By Femi Makinde
Residents of some areas in Ijebujesa, the headquarters of Oriade Local Government Area of Osun State on Tuesday trooped out to protest the power outage in some parts of the community which has lasted for one year.
Armed with placards with various inscriptions, the angry residents stormed the office of the Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company in the town to register their anger.
Apart from the placards, the protesters carried sacrifice in an earthen pot and placed it at the entrance of the IBEDC office but officials of the company fled the office on hearing that protesters were on their way to the office.
The protesters said life had become so hard for them as a result of the outage, adding that businesses had collapsed and social activities had been paralysed as a result of the prolonged outage
One of the members of the community, who has been suffering as a result of the power outage, Venerable Julius Fakunle, of Ijesa North Anglican Diocese, Ijebu Ijesa said the area started experiencing poor supply of electricity from 2015 but stated that this gave way to a total black out from August 2016.
Although Fakunle did not follow the protesters to the IBEDC office, he said the people of the community trooped out to register their displeasure having realised that the company was not doing enough to address the problem.
He said, “We arranged to repair the damaged transformer. After the first effort failed, we came to IBDEC in Ijebu Ijesa and they recommended another contractor whom they said repaired that of Kajola in Ilesa which is still working till date.
“We paid N600,000 to the contractor and up and until today they have been dribbling us. So, we came back to our community and had a meeting to know the next step to take thinking of who can help us. We have engaged people to talk to our political office holders but no response till date.
“The IBDEC later disconnected us and restored light to some areas like Oba’s Palace, filling stations where they can generate more money. We are making efforts tirelessly to get our light restored but all to no avail.
“We went to the Oba in council to complain and the council gave us a Chief, who went with us to Ibadan IBDECto lodge our complaint but later discovered that no complaint was lodged by IBDEC, Ijebu Ijesa to their office in Ibadan and they kept raising our hope.”
The spokesperson of the IBEDC, Kikelomo Owoeye, when contacted told our correspondent that the company was working to address the problem, while appealing to them to exercise patience.
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