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Peter Anosike
Hotel owners in Lagos yesterday vowed that they would not receive Nigerian evacuees from overseas in their hotels.
They told Sunday Sun that their reason was that instead of the Federal Government agency in-charge of the evacuees dealing directly with the hotel owners, they gave the contract to middlemen who seized the opportunity to make quick money.
They disclosed that while the Federal Government budgeted N30,000 per night for each returnee, the middlemen are offering the hotels a paltry N10,000 including breakfast per returnee, adding that only downtown hotels would accept the offer because they are not having customers and also lack standard facilities.
The hoteliers most of them in the Ikeja area said that though the contractors do not have any experience in hotel management, they had insisted that the duty of the hotel owners would be limited to only the provision of bed and breakfast, while they (contractors) would provide every other services required in their hotels.
They also said that the terms of agreement sent to them were not favourable.
Some of the terms they said include that they (middlemen) would bring their own beddings – bed sheets and pillow cases, come with their own house keepers to attend to the evacuees and their needs instead of the hotels’ house attendants, buy gas or diesel for the hotel’s generators to ensure continuous power supply.
They said that all the terms were mere ploy to defraud the Federal Government and suffer the evacuees because the house attendants the middlemen would bring would not be professionals, adding that they would also go and buy substandard bed sheets and pillow cases that are not 100 per cent cotton in other to make more money from the government.
They also wondered that if the hotels would provide only breakfast for the evacuees, where would their lunch and dinner come from?
They called on President Muhammadu Buhari and the Economic Financial Crimes Commission(EFCC), to investigate this agency that is given the responsibility to take care of the Nigerian returnees and make sure that they are comfortable.
According to them, the agency is rubbishing the good intentions of the federal government.
The hoteliers, therefore, urged the Federal Government to be dealing with them directly in cases like this, instead of going through middlemen.
They also called on the EFCC to investigate what has happened to the huge amount of money that was set out for the humanitarian project, which they noted that even a lot of the returnees provided some of the money.
