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| The interior of the Cross River State House of Assembly |
20 November 2019
The 9th Cross River State House of Assembly under the leadership of Rt. Hon. Eteng Jones Williams did not sit on Tuesday the first day of the legislative week for failure of power supply to the Assembly complex NEGROIDHAVEN can say authoritatively.
At exactly 12:40PM Endurance Onun the publisher of an online local newspaper with keen interest in reporting Assembly matters took to his Facebook account to say thus: ‘Today is Tuesday and first legislative day of the week but plenary didn’t hold because there was no light & no money to buy fuel’.
By 5:27PM, publisher Onun will quote the Speaker allegedly saying that ‘Servicing of power generator; reason why plenary didn’t hold today’.
What the Speaker allegedly said contradicts what the Chief Press Secretary to the Speaker, Hope Obeten, who is currently enjoying his Honeymoon said. Obeten said that there was an electrical issue within the Assembly complex. According to him ‘This information is misleading, there was an electrical fault with the power source connecting the chambers and as we speak there’s power in the Assembly main administrative building. However, the House technicians are on top of the situation to trace the faulty line and restore power to chambers’, his statement read on part.
Onun further countered that as at 12PM there was no power supply even to the Office of the Speaker. His words ‘Hope Obeten, if not that you’re on honeymoon, I’d have replied you. No single light (sic) even inside Speaker’s office as at before 12pm. You weren’t around though’.
It seems the House of Assembly is no stranger to dearth of power supply. During the 8th Assembly of Speaker John Gaul Lebo it is said that for three months the Assembly complex including the residential area at Ekorinim experienced power outage for over three months. According to Abang Ogon a former aide to a Honourable member of the 8th Assembly in the same thread initiated by Onun, ‘… The 8th Assembly was worse than this… the legislative arm was almost crippled under the watch of your ‘hero’, the KVA generators in both the Assembly quarters and the complex broke down for over three months, at a point PHED disconnected light in the quarters for nonpayment of bills,
‘Waterboard disconnected water supply from both quarters and complex, the gate in the complex pulled out of the wall for over one year… ‘
By ‘hero’ Ogon may have been referring to the then Speaker Lebo.
Another source has disclosed that for about two weeks now, there has been no water supply to the Governor’s Office complex. The anonymous source added that the ‘place is doom (sic)’.
The development has incited the disappointment of Cross Riverians who expressed their disappointment on social media.
