Osun defends N1.7bn meals, travel bill in six months

Adeleke

The Osun State Government has defended its expenditure of N1.7bn on meals, refreshments, cleaning, fumigation, and official travel within six months.

It also dismissed reports of wasteful expenditure as “mischievous” and politically motivated.

In a statement issued in Osogbo on Monday, the spokesperson to Governor Ademola Adeleke, Mallam Olawale Rasheed, described the figures circulating in the media as a deliberate misrepresentation of legitimate overhead costs incurred across more than 100 government agencies.

He also stressed that the portion of the travel bill directly linked to the governor was minimal, as Adeleke funded most of his trips using a family-owned private jet.

Rasheed noted that many of the international travels were connected to capacity-building and training sessions involving commissioners, agency heads, and senior civil servants, ahead of anticipated political and administrative activities in the lead-up to the 2026 election cycle.

Insisting that opposition parties sponsored reports about international travelling and training expenditures, Rasheed said the claims were not only misleading but also mischievous.

“The sponsored publication is a failed attempt by the opposition to misrepresent and mischaracterise much-needed expenditure on local and international training programmes for public servants, service-wide facility maintenance costs and several critical overhead expenses across over 100 government agencies. Punch