Following calls by Lagos residents in some quarters to resume businesses, the Lagos State Government has hinted that after assessing the readiness of businesses, it will fully re-open its economy.
While speaking at the State House after the State’s Security Council meeting on Sunday, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu said that the move to fully re-open the economy would not be done in a hurry.
According to him, the state, in the coming days, would be rolling out “Register-to-Open” initiative as part of efforts to enable it to assess the level of readiness of the players in the identified sectors for supervised operations.
Also, the governor said that the officials from the Lagos State Safety Commission and Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency would be visiting restaurants, companies, religious houses to assess their level of readiness.
Governor Sanwo-Olu said that the government could not afford to keep people and businesses on lockdown permanently, following the size of the state’s economy and numbers of businesses that are operating in Lagos.
He stated:
We are at a level where we are reviewing the other arms of the economy.
In the coming days, we will be starting what we call Register-to-Open, which means all players in the restaurant business, event centres, entertainment, malls and cinemas will go through a form of re-registration and space management.
There is a regulation that will be introduced to supervise this move.
We will be coming to their facilities to assess their level of readiness for a future opening.
I don’t know when that opening will happen in the weeks ahead, but we want these businesses to begin to tune themselves to the reality of COVID-19 with respect to how their workspaces need to look like.
For us, it is not to say they should re-open fully tomorrow or any time; there has been a process guiding the re-opening.
We will be mandating LASEPA and Safety Commission to begin the enumeration process and the agencies will be communicating with all relevant businesses and houses in the days ahead.
The governor added that in determining whether mosques and churches can re-open in the future, social distancing and hygiene would be fully considered.
