By: Ajadi Sodiq.
It was a sunny Saturday morning around 10:45 am, Mr. Oluwatoyin, one of the managing representatives at Boluid Cafeteria, Zik Hall, had just sent one of his boys out to get petrol. This is solely due to the need for the company to refrigerate their soft drinks for customers to have access to cold drinks. But the recent hike in the price of petrol made him frown his face while he recounted in sadness the recent losses faced by the company due to the failure of electricity in the last few days. Mr. Toyin further revealed to Indy Press correspondent the effect of the dark days on their sales.
“Many of the students prefer cold drinks, they usually take it with their food, and you know the weather out now requires something cold, so they refuse to buy them when there’s no light.” Mr. Toyin revealed.
Furthermore, he said many of their stocked ingredients had gotten spoilt while in the freezer because of a lack of power supply.
“In the past few days, the absence of electricity on campus has made many of our ingredients which are stocked in the refrigerator for preservation. Grounded pepper and other ingredients for jollof rice and fried rice got spoilt. And we can’t add them to our food so as not to send away customers” Mr. Toyin added.
“Usually, after stocking those ingredients, it helps in meeting our daily target on when to start our sales on that day, but when there is no electricity we need to send workers to Bodija to get those things fresh instead. Because of this, we render services late for that day; many of the shops in Bodija open late and we’ll need to wait. And with that, they decide for us when to start sales for that day.” He lamented.
This is not only affecting the Boluid cafeteria in Zik Hall. New Flava and Klass cafeterias experienced something similar. One of the attendants of New Flava opened up to an Indy Press correspondent on their loss in the past few days due to the unavailability of electricity to preserve some of their goods.
“I could remember last week when we experienced three days of no stable electricity, one of our workers complained of the fish in the refrigerator smelling and definitely, these fishes can’t be sold out to customers, we had to trash them and that is a big loss for a company on campus.” Favour Edegbai, an attendant at the New Flava restaurant revealed.
Retail Traders Also
Not only the cafeterias are affected by the unavailability of electricity on campus but retail sellers too. This made Mrs. Alabi, the owner of His Grace provision store, Indy Hall, also lament about the ordeal she faced while there was a failure in the supply of electricity.
“Drinks that I always sell within two days, for like three days now people don’t really buy them from me again, this made a drop in the demand of most of the other goods because most of the students usually take the drinks with most things they get from here” Mrs. Alabi added.
Mrs. Alabi also revealed some of her customers do return some of the goods they might have purchased because there are no cold drinks. She also expresses the stress she will go through if she opts for blocks.
Uneven Power Supply on Campus
It was with this concern that Mrs. Alabi questioned UI maintenance on the uneven power supply among halls. There have been constant situations where power is supplied to halls in the administrative areas and it will take a couple of hours to get to other halls of residence.
“This is a slap on us, we are paying for electricity like other people are doing too, but they have access to electricity more than we do, yesterday two of my customers left to get the same thing he wants to get from me at Bello Hall all because of light. We are just treated like secondhand here” She added angrily.
