Unpaid salaries: Aregbesola assures workers

BY CLEMENT ADEYI, OSOGBO

Osun State Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, has appealed to workers in the state to exercise patience assuring that the government is making assiduous efforts to pay their salaries soon.

The governor gave the assur­ance in Osogbo yesterday in a statement made available to newsmen by his media spokes­man, Mr. Semiu Okanlawon, af­ter a non-governmental organ­isation, Osun Action Strategy Development Group, paid him a courtesy visit.

“We shall overcome. We shall recover from this chal­lenge. I sympathise with and feel for the workers. I appeal to them to bear with us as we work assiduously to end this problem. I assure them that the period of agony will soon be over,” Areg­besola said.

“No leader is happy to see what is happening. It is a har­rowing experience to see work­ers work and at the end of the month their work fail to trans­late to wages.

“The delay in salary pains me a lot and when I reflect on the travails of the people I feel sad about it.

“It is a harrowing experi­ence for both workers and government for the inability to pay. Though the regime of unpaid salaries is tragic and painful, the stakeholders must gloss over the challenges it created so as to find a lasting solution to it,” he stressed.

While lamenting the poor federal allocation, which he blamed on the crisis, he said: “In our circumstance, what is available to us as allocation is less than what is needed to meet our statutory obligation no matter how prudent we have been.”

He, however, noted that the challenge of unpaid salaries should not be seen as an op­portunity by some people to attack either his government or any other state facing the same challenge, noting that the situation was due to the poor federal allocation to the states.

“For those who think this is an opportunity to pillory us in this economic condition, I pity them. Only God does not fail,” he said.

Aregbesola, who, however, said the salary crisis was not pe­culiar to Osun, lamented that it was disheartening for people to work and the work fails to trans­late into wages.

The governor described the situation as an economic trag­edy and attributed the current misfortune to gross mishan­dling of the nation’s economy by the last Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) administration.