Kayode Fayemi, the Ekiti State governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), has tagged allegations of corruption levelled against him by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Sunday as “a campaign of lies”.
Responding to the allegations of Ekiti State Chairman of the PDP, Chief Gboyega Oguntuase that the former Governor was responsible for a debt of N35.34billion before handing over power to Fayose in 2014, Fayemi, through the media director of his campaign organization, Wole Olujobi, said the allegation was made in a bid to cover up the failure of the present administration and smear his image.
Fayemi said Fayose and his party decided to embark on character assassination because of his rising political profile and the imminent rejection of the PDP candidate at next month's gubernatorial poll.
“It is ridiculous that Fayose and his aides can still be peddling inaccurate debt figures after the Debt Management Office had published the debts taken by Fayose himself alone, in the last three years, which has amounted to N56billion, even though he swore and lied many times that he never borrowed a kobo," Fayemi said.
“We admit that Fayemi borrowed N25bn to be defrayed within three years, and records are there at the DMO that Fayemi paid back N14.5billion of the debts, leaving the balance of only N10.5billion before he left office on October 16, 2014.
“If the official debt figures are as stated above, how then did they come about spending N35.34billion to service an outstanding debt of N10.5billion?”
In a statement issued in Ado Ekiti, the state PDP Chairman had raised the alarm that by calculation, the N35.34billion sum already paid to service debt allegedly incurred by Fayemi meant that the state was servicing the debts at an average of N1.1billion monthly.
