Unlike National Assembly, we are dead broke, Osun lawmaker says

Deputy Speaker of Osun state House of Assembly, Akintunde Adegboye, on Monday said that they are also affected by the economic crunch and sleep in darkness due to lack of money to fuel their generators.

He called on the people of the state not to think that legislators in the state are making money like those in the National Assembly, nothing that the cash crunch in the state had subjected lawmakers to serious financial hardship.

Adegboye stated this in Osogbo during a lecture to commemorate the 51st birthday of Najeem Salaam, Speaker of the Assembly.

According to the Deputy Speaker, the situation had become so bad that most of his colleagues “sleep in darkness” as a result of their inability to buy fuel to power their generators.

“As we speak, members of the Assembly are still using their private cars to do oversight functions.

“Most times, we sleep in darkness in our official quarters because we cannot afford to fuel our power generating plants. But to the people in town, we are the people with deep purse. That is the irony of the situation.

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“Here in the Assembly, despite the fact that our staff get something at the end of the month, they still look at us as stingy people.

“How about thousands of our constituents that depend on us, especially the sick, the unemployed youths, as well as others with financial constraints?” he said.

Osun state Governor Rauf Arigbesola in June last year, had told journalists after a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari, “No head of the family will be happy that he cannot feed members of the family. Extend that to state, it is heart-rending that I am in this quagmire.

“But no matter how sad (I don’t want to use the word ‘depressed), no matter how unhappy I am, the truth is that I will not fail to say that it is a situation absolutely beyond my control.”

By Ebere Ndukwu …

 

 

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