A lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Dr. Frank Etim, has said that Tuesday’s prolonged power outage at the National Assembly which delayed plenary was good for Nigerians.
Dr. Etim, who bared his mind on the development on Wednesday in Uyo, explained that the outage witnessed by the lawmakers would help them understand what Nigerians are facing on daily basis due to lack of constant electricity in the country and other essentials.
Recall that on Tuesday, the National Assembly was thrown into darkness for more one hour, following prolonged power outage which delayed the commencement of plenary in the Senate chambers, as the lawmakers waited for about an hour before power was restored.
Commenting, Senator Sunday Karimi (APC-Kogi) described the situation as uncommon.
“Since the commencement of the 10th Assembly, we’ve not had this kind of experience. Often times when we were sitting, we make use of the power generation set, unfortunately today, our generating set developed a fault,” he said.
On his part, President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio, apologised to his colleagues for the power outage and assured that the problem was being addressed.
“The engineers are still working on the lights. It went off since morning, it’s even affecting some offices in the fourth floor.
“We have about nine offices that still don’t have light at present, but they are working on it.
“I noticed even members of the press are fanning themselves, at least they feel the heat too. If it gets too hot, then we may have to adjourn for a while, but they are working on it.
“I apologise for any inconvenience,” Akpabio said.
The university lecturer who is an Associate Professor, lamented over the suffering and hardship Nigerians are currently going through, which is partly contributed to, by poor electricity supply across the nation.
He therefore, opined that for Nigeria to get out of the wood, the power sector must be prioritized, in addition to other key sectors which he said are the bedrock for a viable and stable economy.