Lagos Deputy Speaker, Musibau Taiwo Kolawole Empowers 450 Residents Of Ajeromi/Ifelodun …Warns Against Misuse of Items

Residents of Ajeromi/Ifelodun Constituency 1 in Lagos State have been advised to make proper use of empowerment items.
Addressing hundreds of residents of the area and politicians, who thronged L.A Primary School, Mosafejo venue of this year’s annual HKT Empowerment Programme on Wednesday 24th December, the Deputy Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly, Hon. Musibau Kolawole Taiwo aka HKT, warned that he might be forced to discontinue the programme.
The lawmaker emphasised in his speech that the annual event costs him between seven and ten million naira and that he was not happy that some beneficiaries of the empowerment programmes were reportedly fond of selling the items afterwards.
He said that the idea is to train willing beneficiaries in skills such as tie and die, make over, bead making, bag making, making of wools for kerosene stove, catering, cake making amongst others.

According to him “About 450 people were trained this year in various skills. They were trained and tested and it was those, who passed that are graduating today. Every year, we graduate about 500 beneficiaries and we spend between N15,000 and N20,000 to buy items for each of them and this runs to about N10 million,” he said.

Kolawole added that he was surprised to found out that some beneficiaries sold off the items afterwards and threatened to discontinue the project, which he said he started about 10 years ago, if the trend continued.
He explained that those who are into catering could make as much as 300% profits, making allusion to his experience as an hotelier.

The lawmaker, who has just got the nod of the constituents to contest for a 5th term in office in 2015, also said that he was emboldened to encourage people to learn make-over as a skill due to the way his wife paid her make-up artiste.

“I noticed that anytime my wife had an outing, she would call a lady, who would come around to make her up and collect money for her job. We cannot spend money to buy materials that are useful and people just sell them off. We politicians should be ready to make use of opportunities like this as non-politicians have been coming to benefit and make use of the opportunity,” he said.

The annual programme also makes provisions for widows, while some elderly women also underwent trainings through an adult education programme sponsored by the lawmaker.

The Deputy Speaker also used the occasion to urge party leaders in the state and in the area in particular to encourage people to collect their Permanent Voters Card (PVC) as he said just only 31% of the cards meant for the area has been collected.

“We had a meeting with the Governor of the state today and he told us that only 31% of our PVCs in Ajeromi/Ifelodun has been collected from INEC. We still have 69% with them. We need to work together to collect the materials as they would go far in helping us in all the general elections slated for 2015. We should know that we need much votes from Lagos State for the presidential elections,” he stated.

Another lawmaker, who was at the event, Hon. Mufutau Egberongbe from Apapa Constituency 1, commended the Deputy Speaker for what he called a laudable project.
He said further that APC is known for such a giant stride, which he said is a better option to the much vaunted stomach infrastructure in some other states.