The Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, has reacted to recent comments by the former Special Adviser to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan on Public Affairs, Dr. Doyin Okupe, saying that the former presidential aide does not speak like a person “who is truly deserving of his certificate from a medical school.”
Okupe had recently advised governors of the 36 states to reduce their workforce in order to end their dependence on the federal government for bailouts.
He complained that a state like Ogun spends 90 per cent of its revenue on only 10 per cent of the population of the state (who constitute government workforce).
But in a swift reaction, the NLC President, Comrade Ayuba Wabba, blamed the economic crisis on serial acts of corruption, unlawful and equally unacceptable severance packages for ex-governors and their deputies, and failure to invest.
According to Waba, “Ordinarily, we would not have responded to Doyin Okupe when he urged governors, in a statement few days ago, to retrench civil servants as a panacea to irregular payment of salaries, because we know him.”
“In his jaundiced argument, very much unlike one who is truly deserving of his certificate from a medical school, Okupe said, ‘virtually all state governments in the country have over-bloated civil service’.
“To underscore this point, he said between ‘2008 and 2009, Ogun State received N2 billion monthly from the federation account and paid out N1.8billion as staff salaries, wages and overhead costs’ to civil servants not more than 50,000 in a state with a population of 5,000,000.
“In his view therefore it was ‘an obvious socio-economic absurdity and incongruity where 10 per cent of the population was consuming 90 per cent of the wealth of the state.’
“Okupe is bandying political statistics and this is neither good for his health nor the health of those with whom he seeks to ingratiate himself. We at the Nigeria Labour Congress believe in the equitable distribution of the nation’s resources. We will not subscribe to a situation whereby 10 per cent corner 90 per cent of the resources of the state.”
“It is in furtherance of this that we urge Okupe to do a forensic audit of what Ogun got, what it paid to civil servants, contractors and politicians and what it used in running the Government House!”
