Security: Lagos Receives 1.6 Million Fake Calls

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The Lagos State Government has lamented that it received approximately 1.6 million fake calls in one month about issues bordering insecurity and others.

Commissioner for Science and Technology, Adebiyi Mabadeje disclosed this at a ministerial press conference in Lagos, Southwest Nigeria, saying that during the month of March 2013, approximately 1.6 million hoax calls were made by Lagosians to the Lagos State Command and Control Centre through the free toll line 767.

He added that 2,414 distress calls were also made to the centre in the same month while 1,111 complaint calls were recorded and 8,250 enquiries were made.

However, the commissioner debunked claims that there is a dispute between the Lagos State and Federal Government on the installation of Close Circuit Television, CCTV in the state.

He disclosed that the Federal Government has installed  906 CCTV cameras in Lagos to curb crime, saying that the cameras would soon be launched.

He stated that the federal government brought 1,000 CCTV to the state out of which 906 of them had been installed.

Mabadeje added that the Federal Government had been working with the state government to make the project a success.

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According to him, the state government did a pilot of CCTV only in three locations in the state, saying that the cameras had been installed on Falomo Bridge, Third Mainland Bridge and aniother place and that the aim was to check the effectiveness of the concept.

“The pilot scheme was a successful exercise and there is a plan to take it to all parts of the state before the Federal Government  approached the state government that it was running the installation of the CCTV project.

“The Federal Government listed Abuja and Lagos to benefit from the programme. When they started, they engaged the Lagos State Government. We concluded that why will the state government spend tax-payers’ money on what the Federal Government has concluded plans to instal in the state?

“The Federal Government rolled out a thousand cameras in Lagos state as a start, but about 906 have been installed. This represents the number that the state government has physically seen. We have been working with the central government on this. The cameras will not be everywhere now,” he explained.

He added that “we know that the intention of the central government is to deploy it to all the nooks and crannies of the state. It will roll out to other areas that are more remote in the state. The project started with urban areas. The project has not been abandoned. It is in phases. There is no  stay of  action from the Federal Government.”

—Kazeem Ugbodaga

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