| President Buhari receives in audience Kwara State Governor H.E. Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq in State House on 13th Jan 2020 |
Kwara State, Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq on Monday urged President Muhammadu Buhari to support his administration.
The governor, who spoke at the State House, Abuja, after a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari, lamented that about 75 per cent of the state’s earnings is used to offset salaries.
According to him, his administration resorted to finding alternative means of meeting the huge financial responsibilities facing the state. The government, he said, is faced with huge debt burdens.
He said further that the educational sector had almost gone moribund as there had been virtually no investment into the sector all along.
Besides his administration paying backlog of money owed teachers, the University Basic Education Commission (UBEC) had blacklisted Kwara State since 2013 for failing to pay its counterpart share.
He said his administration paid N450 million to restore the relationship, among the other steps taken to put the government back on track.
AbdulRazaq, according to the statement also told Buhari about how he ended the strike in the Colleges of Education when he assumed office by paying over N700 million to settle their salary arrears.
He also told to the President how his administration has restored constant and timely payment of salary of workers, subventions and running costs across various ministries.
He said he was at the Presidential Villa to wish President Buhari a happy New Year and to inform his about the huge under-development and economic crisis inherited by his administration.
He said: “I have explained all these to Mr. President and I have told him that we want to concentrate on agriculture because money coming from Abuja for our local governments goes in paying 100 per cent of salaries, money coming from Abuja to the State government, 75 per cent of it goes into paying salaries.
“It’s so painful, we have to develop alternative means of generating revenue and that is why we have to be enterprising in the way we do our things.
“I came to see the President to wish him good tiding for the New Year and also with a shopping list because our state is in dire streaks. When we got in, there was total collapse in the state start from education. Our four colleges of education were on strike for a year.
Soliciting support for his efforts to develop infrastructure in the areas of water, roads, education, health, and agriculture, the payment of various counterpart funds in the health sector, how he has returned UNICEF back to the state after many years.
He also explained to the President that Kwara is already keying into various developmental projects of the Federal Government, including passing the state’s Social Investment Programme law that provides for school feeding, soft loans for marketers, and conditional cash transfer for the elderly to cut poverty rate.
The governor appealed to the President to fix federal roads in the state; that the state would construct the Kosubosu-Bode Saadu Road to open up Kwara State, urging the President to give special attention to the roads.