By; JACOB ONJEWU DICKSON
Oyo State Governor, Abiola Ajimobi on Wednesday described corruption as something that is attitudinal, indiscipline and inability to restraint oneself from taking what does not belong to him, which every Nigeria one way or the other is involved in.
Ajimobi spoke to journalists at the National Secretariat of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Abuja where he was addressing question on the last visit of the governors’ forum to President Muhammadu Buhari at Presidential Villa.
According to him, “We are looking at corruption in a global concept as against just taking money and if you look at it generally, you will see that virtually every Nigerian is very corrupt, virtually everybody one way or the other is corrupt either attitudinally, financially or socially and this we believe should be looked into.”
Ajimobi added that “You see we believe corruption is more than just taking money, i think is attitudinal. It is anytime you do anything you are not supposed to do is corruption. And sometime you can even enlarge it to mean basically indiscipline, inability to control yourself, to discipline yourself against the selfish tendencies of wanting to take what does not belong to you.
“Even for not doing your job is corruption, for taking salaries monthly and not coming to work and coming to work and been iddle is corruption.”
Ajimobi who said the current economic crunch in Nigeria was a global issues, which he said “I think all over the world, there have been what you call technical recession”.
This situation he said affected government’s ability to meet her obligations like payment of salaries, contractual agreements, projects executions among other issues.
He said “Oyo state has an average of about N5.2billion monthly wage bill and i think our total income from Federal government Allocation is about N2.2billion from Federal Government allocation and there is no way we could meet our monthly wage bill”.
He said despite the harsh economic situation, the Federal Government, Oyo State government and indeed the government of APC has agreed not to retrench any worker, but would restructure to redirect the staff strength to be more effective.
He said “in other clime, you should adjust your income and adjust your labour force, if you cant pay everybody, then you should reduce them or you should reduce salaries, but because we are a government that believe in generating and creating employment we refused to do the most apprpriate thing to do so we now decided, instead of retrenching, we now restructured.
