Oyo Assembly moves to close down facilities prone to COVID-19

• Urges immediate distribution of palliatives
• Makinde not at war with FG, agency, PDP tells APC

The Oyo State House of Assembly yesterday resumed plenary after a 40-day break.

In a motion sponsored by the lawmaker representing Akinyelebe I, Ayo Fatokun, the House deliberated on the need to put stringent measures in place to ensure that operators of clubs, joints, cinemas, swimming pools and other hospitality facilities that are prone to the transmission of the dreaded virus remain closed until further notice, and erring operators are brought to book.

In one of the resolutions of the motion, Fatokun, who is the Chairman of the Parliamentary Caucus of the Assembly, urged the Executive arm of government “to put stringent measures in place to ensure that operators of clubs, joints, cinemas, swimming pools and other hospitals that are prone to the transmission of COVID-19 remain closed until further notice and erring operators are brought to book.”

In his remark, the Speaker, Adebo Ogundoyin, who said that untold hardships inflicted on the populace by the COVID-19 pandemic were unbearable, therefore, urged immediate distribution of palliatives as promised by the executive arm of government.

He said: “The Ministry of Special Duties and Women Affairs should extend testing centres to rural areas to detect the status of foreigners entering the country. We implore citizens to get tested. All lawmakers and administrative members of staff to take testing that will be decided at the parliamentary caucus.”

However, the lawmakers lamented highhandedness on the part of the security agencies and charged them to focus on the protection of lives and property and stop beating around the bush.

In another development, the Oyo State People’s Democratic Party (PDP) yesterday chided the state’s chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for accusing Governor Seyi Makinde of being engaged in a face-off with the Federal Government and some of its agencies.

The party described the allegation as baseless and non-existent, noting that the claimed face-off only existed in the crude imaginations of the APC leaders.

The PDP, in a statement signed by its Publicity Secretary in the state, Akeem Olatunji, described the Oyo State APC as a group of frustrated individuals with unabated desperation to destabilise the peace and tranquillity in the state following a well-articulated economic plan introduced by Makinde, which it said, was fast erasing the memory of APC’s existence in Oyo State.

“Governor Makinde or the Oyo State government is not in a face-off with the Federal Government or any of its agencies. The face-off APC advertised exists only in their crude imaginations.

“The position that Makinde holds the office of the President in low esteem was a falsehood from the pit of hell and it justified our earlier position that Oyo APC is playing out an orchestrated plan to heat up the polity with a view to achieving their primary objective of ‘bringing down Makinde at all cost.’

“The Oyo APC’s penchant for telling chronic lies in the name of playing politics is not only unrivalled but unprecedented. The accusation that Makinde does not exchange communication with the Presidency is actually too childish. If the governor communicates with the Presidency, is he expected to advertise it? The APC has a very poor understanding of governance.

“The Office of the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces is not one that governors should write love letters to on a daily basis, so, if there is no need to engage with the Presidency, Makinde would not because he wanted to please some misguided souls in APC begin to bombard the Presidency with ‘Please Call Me’ or ‘Please Notice Me’ text messages for publicity stunts.”