Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria, (Atcon) has commended the Lagos State legislature and the state executive initiating the Lagos State Special People’s Law 2011 which seeks to safeguard people living with disability from all forms of discrimination and equalize their opportunities in all aspects of living in the society.
Atcon described the law as a fine piece of legislation.
The Lagos State Special People’s Law 2011 also provides for protection of the interest of persons who live with disabilities and particularly addresses the issues of protection for them on matters of access, employment, privileges, and standard of living, among others.
In a release Sunday signed by Titi Omo-Ettu and David Roberts, president and general secretary respectively of Atcon, the association said that “this is one piece of legislation which is capable of lifting Nigeria out of a so-called third-world classification into one which truly counts among those that have climbed into true civilization”
“We pledge to support the implementation of the Law in the hope that its operators implement with a human face and in the spirit and letter of its objects and prescriptions.The Law has a bearing to our industry in its prescription on access of persons who live with disabilities to telecommunications services which it specifically mentions and indeed access of such persons to all other services which it presents largely as implied” the Atcon.
The association also invited the attention of all it members, other players in the industry, and indeed all employers of labour in the land to this Law and commended it to them for uncomplicated implementation as best as possible in the circumstance.
Atcon also said that “It is important that other State Governments and indeed the Federal Government take a lesson from this law and do the needful to ensure its national embrace and progressive implementation. We certainly cannot continue to ignore the significant contribution which those, among us, who live with disabilities are capable of bringing into productivity and national development.
“We hope and pray that the Office of Disability Affairs which the Lagos State is about to establish to implement this Law will be up to good and not turn out to be an exuberant organisation whose attention will only be to extort, abuse, or focus only on a particular industry or on a set of employers in the manner of an earlier but very unfair legislation, of the same Lagos State, which had to be challenged in Court and put in its proper place” it added