By Bilesanmi Abayomi
The Kosofe Local Government has broken silence, refuting an online publication alleging the Chairman, Mr. Moyosore Ogunlewe, of running the council affairs as his own private family business.
The report also accused the chairman of paying his cabinet members lower salaries than those set by the state government.
Reacting to the allegations, the council’s Secretary, Hon. Fatai Gbadebo, denied all the allegations made against the chairman as falsehoods and lies from the pits of hell.
This medium reports that the report titled “The Kosofe Local Government Chairman and his Rubber-Stamps Exco/Cabinet Members” alleged the chairman of abusing office and powers, among others.
Gbadebo said he had gone through the publication made by one Kosofe headline and discovered that virtually all the claims in the publication were blatant lies.
“I also came across the false claims in the Kosofe headline yesterday evening. When I went through it, I discovered that virtually all the claims were blatant lies.
“Virtually all the things that they put up were lies. It was done deliberately to malign the position of the council chairman. It is a total lie, a falsehood, and a fabrication.
“Concerning the claims that the imprest was not paid, the FMC, and the inflated cost of contracts, we assumed office in April of this year. To be precise, the chairman was sworn in on July 27, 2021, while the cabinet members were sworn in into office in April.
“Since taking office, we have held all of our statutory offices, including Exco meetings, procurement meetings, the FMC, and the PCRC, to name a few,” he said.
Gbadebo explained that all the meetings which the local government administrative guidelines mandated them to hold were held on a monthly basis.
The council official said they were doing all their meetings and no contracts that were issued by the chairman would be executed without proper administrative processing.
He said the normal procedure was to discuss the contracts the exco wanted to embark on in the exco meeting, and after the meeting, it would go to the procurement department.
According to him, this is in conformity with budgetary provisions because that is how the chairman has been running the council.
Gbadebo denied the allegations that he operated a one-man show, adding that they had all the records of the exco meetings, with the voice recorder kept in the office of the council manager.
The official added that this contract infringement allegation could be verified by the procurement officer at the procurement office in the city.
Commenting on the payment of lesser salaries to cabinet members in the council, Gbadebo said the writer of the allegation does not have knowledge about governance in the councils.
He said: “The guy that put up the write-up, as far as I am concerned, I don’t know the adjective to qualify his claim.
“This is because if he is knowledgeable about governance, he will know that it is not possible for a council chairman to personally decide on his own volition the amount of money he will be paying to the public political office holders.
“We have a fiscal and allocation commission in the country that stipulates the amount of money each public office holder will get at the end of every month.
“The chairman cannot even decide how much he earns; it is the commission that does that, and we also have a memo from the Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs Commission stipulating what each public office holder in the council will earn at the end of the month.”
Gbadebo said this was what the chairman had been doing since they were sworn into office, adding that he could not single-handedly do anything outside the norms without abiding by what the fiscal commission had stipulated.
The official assured that whoever put up the publication would be shamed because in this local government they were one and the chairman had been doing his best.
Gbadebo said if they could go around the nooks and cranny of the local government, the Ogunlewe-led administration had constructed several roads.
His words: “There is no ward in this council that you will go to where you won’t see the presence of this administration.
“This is in terms of road construction, drainage, payment of WAEC and JAMB fees, the welfare of the elderly in the area of health care and provision of facilities, just to mention a few.
“I don’t know if we had any other chairmen in the past that had surpassed the achievements recorded by this current administration. He has been spending the public commonwealth judiciously.
“He is not operating a one-man show because every year you have a budgetary approval of the amount of money for capital projects, the waec forms, health, and agriculture departments.”