Refuse: Lagos Assembly Orders PSP To Go Back To Work, Disowns Visionscape

Lagos State House of Assembly has ordered Private Sector Partnership (PSP) operators in all the 20 Local Governments and 37 Local Council Development Areas (LCDAs) of the state to resume refuse collection and disposal with immediate effect.

Speaker of the House, Hon. Mudashiru Obasa, gave this directive on Thursday on behalf of the lawmakers during plenary sitting where the lawmakers debated the state of sanity in the state’s environment.

The House denied knowledge of the Visionscape Sanitation Solutions Ltd, which was currently doing the task of collecting refuse in the state.

This followed an Urgent Matter of Public Importance raised by Hon. Gbolahan Yishawu on heaps of refuse scattered all over the state.

Mr Yishawu, who said that there were several heaps of refuse on Lagos roads, added that the refuse were not as it used to be because some PSP was working and the state government had bought some trucks.

The Speaker, Obasa emphasised that the Lagos State Government does not know about Visionscape.

Obasa stated that there are three arms of government including legislative, executive and judiciary, and the state government ought to have consulted the House on Visionscape before they started operation.

He said: “We insist that we don’t know anything about Visionscape because we were not consulted before they started work.

“We once wrote the Commissioner for Finance, Hon. Akinyemi Ashade not to pay Visionscape again and any money paid to them after our instruction would have to be returned to the State government.

“We will go back to that when the time comes. We have to do the needful now.

“We are calling on the 20 local governments and 37 LCDAs in the state to have meetings with the PSP operators to go back to work and they should start paying them and make the residents to start paying the operators. We have to avoid epidemics and be proactive,” he said.