By Joseph Ebi Kanjo

The Governor Godwin Obaseki-led Edo State government and the state chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) on Friday locked horns over the alleged rising debt profile of the state.

Jarrett Tenebe, the state acting chairman of the APC, during a press briefing in Benin, while accusing the state government of plunging the state into “debt profile of N135 billion Naira and $35.6 billion Dollars,” the state Commissioner for Communication and Orientation, Mr. Chris Nehikhare described the acting chairman’s allegation as “infertile rambling, wild and completely off-the-mark.”

On Tenebe’s allegation that the Edo
State Government has requested “a loan of N17.5 billion Naira with
no corollary of project attached there to the said facility, and also that the facility is not contained as loan to be taken in the 2024 fiscal budget just recently passed,” Nehikhare said “recent facility approved by the State Assembly was to amongst other projects, enable the State Government procure electric buses to enhance the states transportation system.”

Tenebe said: “Information at the behest of the members of the Edo State House of Assembly is to the effect that they were recalled from their holiday or leave by the Speaker on the request of the State Governor for the immediate approval of the said facility which accord to them were said to be N9billion Naira but as event unfolded, after the mammoth request by the opposition in the house as to the rationale for a facility as stupendous as N9billion Naira for fathom projects which only existed in the imagination of the Governor, it was
discovered that the facility was not even N9billion Naira but a figure wrapped in secrecy as much as N17.5 billion Naira to which the opposition in the house rejected and or refused to be part of the approval.

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“While it is important to state that the citizens of Edo State have been taken through difficult and hard times by the Obaseki led administration, it is our request and most profoundly too that the Obaseki administration to hence forth stop these borrowings which its proceeds found their way into his pocket and that of his co-travelers, as Edo State has suffered enough decay in infrastructural and other developmental sects,” Tenebe lamented. (Sic)

But the state Commissioner for Communication fired back: “Even if that was what was written for him, he should have known that the figure is wrong and can’t be true .

“In reality, our debt stock is not a secret and in fact, we are ‘under borrowed’. Emperor Tenebe would have known this if he understood the economics of governance, fiscal responsibility and debt-to-GDP ratio.

“The recent facility approved by the State Assembly was to amongst other projects, enable the State Government procure electric buses to enhance the states transportation system.

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“Tenebe’s undoing is that he and his party have been so used to looting of the people’s treasury and cannot bear the pain that they would never have access to the State’s purse with which the governor has continued to pursue developmental projects across the state.

“It is even more saddening that a party’s chairman only thinks about brick and mortar when it comes to development.

“Tenebe’s attention must be drawn to the fact that opposition politics is not cynicism. Opposition politics requires intelligence, tact and not childish tantrums.”