Last week, the Governor of Lagos State, Mr. Babatunde Fashola (SAN), signed into law two bills establishing the State Emergency Command and Control Centre and the Regulation of Smoking in Public Places.
Before signing the two bills at the conference room of the Lagos House, Ikeja, the governor explained that both would help to strengthen the administration to more efficiently discharge its responsibility to protect life and property.
He reiterated that the state’s commitment to public safety and public health is stronger than the question of whether the law to regulate smoking in public places will work or not, adding that the state owes a moral obligation to first intervene
“It is to tell people that it is a moral situation in which first we would intervene to protect people with clear evidence that now abound about the dangers of secondary smoking, increasing diagnosis of cancers and of causal and effectual relationship that it has with smoking.
“Yes, smokers may have a right to choose to continue with a habit that is clearly unhealthy, but we owe a duty to also provide people who choose to live a healthy life the right to have that healthy life,” he added.
Governor Fashola stressed that similar scenarios have played out in some cities like Paris, London, New York in recent times and that the outcry then was that some of the clubs in London would shut down because it was going to be bad for business, just as cafes in Paris would be closed, but after all said and done, life has continued with all of the societies being the healthier by the measure.
On the law to establish the Command and Control Centre, Fashola said by establishing emergency lines of 767 and 112, the government has created a path where none existed in order to improve the capacity to respond to life threatening incidents and emergencies in the real sense of it.
“As for the emergency line, we have broken a path here where none existed. We provided a three digit dedicated emergency line for Lagosians in order to improve our capacity to respond to life threatening events and emergencies in the real sense of it,” he added.
The governor reiterated that people must pay attention to what really is an emergency, because the way they have used the words – emergency or urgent – shows that the word must really be defined.
