The All Progressives Congress (APC) chapter in Osun State has requested that Governor Ademola Adeleke apologise to the state’s pensioners for breaking a campaign pledge.
According to the Osun APC, Adeleke pledged to finish paying the contributory pension backlog within six months of taking office.
Tajudeen Lawal, the party’s state chairman, alleged that the Adeleke-led administration was riddled with dishonesty in the fulfilment of its election pledges in a statement released on Thursday in Osogbo.
“The information about the administration of Adeleke lacking in sincerity of purpose as the so-called pension bond would be the second of such in roughly nine months during the life of the PDP administration in the State was revealed by the approval of the payment of the N2.1 billion CPS bond for the retirees.
“If Adeleke does not have anything to hide, he should separate the figures his government is allocating to the primary school teachers, to the civil servants, retired employees in the parastatals, and secondary school teachers who retired,” the man stated.
Tajudeen claimed that the government, which was run by Governor Adeleke, had a secret agenda.
“If we figure N500 million for the state alone in the Contributory Pension Scheme in nine months, it comes to N4.5 billion.
“If we perform the same calculation for local governments, it comes to N4.5 billion, bringing the total owing to the Adeleke administration to, at the very least, N9 billion.
“If Adeleke pays N500 million consistently over the course of his 48-month term, he will only be able to pay N24 billion at the end of his term, which is a far cry from the unpaid debts at the state and local government levels.
“Adeleke has been unable to pay more than N4 billion in addition to the pension’s local government obligations for the past nine months. If we split 48 months by four, he could only afford to pay N12 billion for the course of his four-year term.
“The immediately-past Governor Oyetola paid the Contributory Pension Scheme of the retired public servants, parastatals, and secondary school employees on the CPS from 2016 to April 2018 and paid in full all the retired employees on the CPS whose bonds were between N100K and N2m till December 2020.
“Overall, the Oyetola administration paid almost N40 billion to settle pensions and N97 billion from the state’s debt, despite the dire financial situation.
If Governor Adeleke actually has nothing to conceal, why is it so difficult or impossible for him to paste the names of the recipients of the dubious pension bonds as it was the custom during his predecessor’s administration?
“Now that local government councils are healthy, why is Adeleke wasting their money on fictitious contracts instead of releasing chunks of money to these unfortunate retirees to save their lives and jump-start the state’s economy by releasing their bond certificates as he promised to do within six months in his campaign promise?”
The Adeleke administration had authorised the release of bond certificates worth N2.1 billion for the payment of accrued right benefits of another batch of retirees under the Contributory Pension Scheme at the state and local government levels, the Osun State Government had revealed through a statement by the state’s head of service, Samuel Aina, on Wednesday.
