Ortom, Suswam Trade Words over Benue Wage Bill

By George Okoh in Makurdi

The claim by the Governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom, that the wage bill of workers in the state is N7.8 billion has been disputed by his predecessor, Gabriel Suswam.

While speaking to journalists at the weekend during the 11th graduation ceremony of  Sev-Av foundation, Suswan described the state government claim of N7.8 billion as the state’s wage bill as absolutely ‘ridiculous  and funny’.

 He said when he exited office in May 2015, the wage of the state was N2.7 billion, observing that it is the same amount that the Ortom government use in paying salaries from June to September.

 The former governor also said he handed  a workforce of 19,000 to the present government, vowing to publish the accurate wage of the state next week.

“It is rather funny and absolutely ridiculous that the government would claim it is paying over N7.8 billion as wage bill.  At the time I left office, I paid N2.7 billion. I have the document of what this government paid from June to September 2015 and it is not different from what I paid.  So at what time did they start

talking about N7.8 billion which is rather too ridiculous. There is something fundamentally wrong with that.  They are creating a wrong impression and we will publish the figure I paid during my eight years in office.  If anything was added, it should have been from December of that year,” Suswam said.

He further accused Ortom of failure to differentiate between salaries of workers and overhead.

“Let us know how much they are paying as overhead, salaries of local government workers which is a different tier of government. You cannot jumble their salaries with those of core civil servants.  They should come out and tell us because I have evidence of what I paid and what is paid now,” he said.

However, reacting to Suswan’s allegation, Special Adviser to Ortom on Media and ICT, Tahav Agerzua, accused the former governor of being envious of the rising profile of Ortom especially on enactment and implementation of the anti-open grazing law which he could not do during his time.

Tahav insisted that the state governor is working and not giving excuses, maintaining that in this administration, insecurity in the state has been reduced through the amnesty programme which employed the carrot and stick approaches, adding that a lot of weapons were seized during the exercise and destroyed openly in government house according to the United Nations instructions.

He said the governor is even renovating Government College which is Suswam’s Alma mata that he failed to do.

The governor’s aide chided Suswam for allegedly employing a lot of people at the twilight of his administration and left without paying them, adding that he collected over N400 million as arrears for overheads two day to the end of his administration.

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