Students of the University of Ibadan (UI) at the undergraduate Alexander Brown Hall and postgraduate Ayodele Falase Hall have taken to the main roads of the University College Hospital (UCH) to protest their exemption from the electricity restored to the hospital following a blackout that lasted more than 100 days.
On Monday, Minister of Power Adebayo Adelabu visited the hospital after doctors, students and patients had protested the power outage for more than three months. During a closed-door meeting between Adelabu, the UCH management and IBEDC officials, the students stayed outside the venue to protest.
After the meeting, Adelabu addressed the protesting students. He told them that there were plans to ensure that electricity was restored in the hospital within 48 hours.
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“We have resolved with IBEDC to restore UCH and its environment to the National Grid within 24-48 hours. The time is to ensure they take necessary precautions,” Adelabu told the students.
“We have to do a proper circulation to identify who uses what power. UCH may seem like a single territory but there are multiple independent power consumers. College of Medicine, nothing less than six banks, pharmacies, Falase, ABH and residential areas. Those are the root causes and we must separate them.
“We have bought a new transformer so we can determine UCH’s own power consumption. Should we pay for business centres? By the time we separate it, everybody will pay for what they consume. This problem is not from FG, we are just intervening between the service provider, IBEDC, and the customer, UCH.”
On Wednesday afternoon, an ABH resident told FIJ that electricity had still not been restored in the hospital. The sources said that the students had agreed since Monday that they would wait till Thursday morning to resume the protest if the minister failed to deliver on his promises.
“We do not have light, and there has not been light. On that Monday, the students calculated the 48 hours to be Thursday morning. So, the protest is suspended till Thursday morning. We just looked at Tuesday, the rest of this Wednesday till night to see if they would bring light at all,” the source told FIJ on Wednesday.
“If there’s no light at all, then we’d assume that the minister has just come to do some crowd-speaking.”
On Wednesday evening, the sources confirmed to FIJ that the electricity had been restored in the hospital but ABH and Falase were exempted.
On Thursday, students were out on the streets to protest and the UCH management invited the Ibadan Police to quell the demonstration.
“The students are out protesting. Police vans are also out in front of the school hostel, they said they were called by the Chief Medical Director of UCH. Before then, they had called student leaders and threatened them that if there were demonstrations, they would bring the police,” one student told FIJ on Thursday morning.
“The people going in are walking except for those who have emergencies that are allowed to go in with vehicles. The police officers are observing the protest.”
It was not the first time UI students got a failed promise regarding the power issue from a government official. In January, a Federal Housing Secretariat staff member urged them to suspend a protest. He promised to intervene; that electricity would be restored in three days.
The students momentarily suspended their demonstration but they were disappointed after the deadline.
Credit: FIJ.ng
