The collapsed electricity transmission towers have resulted in a blackout across the six Northeastern states of Nigeria.
Consequently, this has taken its toll on lives and businesses in the region.
SaharaReporters reports that the blackout, coupled with the high cost of diesel, has made morgues moribund. SaharaReporters observed that hospital morgues in Yola, the Adamawa State capital have been emitting an awful stench, causing health hazards for staff members, patients and host communities.
An employee of a hospital with a large morgue with several lockers or coolers who spoke to SaharaReporters correspondent on condition of anonymity, claimed, “We require N700,000 for diesel daily to power the generators for the morgues and we don’t have that budget in this hospital.”
“That’s why we no longer accept the deposit of dead bodies because the place is already stinking and you know how bad the odour of a dead person could be,” he added.
A litre of diesel costs about N1,300 in Adamawa State.
On the other hand, the extremely high temperature in the state has reportedly worsened health conditions as several deaths are recorded daily as a result of it.
A community leader around the Damare cemetery in the Yola South Local Government Area, Abba Muhammadu, told SaharaReporters that “the heat wave is really killing our people”.
“We bury a minimum of 20 people every day. As a matter of fact, we buried 40 last Wednesday,” he added.
The situation is not any different on the economic front as many medium and small-scale businesses that depend on power supply from the national grid have either collapsed or are operating skeletal services.
This has sparked a hike in the prices of commodities and the cost of services, causing untold hardship for residents.
The situation has thrown many low-income earning families into a survival crisis, raising questions about the challenges that await them in the future.
SaharaReporters on May 11, 2024, reported that the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) said electricity supply would be fully restored to the Northeast region by May 27.
TCN’s spokesperson, Ndidi Mbah, in a statement, said the commission’s contractors were working to erect four new transmission towers along the Jos-Gombe axis, to enable the restoration of power supply to states in the north-east region of the country.
Disturbed by the ugly development, a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Ahamadu Hamman Dan-Maje, has called on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to urgently prevail on the TCN to restore power supply before the situation descends into a humanitarian crisis.
Dan-Maje who personally visited the damaged transmission tower in Bauchi, urged the TCN to hasten the completion of repairs.
“People are dying, mortuaries are left smelling without power supply, just as businesses are folding up on a daily basis in the North-East,” Dan-Maje lamented.
He also decried the hike in electricity tariff and called for the sacking of the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, saying the “minister had threatened Nigerians with the hike in electricity tariff”.
