By Palma Ileye
Federal Government through the Ministry of Interior, has acquired 21 Fire Fighting trucks to ensure effectiveness and efficiency in providing safety to Nigerians.
Speaking at the commissioning ceremony held at the Headquarters of Federal Fire Service, Abuja, FFS, the Minister of Interior Dr. Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo who commissioned 15 Rapid Response Fire Fighting Vehicles and 6 heavy Fire Fighting Trucks challenged Officers and men of the Service to roll their sleeves for work, stating that the era of work was now, inline with the Renewed Hope Agenda of Mr President.
Tunji-Ojo tasked the authority of the Fire Service saying that their operations should go beyond fire fighting, that the service must also forecast for impending fire out break and other disaster.
He said attention must be given to prevention, rather than fire fighting saying that, “Your responsibilities must go beyond fire fighting, you have to plan and be able to forecast danger to prevent occurrence of disaster.”
He also implored that the Fire Institute would not only be personnel training alone, it must integrate training of fire rescuers, who would be deployed to man commercial and public buildings to ensure compliance with fire sefety mechanism.
He said; “This is necessary because fire fighting is closely related with development, stating that the country cannot continue to pay lip service for the fight. The commissioned fire trucks have the ability to navigate through narrow spaces in the market and residential areas.”
Also, the Controller General of Federal Fire Service, Engineer Jaji Abdulganiyu in his welcome remarks said the Minister had shifted the paradigm, awakened the determination of the Firemen to pursue the vision and reset the goals for expectations and achievements of the service in line with the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration and it’s service delivery policy thrust.
Jaji commended the Minister for his visionary leadership and efforts to modernize the services with the state of arts equipment and data harmonization to raise the bar of internal security and citizenship integrity for Nigerians to have a sweet experience.
“There is no doubt that the Nation’s Fire Service is on its way to her pride of place amongst other Paramilitary Agencies through effective re-engineering of its operational activities. Needless to stress that whatever transformation the Service is able to accomplish is a confirmation of the present administration’s efforts and support at safe guarding lives and property. Our fire statistics in the first and second quarter of 2023 is a testimony of a truly re-engineered Service, records at the Data Repository Centre puts fire call for the period at 1, 096, lives saved -111, successful rescues at 91 and total property saved at over 300 Billion Naira.
“The Fire Statistics reeled out will be better in the coming days, as today marks yet another important milestone in our country’s history as we are here to witness the commissioning of the state-of-the-art firefighting trucks and ford Rapid Response Vehicles, RRV. This is an incredible achievement and I am proud of the hard work and dedication of the team that made this possible. Once again, I appreciate the HMI for pushing for wide plans and robust blueprint for infrastructural breakthroughs in Federal Fire Service.
“Let me also use this medium to inform the general public that the Service has presence in all the thirty-six (36) states of the Federation and the FCT and I want to assure the Honourable Minister that before the end of the year, we shall be deploying to major economic and social hubs across the country, this will go a long way to bringing our firefighting closer to our people thereby reducing response time across the country, a major objective of the HMI,” he disclosed.
He further warned, “those whose delight is to obstruct, attack fire men and destroy our machine during the discharge of their law duties that they will have themselves to blame considering the humongous amount expended by Government in the procurement of these Assets. We will ensure that culprits face the full wrath of the law.”
In attendance are Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Interior, Dr. Oluwatoyin Akinlade, Director, General Services, Dr. Peter Egbodo and Staff from the Ministry.