That Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission and Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, scion of stormy petrel of Ibadan’s 1950s politics, Adegoke “Penkelemesi” Adelabu, could conspire to place University College Hospital, or “Oritamefa,’ in financially suffocating Band A premium electricity market segment is a wicked act against the minister’s fellow Ibadan citizens. It shows that NERC, the minister, and the government they serve have no human feelings. Anyone who puts “Oritamefa” in disgraceful and dire straits and compromises its services to the Ibadan community has done the same grade of psychological damage that those who rested Kingsway Stores did to the Baby Boomer generation of Nigeria.
UCH, to those who may not know, is a folksy rock star institution to the Ibadan, nay, the old Western Nigeria, of a period spanning the closing years of the colonial era, the First Republic, the Second Republic, and the first of the misguided military regimes in Nigeria’s chequered political history. UCH, the oldest university teaching hospital in Nigeria, established in 1952, was initially quartered at the Eleyele fort of the West Africa Frontier Force that fought in Burma during the Second World War. Construction of its current site, started in 1953, was completed on November 20, 1957.
With hospital beds estimated at 1,000 and nearly 7,000 workers, UCH, host of the older University of Ibadan College of Medicine that was established in 1948, is reputed to have been t.