Kayode Akinmade: ₦3.5bn Ogun LG severance: When leadership meets compassion

For galore of the erstwhile governmental office-holders who gathered astatine the Oba’s Complex, Oke-Mosan, Abeokuta, the cheques handed to them were worthy overmuch much than the figures written connected them. They represented thing that wealth unsocial cannot adequately measure: alleviation aft years of waiting, designation aft work and, possibly astir importantly, the restoration of hope.

The Ogun State Government’s outgo of ₦3.503 cardinal successful outstanding severance allowances to erstwhile governmental office-holders crossed the state’s 20 section authorities councils and Local Council Development Areas is truthful much than different authorities expenditure. It is simply a revealing infinitesimal successful the quality of governance and the meaning of leadership.

The beneficiaries, comprising erstwhile chairmen, vice-chairmen, secretaries to section governments, supervisors, peculiar advisers and councillors who served betwixt 2016 and 2024, had waited for years for their morganatic entitlements. The liabilities covered 526 beneficiaries from the 2016–2019 tenure and 516 from the 2020–2024 tenure.

For immoderate of them, the transition of clip had steadily eroded the anticipation that the wealth would ever come.

Then came the intervention.

Rather than allowing the work to vanish into the maze of inherited liabilities, the medication of Governor Dapo Abiodun subjected the claims to verification and reconciliation and pr...