Okowa blasts the administration’s detractors and praises the improvement of Delta’s infrastructure.

Ifeanyi Okowa, the governor of Delta State, slammed his detractors on Friday and invited them to the state to observe the growth of its infrastructure.

Okowa made the appeal while he surveyed the ongoing construction at the state capital of Asaba’s Dennis Osadebey University.

He said: “When people in Lagos and Abuja say that they are not seeing what we are doing, it is either that they don’t come home or that they just want to be wicked in their ways.

“There is a lot going on in our three new universities and we are proud that we took this decision because the new universities have admitted no fewer than 5,000 students within one year of their approval.

“We have also commenced the construction of two hostel projects in the university to accommodate students and it will be useful to us during the National Sports Festival holding in Asaba in November.”

He declared that only eight states are still operating the contributory pension scheme in the country while 16 others had stopped.

He claimed that the pension plan left the state government with a sizable backlog of past services.

“When we came into government in 2015, we were owing about N100 billion as past services or accrual services.

“We were able to investigate the sum and it eventually came down to about N88 billion and since then we have been paying N500 million monthly and we have paid over N36 billion over time.

“We have also made a provision of N20 billion from the proposed bridging finance to see what we can pay down for the past services,” the governor added.