Lagos State Governor, Mr Babatunde Fashola (SAN) on Friday reiterated that the overall objective of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum Retreat was to put national issues concerning citizens on the front burner.
Expressing satisfaction with the third edition of the Retreat hosted by Lagos at the weekend, Governor Fashola who spoke with journalists at the end of the Summit said it should be seen as the consequence of the choice of a federation and democratic rule as against the days of military dictatorship.
Noting that there was a time when military administrators could not look at their Commander –in- Chief in the eye, Governor Fashola explained that the game has changed. This, he said, lies at the heart of the kind of initiative that the Nigeria Governors Forum is taking by putting public national issues like education, agriculture and things that define the well being of the people, security of their life and property and others on the national front burner.
Governor Fashola who also spoke on the persistent power outage experienced at the Eko Hotels at the beginning of the event said he got a report that the generator of the hotel has been running in the last 24 hours without a rest, adding that no mechanical device is designed to often run for that kind of period without a break.
“The standard usually is eight hours and you rest and so because of the importance of this event they haven’t had public power and so that is the reality and so for those who say electricity supply is getting better in Lagos, this was evidence. The generator has been running for 24 hours and the thing just started overheating so those periods that you saw on and off were the periods when the thing stopped by itself and so they had to wait for it to cool and start again, if there was public power clearly, the generator would have rested but these are the problems that we must solve”, he stressed.
The Governor said in the aftermath of the intervention of the present administration in the State in the power sector through the building of Independent Power Plants (IPP), there have been improvements in terms of power supply to government utilities.
He explained that the places where the state has intervened are public lightings, street lightings schools government offices, State houses, government institutions, hospitals and courts.
He explained that the modest initiatives that the State have made in the power sector are providing change to public facilities noting that private facilities like the Eko Hotels and Suites get power supply from the national grid which is the responsibility of the Federal Government and its partners under the privatization programme.
Responding to a question on whether such IPPS would also eventually benefit the generality of Lagos residents, Governor Fashola said the legislation in the Power Reform Sector also limits the scope of the State’s intervention and that if it had room to intervene beyond public facilities, then clearly it would have done so.
He recalled that when the Alausa Independent Power project was switched on, there was an outcry by some people that the State should not sell power to private people and that the State explained then that it was for the State’s use, adding that this regrettably is the situation today. He expressed the hope that the privatization exercise will begin to yield the results that Nigerians expect in terms of steady power supply.