Rt. Hon. Najeem Salaam, Speaker, Osun State House of Assembly, having inaugurated an investigative panel to investigate petition forwarded to the parliament under his watch by a serving judge of the state, Justice Olamide Folahanmi Oloyede on allegation of financial recklessness leveled against Gov. Rauf Aregbesola set the ball rolling for another dimension to the wage crisis resulting from unpaid workers' salaries in the state. He spoke to selected journalist in which our reporters is one of them on different issues ranging from the unpaid salaries, Justice Oloyede's petition and the summit being proposed by a group among other issues. Excerpt:
Q: Osun state appears to have been at a standstill now for lack of fund to pay workers' salaries and complete the abandoned projects, what is your take on this?
Salaam: Osun is passing through a phase, not standstill, and it is so, because Osun just like others is a constituent unit of a troubled nation which was raped badly by the ousted Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) regime, and if President Muhammadu Buhari could describe the country as at present as Augean stable that must be cleaned up for forward march, what do you expect Osun as an integral part to do?
Look, let us face the reality here, the predicament we are in is not about the making of an individual, governor or poor economic planning; it is a structural problem and not until the top gets it right, the federating units would still be contending with epileptic mode of economy and financial topsy-turvy, because the kind of federalism we practise is what I call 'feeding bottle' federalism. For no state could access her resources to surge up her finance, everything belongs to the federal government, and the federal government may not be ready to tap your own resources now, because there is one laying the golden eggs already.
