By Adeleye Kunle
The All Progressives Congress in Rivers State has asked Governor Nyesom Wike to convert the over 60,000 polling unit advisers engaged by the state governor to pensionable jobs for the “jobless youths”.
The Rivers APC also claimed that the number of polling unit advisers by the Governor of Rivers State is a “confirmation of the rate of joblessness” in the state as “documented by the National Bureau of Statistics”, a situation which they said is an indictment on the outgoing administration.
The state Publicity Secretary of the APC, Darlington Nwauju, expressed concerns that the Government of the day “can wake up and announce that it is appointing over one hundred thousand persons as Polling Unit Advisers” which he said only goes to confirm the “widely publicized state of astronomical unemployment” in the state and exposes the “visionless-ness of the past seven years”.
Nwauju said the government under Governor Wike has “failed” to create opportunities to meaningfully engage the army of unemployed persons in the state.
He said: “A question begging for answers for the knee-jerk politically-motivated decision is how the government will fund the bogus appointments? Why is the exercise not done with recourse to Section 196 sub 4 of the 1999 Constitution as amended which covers the appointment of Special advisers?”
The statement also demanded to know where “in the missing budget for 2022 is the stipends or salaries captured?”
Nwauju called on the people of Rivers State to urge the state government to convert the political recruitment exercise into befitting Pensionable Employments through the State Civil Service Commission rather than “recruiting over hundred thousand innocent youths as mere seasonal political jobbers
