Lagos laments spending ₦700m on street lighting
Powering streetlights across Lagos State costs the government a whopping ₦700million monthly, Gbenga Omotosho, its commissioner for information and strategy has said.
Omotosho revealed this to select journalists he met with on Sunday. The commissioner lamented that the government could no longer bear the cost and had decided to seek alternative energy sources.
“The issue of street lights is that you may not know how much is being put into ensuring that Lagos streets are not in darkness.
“The kind of system that we have in place before today cannot continue, using diesel to power street lights. Today, the cost of a litre of diesel is not what we had about the cost of a litre of diesel is not what we had about three to four years ago, where we have to spend about N700 million just to power street lights in a month.”
Omotosho added that the Lagos State government is retrofitting the streetlights, based on its decision to use alternative energy sources in powering them.
“We are also trying to use gas, some of the street lamps have been changed to gas and we are also trying to use solar systems,” he said.
TheCornet reports that Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial nerve center, had launched an ambitious Street lighting campaign in 2018.
The campaign, Light Up Lagos, aimed at providing street lights across the state.
In 2020, the incumbent administration announced it would retrofit the street lamps with energy saving bulbs. The government, at the time, said that the action was to “accelerate infrastructure interventions” that would make the state a 21st century economy.
