While calitown.com can confirm that in a matter of days, the Executive arm of the 17 newly sworn-in local government administrations in Cross River State will be constituted and sworn-in, it has it too from impeccable government sources that the delay in constituting the Executive arm is not unconnected with a few discrepancies that nearly threw the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party, PDP, in the state, off balance, before the last LG polls.
In the run-in to that election, the party is said to have discovered very late “that most of the candidates it fielded in the election submitted questionable academic qualifications. In fact, by the time we approached an institution like the University of Calabar for the verification of most of the certificates submitted, the result we got was gravely unfortunate”, one source said.
It is what informed government and the party’s decision to insist that the list of Supervisors, Special Assistant as well as Aides in the local councils be submitted to the governor for cross checking and verification of paper claims. “This exercise threw out a couple of persons who thought it was going to be business as usual and further underscored the commitment of the governor to seeing that the mistakes of the past are not repeated”, a top PDP source told calitown.com.
At the local council level, the hustle for Executive positions rekindled old political rivalries, created new alignments and further relegated to the background the spirit of selection based on merit. “Imagine that most of those who made the respective lists are cronies and acolytes of a few well placed individuals who have put these people there not because they parade any enviable track record of service, but they are put there to show that Mr. X is more politically relevant than Mr. Y”, one observer told calitown.com
