13th April, 2015
By Peter Claver Oparah
Lagos, like Nigeria, is on the march again. The process of electing a governor to take over from the glorious era of Babatunde Raji Fashola, the cerebral lawyer and redoubtable administrator, is over. In a few weeks, precisely on 29 May, 2015, a new man, with the competence to continue and add to the existing template on ground will mount the engaging governorship stool of Lagos to continue the glorious urn Lagos has consistently enjoyed in sixteen unbroken years.
Lagos remains among the few states that have gained positive dividends from the civilian dispensation that dawned in May 1999. Lagos has harvested from a rich pool of great administrators that leverages from the abundant potentials that domicile in the state to leave lasting legacies in the state these pad sixteen years. As he came in 1999, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu fondly known as The Logician, drew the master plan that recovered Lagos from the debris it was reduced to as Nigeria whittled under militarism. Tinubu took up virtually every sector and re-jiggled them to lay very solid foundation for the recovery and growth of Lagos. From education to the environment, from judiciary reforms to transportation, from local government reform to security, from power generation to health reform, the Tinubu government displayed a good comprehension of the needed things that will uplift a Lagos the PDP taunted as a jungle during the time Tinubu took off as Lagos governor in 1999. The logician in him was called into play as he drew the master plan from the recovery of a Lagos from progressive gloom wrought by maladministration.
As at the time Tinubu came, Lagos was practically hobbled by terrible road networks, decadent educational system, decrepit health sector, a nauseating environmental crisis marked with mountains of dung heaps all over Lagos, a deadly security crisis that was marked by a fiendish ethnic militia uprising and rampaging armed robbers and other criminals that made mincemeat of defenceless Lagosians. A chaotic city transportation system and widening urban slum centres rendered Lagos unloveable and the strategies to tame these vicissitudes and kick start the recovery of Lagos was set under the Tinubu era even when he was facing a vicious war levied by the PDP federal government and which targeted its statutory allocations.
Perhaps Tinubu’s greatest achievement was in the choice of his successor. Tinubu overlooked the loud and powerful political aspirants to the governorship of Lagos to pitch his support for an almost anonymous technocrat. Fashola who is better known as The Actualizer. As he made the decision to back Fashola. it was like the heavens would fall, as the big players of the time felt it was an abomination to overlook them and pick a political neophyte that knew nothing about the workings of the wheel of political machine in the state at that tme. But Tinubu stuck to his gun and insisted on the choice of Fashola.
Eight years later, it is not in doubt that Lagosians today believe their years under Fashola have been a very fruitful era where the potentials of the state have been well harnessed to give them full benefits of democracy. From the heavy investments in infrastructure development all over Lagos to the achievement of total security for millions of Lagosians, from the enhanced transportation system to good, qualitative healthcare, from consolidating the quality of judicial delivery to massive provision of housing schemes, from provision of standard education to massive urban recovery and renewal, Fashola has taken Lagos to such impressive heights that it had become an oasis of growth and progress in the badly managed Nigerian space. Fashola has expanded the frontiers of economic growth such that Lagos has become the fifth largest economy in Africa, outpacing many countries and offering limitless opportunities for continued economic growth.
Lagosians will hardly forget the scary visage of platoons of robbers and criminals invading homes and engage in house-to-house operation to disposes innocuous victims of their valuables, kill, maim and rape in the process. This is a visage that had been banished through innovative intervention in security that had made other Nigerians to relocate their vulnerable relatives to Lagos when the country was bedevilled by intractable security crisis. Lagosians today are fast forgetting the visage of a big sprawling state bogged down by decay and rot and in its stead, has a glittering mega city, with seamless capacity to absorb the huge population migrating each day to the state for the purpose of prospecting for a future. Writing recently in the British Telegraph, Colin Freeman, under the title, ‘Meet The Man Who Tamed Lagos’ wrote; “Confounding the image of Nigerian leaders as corrupt and incompetent, the 51-year-old governor has won near-celebrity status for transforming west Africa’s biggest city, cleaing up its crime-ridden slums and declaring war on corrupt police and civil servants”.
Fashola didn’t need to reinvent the wheel of governance when he replaced Tinubu. He merely built into the already charted roadmap Tinubu left and started blazing as soon as he came on board. Massive construction of roads, rehabilitation of hospitals, schools, markets, provision of water by building giant water plants across the state, building power plants, building modern court rooms, expanding the BRT mass transit scheme, building thousands of low cost houses across the state, from recovering the numerous seedy slums in the city, thereby dislodging hoodlums and criminals to setting up several skill acquisition centres to train and impart youths with needed productive skills, from installing order and discipline to the chaotic order that reigned in the state to rehabilitating abandoned federal roads in Lagos, from the ambitious environmental upgrade that had seen the beautification of a city that was once described as the quintessence of urban rot to the construction of very ambitious light rail lines, Fashola continues to demonstrate a creative understanding of the needs of Lagos for the benefit of all Lagosians and Nigerians. What more, Fashola’s spectacular leadership role in dealing with the novel Ebola virus outbreak can only come from a government and system that operates beyond the ordinary kens of governance in Nigeria.
Given all these and more, it is incontestable that Lagos needs consolidation to continue building on the legacies that have made it stand out as a well governed modern state with capacities to impact positively on its inhabitants. The post-May 2015 Lagos needs a steady hand on the plough who is trusted to add value to what exists on the ground to take Lagos to greater heights. Lagos needs a competent administrator that has the requisite skill to build on the sixteen years recovery master plan that has placed Lagos in good stead to lead the economic revival of a badly governed and corruption-wracked country presently run aground by clueless and corrupt governance. Lagos needs a groomed hand that has walked through the bureaucratic structure of the state and has gathered proven competence to drive a seamless pursuit of excellence in a state that shows the light in virtually all spheres of governance. Lagos needs someone that has the cognate understanding of the needs of the state especially its current status as one of the few mega cities of the world and most importantly the critical driver of Nigeria’s fragile economy in the wake of the dimming oil accruals.
Akinwunmi Ambode fits these requisite criteria. He has been adequately groomed to continue where Fashola stopped. He walked through the state civil service structure and retired as the state accountant general. He has gathered tremendous competence to steadily navigate the ship of Lagos State. He has been part of the success story of Lagos, part of the masterful political architecture that leverages Lagos with its brightest and best prospects; to the good of Lagosians and the glory of Nigeria. A veritable bean counter, it is apt to note that just as Asiwaju Tinubu has confessed that his successor, Fashola has outperformed him, the same Fashola has already promised that Ambode will out perform him. These unflattering self assessments are driven by the need for Lagos to have the best and an honest effort to ensure that Lagos is availed of the best available hands at all times to steer its wheels to steady progress.
Lagos needs more of a consolidator that will not seek to reinvent the wheels to advertise his difference from what he or she met on ground. What Lagos needs is to deepen the great developmental governance that has paid Lagosians so handsomely these past sixteen years. Akinwunmi Ambode fits so rightly into the type of person Lagos needs now to drive its progress. He has been in the very thick of governance. He understands the wheels of governing a very complex and intricate state like Lagos.
The Logician has worked and drawn up the road map. The Actualizer has planted, watered and nurtured. The Consolidator needs to bring the work to fruition and this is the template needed to take Lagos further down the same wheels of progress that have made Lagos stand out from the crowd of miserably governed and low yielding states in Nigeria since 1999.
•Oparah writes from Ikeja, Lagos. •Email: [email protected]