By THE CLAIM
At the Arise TV/ThisDay-organized governorship town hall in Osogbo on Tuesday, August 11, the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Bola Oyebamiji, told the audience that it was his own “ingenuity,” as Commissioner for Finance under Governor Rauf Aregbesola, that alerted the governor to the fact that the federal government was owing Osun State money. He said he advised that the state write to the FG to reclaim the debt, that Aregbesola initially hesitated, and that the state eventually wrote to Abuja. He said President Muhammadu Buhari (as then was) then approved a Paris Club refund for Osun, and that this was how the state government was able to start paying salaries again.
THE VERDICT: MISLEADING
The claim does not hold up against the public record. Osun’s Paris Club refund predates Oyebamiji’s time in the finance ministry by several months.
THE EVIDENCE
Multiple sources, including the Osun State Government’s own website, Oyebamiji’s official biography on the National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA) website, Wikipedia, and reporting by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) and Punch, confirm that Oyebamiji was appointed and sworn in as Commissioner for Finance in May/June 2017, after previously serving as Managing Director of the Osun State Investment Company Limited (OSICOL).
However, Osun’s first tranche of the Paris Club refund, N11,744,237,793.56, was received from the federal government in November 2016, roughly six to seven months before Oyebamiji took over the finance ministry. This is confirmed in an April 7, 2017 statement published on the Osun State Government’s official website, in which the state’s then Accountant-General, Akintayo Kolawole, laid out in detail how the money was spent: N8.5bn on salaries for September to December 2016, N924.7m on leave bonuses, N2.5bn on pensions, and N1.7bn transferred to the Ministry of Local Government for local government salaries. The statement further shows that the decision on how to allocate the refund was taken by the Osun Revenue Apportionment Committee, headed by Comrade Hassan Sunmonu, not by Oyebamiji, who does not feature anywhere in the account.
By the time that first Paris Club tranche had already arrived, been allocated by a named committee, spent, and publicly explained to journalists, Oyebamiji was still months away from being sworn in as Commissioner for Finance. He could not have advised Aregbesola to seek a refund that had already been received, nor taken credit for a disbursement decision made by a committee he did not head.
A possible source of confusion
Oyebamiji did later announce a second Paris Club disbursement to Osun, N16.8 billion, at a press conference in Osogbo in September 2018, this time while he was genuinely the Commissioner for Finance. That tranche, combined with an additional N3.2bn, was earmarked to clear salary and pension arrears from 2015, plus leave bonuses. It is possible the “16 million” reference in his town hall remarks was a garbled figure for this N16.8bn, but even so, this was a follow-up disbursement handled while he was in office, not the original 2016 breakthrough he described advising the governor to pursue. Notably, in his own 2018 remarks announcing that second tranche, Oyebamiji himself referred back to the November 2016 refund as a prior event (“you will recall that in November 2016, the state government received N11.74 billion”), rather than describing it as something he had a hand in initiating.
