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Governor Rotimi Akeredolu jolted his listeners on Wednesday , the 30th of August when in the course of his speech at the inauguration of the new cabinet members, he made bold to clear the air on the state of debt of Ondo state. Without mincing words, the senior Lawyer and Executive Governor thundered, ” I inherited a debt of two hundred and twenty billion naira from the out gone Mimiko administration.”
The Governor also noted that contrary to the claim of #20 billion naira left in the government coffers by the immediate past government, what he met at the state treasury was a meagre #9.9 billion . Continuing, Akeredolu said paucity of funds to execute projects and bankroll recurrent expenditure have stretched this present administration to its limit , but being a government that is focused on dishing out dividends of democracy, the government will not relent and will continue to be resilient in the face of daunting economic and financial challenges.
There is no doubting the fact that the score card of the state finances is in the red, going by the claim made at the Dome by Governor Rotimi Akeredolu. The relationship between state government and the labour unions almost turned sour a couple of weeks ago over the modality of payment of the one month arrears of salary from the Paris club refund. Needless to say the immediate past government of Governor Mimiko owed workers the upward of six to seven months salary , a liability Governor Akeredolu inherited and an albatross that could have thrown the state into a labour crisis if the situation had not been well managed.
However, the state government at this critical time is required to give the people just more than the state of the finances of Ondo state. Considering the fact that it took the new government time to debunk the claim of the #20 billion left behind by the immediate past administration, a probe of how a whooping #220 billion naira debt was incurred is required to set the record straight. It is a giving that the huge debt profile becomes the collective liability of the entire state , thus, the incumbent should go a step further by ascertaining how the state came this high in its debt profile and what capital project and recurrent expenditure made the state debt profile to soar so high.
It is instructive to note that key members of the out gone administration have been debunking the claim of government over the size of debt left behind by their government.
To set the record straight beyond rhetorics , the time to probe the books of the immediate past government is now!
