The Streetlights Maintenance Contractors in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) have attributed the constant darkness being experienced on the major highways in the federal capital to the consistent power failure from the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC).<\/p>\n
The Legal Secretary of the contractors, Festus Ugwegbu, in a statement issued on their behalf yesterday in Abuja said the streetlights are always active and ready to shine at night if not for the constant outages and load shedding by the AEDC.<\/p>\n
The contractors disputed media reports about the darkness in the Federal Capital Metropolis and its environs, which had been wrongly attributed to the laxity of streetlight contractors.<\/p>\n
Part of the statement read: \u201cTo put the record straight, the contract was awarded in August 2022, and it is expected to end by July 31, 2024, with a fixed contract rate from inception, irrespective of inflation and the hike in prices of materials and labour.<\/p>\n
\u201cNevertheless, we, the contractors, have been optimally delivering our assigned responsibilities despite our failed appeals to the FCD administration for a review of the contract sum, and a price variation to reflect the effects of inflation on the cost of executing this project.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn addition, it should be noted that there are some streets in FCT that are not under the maintenance of any contractor -the Department of Facility and Maintenance can testify to this fact.<\/p>\n
\u201cTherefore, it is unfair and scandalous to generalise that Abuja is dark because of contractors\u2019 inefficiency, who are almost at the end of their two year contract and have fulfilled all their contractual obligations thus far.<\/p>\n
\u201cDespite the effort of the contractors who worked assiduously to ensure that the city is lit up, we are yet to be paid in accordance with the contract terms and conditions signed by the FCT administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt may surprise Nigerians to know that the contractors are owed seven months now, and this has been the treatment from the FCT administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cMeanwhile, the contractual agreement says that payment attracts penalties if it is more than 90 days.<\/p>\n
\u201cFurthermore, the high rate of vandalism, as mentioned, which obviously affects the total cost of contract execution, has not deterred us from performing our contractual obligations optimally.\u201d<\/p>\n
The contractors also clarified that the scope of their projects did not cover solar powered streetlights.<\/p>\n
The statement further read: \u201cAt this juncture, may we also inform the public that maintenance and security of solar powered streetlight installations in FCT is not covered by our contract and any vandalism to that installations might render the area to darkness at night.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Streetlights Maintenance Contractors in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) have attributed the constant darkness being experienced on the major highways in the federal capital to the consistent power failure from the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC). The Legal Secretary of the contractors, Festus Ugwegbu, in a statement issued on their behalf yesterday in Abuja […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":31134,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[531],"class_list":["post-31133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-abuja-reports","tag-aedc"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31133"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31135,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31133\/revisions\/31135"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}