Adeleke Cleared Cooperative Societies Debt Owed by Previous Governments
By Sola Isola
Osun state government has converted Odeomu Cooperative College to a degree awarding institution where students will obtain National Diploma, Higher National Diploma as well as Bachelors Degrees.
The College which was abandoned for 12 years and later rehabilitated by the Ademola Adeleke-led administration will now operate as a degree awarding college through the Osun State University.
The Commissioner for Cooperatives and Empowerment, Hon. Bayo Ogungbangbe revealed this on Friday while receiving the Popular Social Media Influencer, Omolola Fasakin, also known as ‘Mewolaka’ and members of the media of team of the Governor led by Hon Hezekiah Oladele Bamiji, Senior Special Assistant to the Governor on Media.
He also noted that previous governments in the state had paralyzed over 20,000 cooperatives societies buy borrowing their fund and refusing to pay back or even taking loan refund on behalf of banks and refusing to remit to the bank adding that Governor Ademola Adeleke had paid back over N900 million debt in that regard.
He said, “There is a Cooperative College in Ode Omu which was established by Senator Isiaka Adeleke but the school was abandoned for 12 years and by the time this government came, the whole school has been dilapidated.
“Governor Adeleke directed that we inspect the school. We released funds for the rehabilitation which we did in under two months.
“The Governor has just directed that the College should not only be issuing Basic Certificates but it should be a degree awarding institution where students can obtain National Diploma, Higher National Diploma and Bachelor’s degrees.
“Osun State University is adopting it as a campus, the inspection team has visited and they have said the college is suitable to run the programmes, in fact admission will start in September.
“Not only that, the Governor visited the College to commission the project, he directed that the entire road network within the college be tarred, the ministry of works have visited and the funds for the construction has also been approved.”
Speaking on the achievements of Governor Adeleke in terms of Cooperatives and Empowerment, the Commissioner noted that the Governor had approved close to N3.450billion as revolving loan to all cooperatives societies in the state.
“This Ministry of Cooperatives and Empowerment is a new ministry that Governor Adeleke established in July 2023, with the purpose of rescuing the people of Osun state from poverty and from loan agencies that are harassing the people of the state.
“When we started there are more than 20,000 cooperative societies in Osun state and most of them were moribund before this government came because the previous government before ours were taking money from Cooperative Societies account to run the affairs of government.
“Then we organized a Cooperative Summit and called on all the cooperative societies in the state. The Governor then approved N1 Billion as revolving loans for Cooperatives Societies. He later reviewed the amount to N3.450 billion and right now in less than one year we have disbursed over N1.5billion.
“The Governor also instructed that we should register new cooperative societies across the 332 wards in the state and he paid for the registration of those cooperative societies. We saw that some wards are big and we have to break them down, we currently have 380 ward based cooperative societies.
“We then started giving these wards based cooperative societies N525,000 every three months and we have paid that money 4 times and it is not a political affair, anybody is qualified to join the cooperative society and the loan there is interest free”, he added.
