Businesses in Calabar, Cross River State, are under pressure, following the lack of Seven days of power outage.
The situation was caused by a fire that occurred on 3 September, at the 132/33 KV Substation in Adiabo, Calabar. Ndidi Mbah, TCN General Manager, Public Affairs, had on 4 September, issued a statement, assuring residents of the city of the company’s effort to restore power. The statement stated that TCN engineers were replacing the affected equipment to ensure the restoration of power to the city by 5 September. Seven days of power outage, The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported that till 9 September, the city was still in darkness, with no hope in sight. A bank official who spoke to NAN, said the bank and others have shortened their hours of operation because of poor power supply and high cost of diesel. “A lot of people may criticise banks but you need to know what they go through daily to ensure service provision.
“They run virtually on diesel and do you know how much a litre of diesel costs today, not to talk of other operational expenses? Poor power supply has made doing business difficult in this city. ” Similarly, Affiong Okon, a cold-room operator, said her business was declining because power was needed to ensure that all the items in the cold-room remained fresh. This is painful because a few months ago, there was no power in the whole of Calabar for a long time due to one problem or the other. I am still imagining how I survived it, today another one has started.Seven days of power outage, “To make matters worse, they are going round to share bills as we speak, even though, there is no light in the whole of Calabar. Are these people not telling us to lose our minds and become violent one day?” she said. Calabar and its environs had suffered total blackout between 8 April and 16 May because of vandalism of a tower in Itu that evacuated power from Ikot Ekpene power plant to the Adiabo plant in Calabar.
Source: This news is originally published by premiumtimesng