[TRENDING VIDEO] Moment Nigeria’s 112 emergency number was dialed on live television show but didn’t connect
Nigeria’s national emergency number, 112, failed to connect during a live demonstration by Channels Television presenter Seun Okinbaloye after an All Progressives Congress chieftain, Alwan Hassan, challenged him to call the number during a television interview.
Hassan, a member of the APC Presidential Campaign Council, had described the emergency line as an achievement of President Bola Tinubu’s administration while appearing on the station’s Politics Today programme on Tuesday.
He asked Okinbaloye to dial the number and put his phone on speaker, explaining that it connected callers to emergency responders for medical, security and other distress situations.
“Take your phone and call 112. Nobody knows about this. We used to hear it in America, 911. Call 112 now, put it on the speaker, and they’ll ask you what’s your emergency…Thanks to APC government,” Hassan said.
However, after making the call, Okinbaloye said the number was not connecting.
“This number is not working,” the presenter said, as Hassan maintained that the service was operational and suggested that a network problem might have caused the failure.
Okinbaloye countered that other calls were connecting from the same location. He also noted that viewers were sending messages reporting similar difficulties with the emergency line.
Hassan continued to defend the service, claiming that he had called the number several times and that it had worked on previous occasions.
He explained that calls to 112 were expected to reach emergency communication centres in the callers’ locations, where operators would establish the nature of the incident and contact the appropriate responders.
He said medical emergencies would be directed to ambulance services, while security incidents would be communicated to the nearest police station.
Hassan added that the government was developing a system through which emergency centres could identify callers’ locations using a dashboard, reducing the need for people to provide their addresses.
According to him, the Abuja centre was ready, but Tinubu had instructed that it should not be launched until centres across the country were properly aligned. He expected the process to be completed by March next year.
When Okinbaloye suggested that the emergency number might be among the administration’s promises that were not yet fully operational, and referred to what he described as a lengthy list of unfulfilled commitments, Hassan said the government would deliver on them eventually.
“We’ll fulfil them. We’ll fulfil them with time. This is why we’re asking for more time,” Hassan said.
A call made by a PUNCH Online correspondent also failed to connect. However, an X user, OTGnija, reported that a call to the number went through in Umuahia, Abia State.
The contrasting experiences have raised questions about the consistency of the emergency service across different locations.
In September, the Federal Government directed relevant agencies, including the Nigerian Communications Commission, the Nigeria Police Force, the National Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Road Safety Corps, to develop an operational roadmap for the nationwide rollout of the 112 emergency number.
The directive followed the National Economic Council’s approval of 112 as Nigeria’s single universal toll-free emergency number, designed to provide access to assistance during medical, security, fire and other emergencies.
According to reports, in May that Nigeria’s emergency response system was facing several challenges, including inconsistent availability of the 112 line across mobile networks, inadequate ambulance coverage and poor telecommunications connectivity.