Lagos state governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu today January 7, met with President Buhari in Abuja where he brought the president up to speed on efforts being made to reconstruct the state after the violence that erupted in October 2020 when the EndSARS protest was hijacked by hoodlums.
Speaking to state house correspondents after the meeting, Governor Sanwo-Olu says the state government is already resuscitating small scale businesses through the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund.
“It is work in progress. We are carefully taking a proper study to know what we need to do, taking our time to get it right but we have started something.
Some businesses that were affected, some people having their shops looted or burnt or something. We have been able to directly begin to support such businesses, especially on a micro, small level using the Lagos state Employment Trust Fund.
They have started intervening and supporting some of these small businesses, giving them grants, giving them soft loans and making sure that they can come back together very quickly.
The bigger, larger items around infrastructure, around transportation, they will take a fairly longer time. We are talking about a period that is still under three months. So, its still a working document that we are doing right now and we also have to be very creative on how we raise the finance. We didn’t have money anywhere, you know it was toward the end of a financial year and we are just starting another year.” the governor said
On the second wave of COVID19, the governor appealed to Nigerians to take full personal responsibility because of the threat of the pandemic.
“We have seen, unfortunately, the fatality rate around the country, even in Lagos.
One of the things we have realised is that a lot more people require oxygen attention, they need additional breathing aid, so we have started building what we call oxygen tents, we are building about ten of such facilities, we have commissioned about four or five of them.
We are also building proper oxygen plants, additional to oxygen plants in the state so that we can meet the respiratory requirements” he said
