The All Progressives Congress (APC) has blasted the plan by Ekiti State
Governor Ayo Fayose to buy Christmas clothes for 10,000.
The party questioned why the governor is embarking on the year-end
gesture when his administration owes workers months of arrears.
Fayose announced that he will buy Christmas clothes for 10,000 children
“as a mark of showing Ekiti children love to partake in the sharing of
the state’s wealth”.
A statement yesterday in Ado-Ekiti, the capital, by APC Publicity
Secretary, Taiwo Olatunbosun, noted that rather than buy Christmas
clothes for 10,000 children, the governor should pay their parents.
“It is high time Ekiti people, workers and labour leaders opened their
eyes and minds to Fayose’s deliberate deceit before majority of our
people end up in early graves.
“Fayose should pay salaries, pensions
and gratuities of parents of those children he is planning to buy
Christmas clothes for, to enable them perform their parental roles,
instead of the governor buying cheap clothes at exorbitant costs, more
than half of which will end up in private pockets, as we had during
National Union of Local Government Employees (NULGE) and Teachers’ Day
celebrations.
“The workers and pensioners know their responsibilities
as parents to their children, if the eight to nine months’ salary and
pensions arrears are paid.”
“It is sheer greed, wickedness and callous insensitivity to Ekiti
people’s plight for Fayose to refuse to address doctors’ strike in
public hospitals over unpaid salaries while other workers remain unpaid
for between six and nine months. But he is planning and talking of
buying Christmas clothes for 10,000 Ekiti children.
“Fayose is doing
this because he wants to make money from such unsolicited show of love
while tens of hundreds of Ekiti indigenes, old and young, are dying in
Ekiti hospitals for lack of medical services as a result of the
governor’s insensitivity to the immediate needs of our people over
non-payment of doctors and civil servants’ salaries and pensioners.”
In response, PDP’s Publicity Secretary Jackson Adebayo said
He said: “Nobody should be surprised by their criticism of the
governor’s gesture of love, which is unprecedented in the history of the
state, and that was why the people rejected them at the 2014
governorship election where they lost woefully.
“Governor Fayose is a
friend of the masses. This is one of the ways to prove that he is the
man of the people and the people will continue to love him and vote for
the PDP while APC will continue to fail and fail and fail.”