COVID-19: Lagos lists steps it’ll take to allow churches, mosques, businesses fully return to life

The Lagos State government has stated that it was set to send its officials to evaluate the preparedness of churches, mosques and companies in the state to fully reopen amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

This was revealed on Sunday at a briefing after the State Security Council meeting at the Lagos House, Marina, by Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who noted that social distancing and hygiene will be prerequisites to reopening religious places of worship in the state.

Governor Sanwo-Olu said that in the coming days, officials from the Lagos State Safety Commission and Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency would be assessing the readiness of churches, mosques and others to asses their readiness to fully reopen.

According to him, government could not afford to keep people and businesses on lockdown permanently, considering the size of the state’s economy and numbers of businesses in its domain.

“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.

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“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 work spaces 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. I must, however, caution that this should not be misinterpreted as a licence for full opening; it is certainly not. The state’s economy is not ready for that now,” Sanwo-Olu added.

The comments of the governor came after the Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) cautioned against the reopening of mosques amid the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, stating that the move to do so was not wise enough.

MURIC in a statement issued on Monday by its Director, Professor Ishaq Akintola said that everyone must be on the side of caution regarding the dangerous COVID-19 virus whose cure has not been found yet.

The Islamic body which was reacting to the reopening of mosques on the orders of Borno, Gombe, and Zamfara state governments suggested that places of worship should remain closed until the Federal Government (FG) declared the country safe from the pandemic.

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