COST OF GOVERNANCE: 'SANUSI'S PRESCRIPTION IS WRONG'

Edo State Governor, Adams Oshomohle, has said that the prescription of staff sack in the civil service by the Central Bank of Nigeria's (CBN) Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, as a way to cut down on the high cost of governance in the country was wrong.

Sanusi had recently prescribed the sacking of 50 per cent of the nation's workforce as a way to reducing recurrent expenditure.

But speaking, yesterday, in Abuja at the launch of the Nigerian Employees Digital Welfare Scheme (NEDWS), Oshiomohle maintained that whereas Sanusi's diagnosis of the problem was right, his prescription was wrong.

He said: 'When governor Sanusi said that the structure of public spending is not sustainable, I believe he is right. It is an open secret that we are consuming at the federal level 80 per cent of our budget on recurrent and to service debts. We have only 20 per cent for capital projects. We cannot continue like this and I believe that Sanusi is right when he raised the alarm that the pattern of spending could not deliver development.

However, the problem is that whereas Sanusi's diagnosis was right his prescription was defective.'

While maintaining that it was a fact that 80 per cent of the capital budget went into recurrent expenditure, the comrade governor added that what constitutes recurrent expenditure is not personnel cost.

He said that wage bill was not synonymous with personnel cost but noted that part of what is termed personnel cost include the cost of flying by public officers and not the N18, 000 salary which workers earn.