The most populous city in Nigeria, Lagos may be facing a dilemma as a large number of staff members of the Lagos State Emergency Management Response Unit (LRU) are threatening to shut down over five months’ salary indebtedness. A large sum of staff have also been let go.

The LRU is a unit that was created from the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency (LASEMA) for outdoor operations. However, the unit was contracted to a firm, Avantegarde Management Services, by former Governor Akinwunmi Ambode. Avantegarde, under a public-private-partnership agreement with the government, then provided staff for emergency operations.

The workers had apparently been handling emergency management operations in Lagos and manned the Command and Control Centre at Alausa, Ikeja, where over 80,000 emergency calls are received on a daily basis.

According to an official of the LRU, who spoke on condition of anonymity, calls to the 112/767 emergency numbers are now rarely picked because of the crisis in the LRU. The worker said a protest had been planned for Friday (tomorrow) at the LASEMA office at Alausa, from where the workers were to go to the Lagos State House of Assembly.

The protest appeared to have started already on Twitter as our correspondent observed some of the workers calling on social media influencers for support. Some of the posts had videos and photos tagged, ‘Save LRU Lagosians,’ indicating the emergency management workers endangering their lives to save residents.

“Many of these guys can’t feed their families, pay the dues of their kids because they have not been paid for five months. They still work round the clock just to help save lives,” one Kadri Afolabi wrote.

A worker told The PUNCH that the state Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, visited the unit three weeks earlier.

“He came to inspect some projects and we wanted to talk, but we don’t know what the new Director-General, Dr. Femi Oke-Osanyintolu, told him and all he (Sanwo-Olu) said was that he would see to our challenges. We don’t know if he really understood what was going on and everybody pretended as if all was well. He just went through the call centres at Lekki, Onipanu, and Alausa. The workers at the call centres were begged to be on shift that day. As of today, there are few workers to take emergency calls. If you don’t believe me, call 112 now. Nobody will take your call. And that is where we had over 115 call centre agents.”