Imo State governor, Rochas Okorocha has described as baseless and unfounded, insinuations in some quarters of plans by his colleagues to remove him as chairman of the All Progressive Congress (APC) governors’ forum.
“I want to make it abundantly clear that the governors of the APC have not hatched any plot to remove me as their chairman because there is no dissenting voice among us as progressives. We are united and our unity will continue to grow from strength to strength” he declared.
Okorocha, who gave the clarification at an interactive session with newsmen at the NUJ Press centre in Owerri, during which he brandished part of his scorecards to the people of the state, said that the much expected local government council election in the state would tentatively hold in either September or October this year.
According to him, acquisition of computer literacy is now compulsory for all civil servants in the state as part of measures to make the state civil service result oriented.
Boasting that he would make the state an investment centre, the governor said that arrangement had been concluded to provide one industry in each of the 637 autonomous communities in the state.
Okorocha who claimed to have cleared all arrears of pensioners in the state up to December last year, however said that the state government could not afford to part with N1.5 billion monthly to pay pensioners, describing this as quite outrageous.
“I have paid pensioners in the state up to December 2016 and we used almost the Paris club fund to do this through negotiation but we cannot inject N1.5 billion monthly in paying our pensioners because this will be too much for us.”
The governor who declared every 6th of May, as “Imo Freedom Day” said that each council area in the state would receive an additional sum of N20 million on top of the N10million already made available to each of them to fast tract grassroots transformation.