Lagos State Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode on Saturday described the eight years tenure of his predecessor and Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola as commendable and remarkable.
Ambode spoke when he received Fashola and some top officials of the Ministry on a courtesy visit at the Lagos House, Ikeja.
He said: “On behalf of the people of Lagos State, I would like to wholeheartedly welcome Mr. Babatunde Fashola, my predecessor and now Minister of Works, Power and Housing and especially back to the Alausa office where he actually left about 22 months ago.”
“We want to say that whatever it is that we have done in the last 22 months is just more or less a fall out of the great achievements the former governor had already put in place.
“The last 18 years has been so dramatic and historic in terms of the growth and development that we have seen in Lagos, commencing from 1999 when Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu came into office and the eight good years spent by you and the two years we have done. So, obviously, there is a remarkable change between 1999 and now,” Governor Ambode said.
Earlier, Fashola who described the visit as home-coming for him, said he had come with his team to Lagos as part of a nationwide project monitoring exercise to inspect the job done so far on Federal Government projects. He assured that the Ministry had made representations to the Federal Executive Council on modalities to pay debts owed State Governments including Lagos State for rehabilitation of federal roads over the years, saying that the debts would be paid through bond instrument.
The Minister also expressed readiness to assist Lagos State power initiative, especially in the rural areas. It would be recalled that Governor Ambode recently set machinery in motion to attain 24-hour power supply through generation of 3,000 megawatts of electricity by 2022.
Meanwhile, Fashola, has assured contractors handling road project across the country that the Federal Government will now be paying them quarterly and will no longer owe them as it was done in the past. The Minister spoke during a courtesy call on the governor of Oyo State, Senator Isiaka Ajumobi, in Ibadan and his Ogun state counterpart, Senator Ibikunle Amosun.
