Impeachment: Judge’s allegations baseless, says Aregbesola

Osun State Governor, Mr. Rauf Aregbesola, has described the allegations contained in Justice Folahanmi Oloyede’s petition against him as deliberate falsehood fabricated to tarnish his image and set the people against him.

Aregbesola said this in Osogbo on Saturday while speaking at the 50th birthday of the Speaker of the State House of Assembly, Mr. Najeem Salaam.

Although the governor stopped short of saying the judge was used by the opposition, he said the petitioner and those using her had failed woefully.

The governor said it was condemnable for a judge to peddle lies, adding that one lie was enough to rubbish the image of any judge.

He said his administration did not collect N538bn contrary to the claim by the judge that N538bn was the total amount the governor collected on behalf of the state and its local government councils and not N204bn which Aregbesola disclosed to the lawmakers during the inauguration of the Assembly in June.

Aregbesola said, “After examining the petition written by the judge, I asked myself if she had any point but I found none. It was a tissue of lies. There was no iota of truth in it. They said Osun government collected N538bn.

“The judge knows the code of conduct of judicial officers. She dabbled into what she should not have dabbled into.

“For those thinking her allegations are true: assuming without conceding that Osun collected N10bn in a month and we have 48 months in four years: the total money collected in 48 months would be N480bn. That is not even up to the N538bn she claimed but we did not collect N10bn a month, we did not even collect N5bn.

“That fact deflates one of the lies. If the judge was telling lies why couldn’t journalists check how much Osun was collecting from the records? If I collected N538bn, Osun would have been far better than how it is.”

He blamed former President Goodluck Jonathan for the nation’s current economic woes. He said the United States confirmed that one million barrels of crude oil were stolen on a daily basis.

Aregbesola also said that he did not rule the state from outside. He said he wasn’t travelling all over the world, insisting that he had not gone on leave since he became governor.

He said, “I used to travel to Cuba before I became governor. That was where my child attended school. But I travelled to Cuba last in 2005.”

He promised to pay salary arrears before the end of the month.

“We will be free before the end of the month,” he said.

He said he would ‘talk’ after he might have paid the outstanding salaries.

Aregbesola had stopped the musician invited from singing for him which is his usual style anytime he was called to make his speech. He said he would not dance because of the backlash his administration had received because of the non-payment of salaries.

Meanwhile, the Chairman, Civil Societies Coalition for the Emancipation of Osun State, Mr. Adeniyi Sulaiman, has said that the group will not allow the petition of the judge against the governor to die.

Sulaiman, who said this in a statement on Sunday, stated that the group would ensure that relevant agencies took necessary actions on the petition.

He urged women activists in the country to rise up in defence of Oloyode, who he said did nothing wrong by writing the petition but just spoke the minds of millions of people affected by the alleged bad governance of the governor.

The statement read, “The only solution to the problem is for Mr. Aregbesola to answer to the posers raised by the erudite judge in her petition and come out with the true picture of the financial status of the state without hiding anything.”