EKITI State Governor, Mr Ayodele Fayose, has said that only workers who are not on strike would be paid their salaries.

In a statement by the governor’s Chief Press Secretary, Mr. Idowu Adelusi, on Saturday, the governor noted that the state was handicapped by the continuous slide in statutory allocations coming and the general economic recession in the country.

He explained that the state government had had to combine two months allocations from the federation account to pay one month salary to workers, adding that Internally

Generated Revenue was still inadequate to cover the short fall. “For the April allocation shared in May, we got N752 million, while our wage bill is N2.6 billion monthly. The previous month we got a little over N1 billion and that has been the trend since last year.

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“We have had to combine two monthly allocations to be able to pay a month salary. But since the beginning of this yeaºr, three allocations are not even enough to pay a month salary,” he said.

Governor Fayose further blamed the poor state of finance in the state on indiscriminate borrowing the ousted Kayode Fayemi administration embarked upon. His words: “The N25 billion they raised from the capital market, the nearly N30 billion commercial loans, the UBEC, water scheme, fertilizer and other loans they incurred led to the deduction of about N1 billion from our allocations monthly.”

The governor called on the Federal Government to use dialogue to resolve the Niger Delta issue and stem the tide of incessant bombing of oil facilities that is impeding the flow of revenue to the nation’s coffers.