By GBENGA ARIYIBI

ADO EKITI- IT is not the best of times for Ekiti civil servants who would have been paid their monthly wages on the 20th of the month as the government weekend attempted to justify the delay.

Briefing  newsmen in Ado Ekiti on the activities of his ministry, Commissioner for Finance, Mr Dapo Kolawole said the delay in the payment of salary of some workers in the state resulted from the government’s adoption of a centralised method of preparing vouchers for the payment of salaries.

He attributed the delay in some agencies in the payment of workers salaries to long process and bottlenecks  that had to be observed before effecting payment, thereby absolving government of any complicity in the delay.

According to him; “So, if there is any delay so far in the payment of workers’ salaries, it is neither my fault or that of the governor. I am not blaming anybody for this because it is the system that we are  running that caused it”.

He disclosed that the state was the first state to accede to the request of the workers in the payment of the N13,000 relativity, saying the government was meeting with the labour on how to implement the new minimum wage for workers on grade levels seven to seventeen.

On the   Internally Generated Revenue, IGR, Kolawole said the State Government had jerked it up to an   average of N600  million monthly against the initial N121 million.