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Fayose's 2014 campaign, and the political language it popularised nationally, promised direct relief for the poor — empowerment for unemployed youths and widows, aid for the aged, food relief for the poorest, boreholes, and skill-acquisition and loan support for the rural poor — as a deliberate alternative to Fayemi's "material infrastructure" agenda.

"Stomach infrastructure" became the defining, and most widely reported, description of Fayose's governing philosophy after his June 2014 election win, and the administration did run food, empowerment and micro-grant activity along these lines. But the same term in office was marked by a prolonged workers' and pensioners' salary crisis (see below), which undercuts any claim that welfare needs were being met in a sustained way.

Implicit in the welfare-first "stomach infrastructure" platform was that ordinary workers and pensioners would be looked after, not left unpaid.

Ekiti received ₦9.604bn from the Federal Government's 2015 salary-bailout package specifically to help clear worker and pensioner arrears, yet by May 2016 the state's civil servants — backed by the NLC, TUC and Joint Negotiating Council — went on an indefinite strike over roughly five months of unpaid salaries, demanding a further ₦512m in December-2015 deductions be repaid; protesters at one point called for Fayose's resignation. Arrears persisted into 2017, with health workers alone owed six months' pay.

A new international/cargo airport near Iworoko-Ekiti was pursued as a flagship, transformational infrastructure project of the administration.

The project was pushed with what The Nation described as "frenzy" from late 2015, but the state cleared roughly 4,000 hectares of farmland with bulldozers on 2 October 2015 before consulting or compensating the customary landowners across five villages, destroying crops and buildings; ten farmers reportedly died in the resulting standoff. A High Court later ruled for the farmers, upholding their land titles, ordering compensation and enjoining the developers from entering the land. Work was suspended in October 2015 pending compensation, and the airport was not completed or operational by the time Fayose left office in October 2018.