Imo State Governor, Rochas Okorocha, has said that this generation of Nigerians are such a glutton, and careless for the coming generation.
Gov. Okorocha gave this verdict in Owerri, the Imo State capital, in an interview he granted Daily Sun in which he decried the high recurrent expenditure, which he said was a burden on governments across the federation at the expense of capital and human development.
He said: “Honestly, the culture of recurrent rather than capital expenditure government which is almost like a nationwide problem. You see people who are employed on sentimental considerations by their political masters who do nothing. All they do is collect salaries and do nothing. That pains me.
“There is also the problem of over bloated salary structure. Like now, what I get in a month is about N3.4 billion and my total salary structure is over N5 billion; how do you reconcile it? These are my greatest challenges in government. It is about the recurrent versus capital expenditure.
“As a businessman, I work it out that if I can save the recurrent for one year, I would make Imo State an industrial zone. The industries would be employing people and paying those people that I borrowed those recurrent salaries from and paying them twice their salaries for the next 100 years.
“We eat our future in this country. I cannot understand why a governor should get N5 billion and pay N4.9 billion to workers and this constitutes about three per cent of the population and there is no productivity of any sort that you see. It does not show on them or the environment they live. It does not show any where other than in consumption.
“What happens is that you see joints of pepper soup, ‘Isi ewu and
Nkwobi’ all over the streets. We keep consuming the future of our children.”