Edo Government says it does not owe pensioners but will assist local governments to discharge their indebtedness to workers.
Deputy Governor of Edo, Mr Philip Shaibu, made the clarification in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Benin on Wednesday.
He said that there was misinformation about unpaid pension arrears in the state when actually pension indebtedness was at the local governments and not at the state government level.
“We don’t owe pensioners at the state level. I think there are, really, mixed feelings on the issue of pensions.
“Here, we celebrate at the state and I am happy to say we do not owe salaries, we don’t owe pensioners. We pay pensioners before civil servants.
“You cannot say the same at the local government level. People do not seem to know the difference between the local government administration and the state government.
“ We have consistently done that (paid salaries) and we have never defaulted. But the local government council areas have their own crises.
“They have not been able to pay their pensioners and workers for some months.
“That’s why Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo constituted a committee and asked me to head it to see how we can take the same technology that assisted the state to capture their internally generated fund into its account.
“Because until those internally generated funds get into their accounts, they will still have those problems’’, he said.
Shaibu said the days of what he called reckless squandering of “Abuja handout by local governments were over because such seemed to have dropped minimally.
“And since everybody is looking inward, my governor asked that we assist councils to properly maximize their Internally Generated Revenue to their benefit’’, he said.
He disclosed that the state government was still augmenting the local government councils in some areas of expenditure.
“But since bailout cannot continue to come, they need to take advantage of the environment to generate their own income.
“This is so because any local government council authority, like the states that cannot sustain its bureaucracy from its own internally generated fund, is not viable to be a local government.
“Just like a company, you are not expected to borrow money to pay your workers, otherwise, you go bankrupt.
“Any state or local government that cannot generate and sustain its own fund to at least tackle its bureaucracy cannot survive’’, Shuaibu said.
He also assured that councils in the state would be up and running very soon.
“The governor is bringing the experience in and he has given us directives on what to do with them so that they will be viable and be able to workforce without Abuja money.
“Abuja money will just be for infrastructure. We already have a pilot programme which was successful in Ikpoba-Okha, Egor and Oredo local government areas.
“ And I can tell you if the successes recorded in the three local government areas are replicated in the remaining 15 local government areas, beginning from today, in a very short while they will be viable enough to pay their workers and pensioners.
“And we will have an Edo state with workforce from state to local government levels that does not owe any pensioner. But for now, I think the pensioner issue is at the local government level’’, he said.
On the agitation for the conduct of election at the local government level, Shaibu assured the people of Edo that the state government would do the needful soonest.
He said Obaseki’s administration would ensure that the institutional frameworks were deployed to herald the conduct of election of credible persons into political offices in the 18 local government areas of Edo. (NAN)
KOO/DOE/ IEA