Ademola Adeleke, the governor of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), asserted that Oyetola had employed 12,000 people violating the law during his final months in office.
At a meeting with stakeholders and members of the Osun Young Professionals in Kwara State in Ilorin, a media adviser to the former governor, Ismail Omipidan, rejected the assertion as untrue.
"It is false. In response to our challenge, they could not provide a list of the 12,000 employees hired in just two months. What exactly is the Osun state labour force? We only employed 2,000 personnel in total—1,500 teachers and 500 regularised temporary health workers. Even before the election, some people had jobs, while others started working thereafter. He said that we continued working until the very end of the day to commission projects, not to lay landmines.
In his assessment of the Oyetola administration's performance over its four years in office, Omipidan noted that the state's internally generated revenue (IGR) increased from roughly N10 billion to roughly N19 billion annually.
He claimed that we constructed more than 500 kilometres of roads in just four years. Most of the roads we worked on had been deserted for 30 or 40 years. The Ada-Igbajo road, the Alekuwodo road system, and the Iwo-Oshogbo road are a few examples. Before we departed, we signalled the beginning of Iwo Road construction.
The Iwo-Oshogbo road is being worked on as I speak. The promises we made included some of these. I consistently contend that we only lost the vote count and never the election. For four years, we didn't use any bank facilities. Before we arrived in 2018, paying salaries was a very difficult task. We owed no salary for the four years that we worked there.
Before we left the office, my principal even signed the November salary. You'll be amazed if you know how things were in Osun before 2018. The degree of debt was one of the topics we purposefully avoided discussing in the media up until recently. We purposefully left it out because we didn't want it to appear that we were trying to discredit anyone. Sadly, it turned into our albatross. We inherited debt when Oyetola took over in 2018. We sought ways to make things function for the four years we ruled Osun. We didn't increase the debt we were given.