Emmanuel Thomas, Lagos
July 11, 2015 – Civil servants whose ministries occupy three main blocks in Alausa are not finding it easy in the last one month. Their offices have been thrown into perpetual darkness, no thanks to a faulty cable.
The affected blocks are those housing Home Affairs and some departments in Youth and Sports. Others are the block housing Ministry of Rural Development which has been scrapped by Governor Akinwunmi Ambode. Also affected is the block housing Civil Service Commission. We gathered that workers whose offices occupy those blocks may have to wait a very long time for the problem to be solved.
According to a source, each cable pipping power into each of the ministries is faulty and it will cost about N25 million each to fix each block and a cumulative cost of N75 million for the three.
We gathered that the engineers are reluctant to solve the problem since government is yet to remit same to affected ministries when a similar problem was fixed during the administration of Mr. Babatunde Fashola.
The situation is further worsened by a policy of the last administration which decommissioned about 200 power generators that were reserved to power the ministries in the case of emergencies.
The previous administration also disconnected the whole secretariat from the Ikeja Electric after installing the Alausa IPP. As a stop gap measures, some of the affected ministries, Home Affairs in particular has deployed a 5 KVA generator in the time being pending when the problem will be fixed.
We gathered that the generator which now works from 8am till 5pm each day can serve just a few offices including the reception. The cooling systems (AC) have been switched off for now, leaving workers who are lucky to connect to the generator to use just fan.
