Ekiti govt reveals funding plan to clear outstanding gratuities

Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State has said that his government is willing to secure bond offerings to offset the outstanding gratuities of state pensioners.

According to the governor, this would be necessary to put smiles on faces of retired civil servants who had rendered selfless service in different capacities to the state.

The governor made this comment on Thursday in his office while receiving delegates of the United Nations, led by the Resident Coordinator, Edward Kallon.

A statement issued on Saturday by Fayemi’s Chief Press Secretary, Yinka Oyebode, noted that Ekiti needed to develop innovative tools to address the myriad of challenges facing the state.

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“We are interested a lot in the bond and we have a practical challenge here for example in our state, we are looking at a way of developing innovative bond to address it.

“We have a lot of people who have retired from service and their gratuities have piled up over past couple of years running into billions of naira that we are not immediately able to pay and I don’t think it is fair for all this people who have devoted years of their lives to serving the state.

“That is why we started the social security scheme for the elderly as a safety net to address this sort of issue but for us we think it should be possible for us to develop a bond that can enable us pay off all these and then find a way to offset that bond over a long term”, the statement said.

“We are recruiting teachers and, it will shock you, Ekiti is one of the smallest states, on the first day of our recruitment, we had 6500 applications online; by 12:00 noon this afternoon, we had 9,000 for teaching positions that will start mid-September in our basic schools.

“That depicts a picture of the enormity of the challenge. This is what increasingly led to the radicalization of people who feel there is no hope; so, we have to find a way to eke out a living and government had to be more innovative and creative about tackling these challenges”, it added.

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