I Was Not Elected To Reel Out Excuses – Fayemi

Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State says he refrains from complaining about his predecessor, Ayodele Fayose, because he was not elected to do that.

Speaking with a select group of online publishers in Ado-Ekiti ahead of the celebration of the first 100 days of his administration on Thursday (today), Governor Fayemi said he was on a second missionary journey, which by nature allows little room for excuses.

He said: “If I were to start giving excuses, you will ask me that ‘you were there before don’t you know that is how things would be? And if you know that’s how it would be, are you not prepared for the eventuality?’

“Not making excuses is not to suggest that things were in absolutely perfect condition.

“They were not.

“Things had degenerated, but I was not elected to reel out what’s bad about the situation.

“I was elected to make it better and that’s what we’ve been trying to do.

“The resources are not what they used to be; they are much lower but we managed within the available resources to make life better for the people.”

Within three months, Fayemi said the current administration has recorded some significant milestones in correcting some of the problems it inherited.

He said: “I’ve been here for less than three months and we have paid four months salaries for that period.

“We’ve settled pensions for that period.

“We’ve even started paying severance of past political office holders who were not in a position to receive their severance in that period.

“We have re-introduced free education in the state.

“We’ve introduced free health programme.

“We are starting a health mission across the state.

“Our empowerment programmes are restarting, putting back about 10,000 school leavers back to the school volunteer programme that we used to run.

“Basically, for us, we just feel very strongly that our people deserve a new lease of life.

“They have had a pretty rough ride in the last four years.

“Lessons have been learnt across the board.”

As his administration clocks 100 days on Thursday, January 24, 20189, Governor Fayemi recollects the pledge he made during his inauguration speech to give a State of the State address that will explain in details what he met in office.

He said: “Part of the reasons why we have not been talking or giving interviews or saying this is what went wrong in the past is that we felt the people needed to have a full picture and we didn’t want to do it by our own reckoning, so we hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to do a forensic audit of the state.

“They are still here and by Thursday we will make the outcome of their investigations public.

“It is then up to you to do an independent verification of what they’ve come up with in terms of the finance of the state particularly and in terms of the way things have been run.

“We want an independent, credible audit firm to do this and release that information.”