Expdonaloaded News; Indebted states can’t blame crash in oil prices –Oshiomhole

Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State has advised states owing workers’ salaries to review their capital, recurrent expenditures and their context of the federal character principle, rather than blame the current crash in price of crude oil for inability to pay workers.The governor, who noted that Edo State meets her wage obligation to workers monthly, challenged top-level public servants in the state to look inwards to ensure the state continues to initiate and execute fresh capital projects in addition to completing ongoing ones and meeting basic recurrent expenditures, in spite of the dwindling resources from the federation account.
Speaking, yesterday during a three-day retreat for members of the state executive council and permanent secretaries at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja with the theme: “Finishing Well,” he observed that a lot still needed to be done to ensure his administration finished stronger than it started almost seven years ago.
“There are still a lot of wastages in our system. From our experience in Edo, without attacking wages, we have cut a couple of things without having to physically carry out retrenchment like some state governments did.
“At $45, I believe it is a high price for crude, but I think the problem is that we have assumed that when the price rose to $140 and stabilised at $108, that it had become the ideal level and so when it dropped to around half of that, we thought we were in crisis. When I look at what the numbers were in 1999, at the beginning of this democracy, it was less than $40 and we still had a fairly balanced budget looking at the ratio of recurrent expenditure vis-à-vis capital expenditure.
“Now, if you appreciate So, I think we need to revisit this issue of capital expenditure, recurrent expenditure, the context and the character of expenditure.
“We run a federation but the state have very little or no influence.