ADAMAWA: N5b Loan For Campaign Or For Settling Salaries?
Students Cry N25m Extortion
By Adamu Muhammad Dodo
The salary arrears and other entitlements of the health workers and public servants with local government authorities in Adamawa state Nigeria, are yet to be paid by the Bindow led government, weeks after having granted a loan of five billion naira requested, primarily intended for for that purpose, the Periscope Global Investigate would reveal.
It could be recalled that the unanimous voice vote approval of the N5b loan by the Adamawa lawmakers, followed a request for such window, sent to the state house of assembly by Governor Muhammadu Umaru Jibirilla Bindow and read on the floor of the House by the Speaker Kabiru
Mijinyawa during plenary session, because the LGA went fallow as workers wallow in abject poverty, a sorrowful devastation, lacking any strength to think about any meaning in democracy rather than demeaning the public service and destroying any confidence in governance.
The inability on the part of Bindow led government to fulfill the promise of bringing back the long gone happiness on the faces and to the families of the public servants by settling their salaries and other arrears of entitlements, gave room for rumour and information from yet to be verified sources that the money would be meant for campaign rather than for payment of workers’ entitlements.
“Bindow would forever fail to settle the workers’ salary, for once declaring that he couldn’t source for loan simply to settle salaries of the public servants,” a critic argued.
“In spite of the bailouts, the repeated Paris Club refund funds, the monthly allocation, other sharing formula and the improved internally generated revenues, governor Bindow
could not bring succour to the civil servants, especially, with primary health and local government authorities. What makes you think it’ll be any different with the N5b sourced loan?” A public servant lamented.
“It’ll be money politics in Adamawa this 2019 elections than ever before. The governor has to provide means to be able to blend. Loan is probably one alternative among other possibilities. The point however is that the public servants will not be required for any mediation with a view to getting the loan sourced. So, why should they be seen, heard or be pleased in the sharing formula, lacking the capacity to impeach or implement any favourable action?” A political analyst would say.
“You see, the trade unions leadership could not react to such unfortunate treatment because, as was strongly insinuated, union dues have been paid upfront and up-to-date, with no arrears of any entitlement. Union members are betrayed, left alone to sail the ocean of wave rather unguided,” a public servants analysing the weakness of trade union in the state, would say.
However, the silent voices of elders in rural areas who are directly affected by the economic decay in their various communities owing to the inconsistencies associated with payments of salaries, revealed to the Periscope Investigate that the “markets are barren with no buyers for a brilliant selling. Children remain playing at home because parents can’t pay school fees. We only pray that we don’t fall sick.
“Politicians should remember us not only during the time of campaigns when must of us would have been claimed by insecurity of poverty as a result of misrule.
“The other day some of our children in tertiary institutions of learning, whom we have to sell our farm produce, even before harvest, to be able to raise their school fees, sent some of them to get them N500 each for scholarship form.
“Some parents were able to raise the amount, while some parents from among us could not secure even a loan, sent message to their children to be patient and commit the condition to prayers.
“Our children who paid the N500 for scholarship form, are eventually, left lamenting that it was a hoax for extortion, a kind of senior indigenes exploiting indigent students, while their children are better favoured as students. This is a reincarnation of apartheid in the state.
“That’s how best we know how we can tell a story, calling for redress,” the famished looking elders would lament.
On N25,000,000 Scholarship Forms
Adamawa state students lamented that they were robbed of over twenty five million naira by the government that ought to have sponsored their education in an ideal situation.
“We suddenly fail victims of deception, exposed to exploitation.
“We were asked to purchase scholarship forms at an exorbitant amount of N500. Over fifty thousand students paid for the forms and amount raised was a whopping some of over N25,000, 000.
“It summarily went down the drain. Come to think of it, why must students have to pay any fee for scholarship form?
“We’re actually advised to institute the case before EFCC or the court of law. We’re working on a superior alternative against betrayal of trust, extortion, exploitation, deception and financial oppression, suggestive of financial crime.
“The most unfortunate, a near inhumanity, is that the parents or guardians of some of us are primary health workers and public servants with local government authorities, who are yet to be paid arrears of their earned salaries and other entitlements,” some of the students’ union leaders lamented.