Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo state has restated his resolve to continue with the planned concession of some public parastatals in the state, insisting that the measure had become inevitable for effective management of these institutions.
Okorocha who disclosed this while interacting with newsmen at the Government House Owerri regretted that all General hospitals in the state now lie comatose with low public patronage as a result of the lackadaisical attitude of the medical personnel’s who refer patients to their private hospitals to make quick money to the detriment of the state’s economy.
“Now that the Health sector had been concessioned, let all communities interested in their health centres take them over” he stated.
The Governor disclosed that the state government had in the past four years injected a whooping sum of N46 billion to settle salary of the health workers.
He however made it clear that it was only six or seven parastatals in the state that had been concessioned as a result of poor management.
Governor Okorocha said that his administration had despite meager resources paid all salaries of civil servants to date baring workers of some parastatals and those of the health sector who for unjustifiable resources rejected theirs.
According to him, the state pays a higher minimum wage than such states as Lagos and Akwa-Ibom even as he vowed never to pay hazard allowance to staff of the state House of Assembly because of the frivolity of such a demand.
On the ongoing strike by staff of the state judiciary, the governor said that a committee had been set up to negotiate with the workers for possible reduction of their monthly salary which according to him currently stands at N500,000 per magistrate.
He said that government’s proposed salary adjustment programme for staff of the judiciary was to bring them at par with what obtains in other states.
Decrying the rot going in the state civil service, the governor said that arrangement had been put in place to tackle the Ghost workers syndrome even as he warned civil servants who are not yet computer literate to avail themselves of government’s opportunity to train them in line with current global scientific and technological demands.
