The governor of Osun State, Ademola Adeleke, has been given ten days by Ibadan-based attorney Mutalubi Adebayo, SAN, to pay arrears of allowances owing to retired and sitting judges in the state, or face legal action.
When Adeleke refuses to comply with the request by September 30, legal action to force him to pay up will begin in a court of competent jurisdiction on October 3. This is according to a statement signed by Adebayo and dated Thursday, September 21, which our correspondent in Osogbo got.
In a communication to our correspondent, the attorney, who validated that he was the statement’s author, added that he would be pursuing interest and punitive damages for the unpaid entitlements in addition to the arrears of missing allowances.
The rest of Adebayo’s statement said as follows: “This serves as a notice to the Governor, the Government, and the Judicial Service Commission of Osun State of Nigeria that if all the arrears of allowances being owed to all the Judicial Officers in the state (both serving and retired) from the tenure of Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola till date are not liquidated on or before the 30th day of September 2023, I, JCI Senator Mutalubi Ojo Adebayo, SAN, shall on the third day of October 2023 commence legal action in a court of competent jurisdiction to recover the full amount of the said unpaid allowances from the Government of Osun State and its Judicial Service Commission.
Please take additional notice that I will be pursuing aggravated damages and interest for the unpaid allowances. The Osun State government’s repeated refusal to pay these amounts has been blatantly indecent, careless, and disrespectful of the law. You can expect this to continue.
When the report was filed, Olawale Rasheed, the governor’s spokeswoman, had not yet responded to the remark.
