President Muhammadu Buhari has directed governors to pay workers outstanding salaries to enable them celebrate Christmas happily.

Imo state governor, Rochas Okorocha confirmed this to state house correspondents after a meeting with the president in Abuja on Monday.

He said the meeting was mostly centered on issues of workers in the country.

Okorocha said Buhari ordered that workers and pensioners should be paid their outstanding salaries and allowances from the balance of the outstanding Paris Club refund which would soon be paid to them.

“It was a brief meeting between the governors of Nigeria and the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria,” he said.

“The discussion centred on basically the end of year and president himself has expressed the need to make sure that every Nigerian, especially the workers have a beautiful Christmas.

“The issue of outstanding Paris Club was discussed and that was taken care of to make sure that workers in various states, everywhere in the country get to celebrate the Christmas.

“We also use the opportunity to review our working relationship with the president and we found out that we are in harmony; there is no difference between us and the president, everybody seems to be very happy; we are working together.

“We particularly commended Mr President for getting Nigeria out of recession.”

Okorocha said the governors lauded the president for approving the payment of the remaining balance of 50 percent of the Paris Club refund to the states.

“We are looking at getting the balance of Paris Club refund thrashed out once and for all,” he said.

“We also made a request for Mr President’s approval that the balance should form part of our 2018 budget, because we can’t include it until we are sure that the money is coming. That was also sorted out.”

Azeez