Adebayo Adelabu, the Nigerian Minister of Power, has promised the students of the University of Ibadan that measures have been put in place to restore electricity to the Ibadan University College Hospital (UCH) between 24 and 48 hours.

Adelabu said this on Monday as undergraduate students of the Alexander Brown Hall and Falase Postgraduate Hall and other concerned students from the institution’s main campus protested three months of power outage.

According to FIJ’s source in ABH, the students had earlier planned to stage a new protest on Tuesday due to the blackout which had spanned through 100 days, but when they got the information that Adelabu would visit the school on Monday, they decided to move the protest back to Monday.

UI Students Protesting on Monday

When Adelabu got to UCH on Monday, he had a closed-door meeting with the UCH Management and the Managing Director of the Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company (IBEDC). The students protested at the Chief Medical Director’s office in the hospital complex.

READ ALSO: UI Students Suspend 82-Day Blackout Protest, Set Monday Deadline

After the closed-door meeting, Adelabu, an indigene of Ibadan himself, said that the power outage problem was not a problem peculiar to UCH alone; the University of Benin Teaching Hospital and the University of Lagos Teaching Hospital were also in a similar situation.

“That we have decided to come means we want a long-term solution. The president (referring to the UI Student Union president) mentioned that I’m from this town. Do you think I will be happy when the premier hospital is this way?” Adelabu said.

Adelabu addressing the students

“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 assured 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.”

READ ALSO: UCH Blackout Persists, Students Deem Mgmt’s Alternatives Insufficient

Adelabu added that an agreement was in place to introduce a solar-powered mini grid for UCH and UI. He stated that the grid would not take less than ten months to be fully erected but it would be completed in 2025.

This is not the first time the UI students have been promised a restoration of power in UCH. In January, a Federal Housing Secretariat staff member assured the students that power would be restored in three days, making them momentarily suspend their protest.

After the deadline, students in the school confirmed that power was not restored.
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