Governor says Nigeria is broke

Rivers State Governor, Rotimi Amaechi has said that some states can’t pay their workers’ salaries because Nigeria is broke.

The governor made the statement on Sunday, May 17, 2015, during a thanksgiving service organised by the state governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state, Dakuku Peterside.

“When I said sometime last year that Nigeria’s finances was in a dire strait, some people referred to me as an alarmist. Since I made that statement in December last year, the statutory allocation to the state has continued to decline,” Amaechi said.

“Now, almost all the states are finding it difficult to pay salaries. The state government owes civil servants their April salaries and pensioners’ four months’ salary arrears because the state does not have the money to pay them,” he added.

“Some people have chosen to make an issue of the difficulty we are currently experiencing in paying the salaries of civil servants as well as the arrears of our retirees. It is not our making. No government will deliberately refuse to pay the salaries of its workers. We will pay as soon as we receive our share of our statutory monthly allocation from the Federal Government,” the governor said.

Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has however said that the governors are to blame for the salary situation saying that they had been warned by the FG to make wage payment a priority.