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ILLUMINATIONS

BY SEGUN AYOBOLU

TINUBU’S INDELIBLE LAGOS RECORD

(Published in The Nation newspaper of Saturday, August 27, 2022)

“An oft-stated tale of Lagos’s once-notorious traffic jams is that of a taxi passenger stuck in a snarl-up who left the vehicle, wandered into a roadside restaurant to eat, drank a beer, took a nap and returned to the vehicle that had not moved an inch. He reached his destination several hours later. First-time visitors to Lagos about 10 years ago were warned, “This is Lagos”. That meant that you should not expect help from anyone – but brace up for hard times ahead. Fast – forward to 2016 and the traffic congestion, high crime rate, clogged gutters and roads filled with garbage could soon become just a bad dream. These days Lagosians still regale each other with anecdotes of the dystopian city even as positive changes can be seen in Africa’s most populous city, with 21 million people. These days the greeting “welcome to Lagos” portends better news”.

Those were the words of the journalist, Kingsley Ighobor, writing in the April 2016 edition of the United Nations Journal, ‘Africa Renewal’, in the magazine’s ‘Focus on Cities’ section. He continued, “The transformation of Lagos started during the tenure of Bola Tinubu, Lagos State governor from 1999 to 2007. Mr. Tinubu set forth a rescue operation that his successor, Babatunde Fashola, later continued. There were political and economic benefits for such efforts. “Lagos is Nigeria’s richest state, producing about $90 billion a year in goods and services, making its economy bigger than that of most African countries, including Ghana and Kenya notes the Economist”. Yet, despite the glaring evidence of positive change across Lagos before their very eyes, there are some public intellectuals and journalists who purvey what can only be described as deliberate falsehood that the country’s commercial nerve centre has made no progress since 1999.

An example is The Punch columnist, Abimbola Adelakun, who in her column of Thursday, July 14, 2022, wrote, “Lagos is one of the most dysfunctional cities in the world, and several objective assessments have demonstrated so. Lagos sits at the bottom of every rating that measures the liveability of cities worldwide. Year in and year out, the administrators of Lagos get exposed as a bunch of phonies. During the rainy season especially, their shoddy infrastructure collapses on their faces and their cluelessness is revealed. The only thing going for those who trot out the silly defence of their paymaster is that most of their audience have never seen an actual city before in their entire lives, and therefore have no framework for a reasonable comparison. That is why they dutifully regurgitate the lines of “Lagos is working” when they do not know what a working city looks like”.

Not minding the condescending and insulting arrogance of a columnist who probably moves around blindfolded anytime she is in Lagos, what is astounding is the magnitude of the sheer intellectual dishonesty of Adelakun. She is an Assistant Professor in a prestigious American university and an unflinching fidelity to truth is supposed to be the hallmark of the genuine intellectual. The way she resorts to careless and empirically unsupported generalizations does not indicate the sobriety, cautiousness and restraint of the meticulous scholar. It is pertinent to wonder how and what she teaches her students. Is it true that there has been no positive transformation in Lagos whatsoever over the last two decades? This is entirely fictional and does the reputation and credibility of this otherwise brilliant writer no good.

A look at the news reports and features pages of the major newspapers when Tinubu clocked a 100 days in office in August 1999 reveals the utter chaos and anarchy that prevailed in Lagos at the time. The entire city from the rural areas to the elite residential preserves was suffocating under mountains of refuse. Heavy and destructive flooding accompanied rains as a result of either blocked or non-existent drainage channels. That was not the flash flooding witnessed now, which drains off in less than an hour after rains, and is a normal feature of coastal cities even in the most advanced countries in the world. The short journey from Ikeja to Ojota through Oregun, for instance, could take several hours on the then one lane road that was riddled with potholes and craters. Today the Kudirat Abiola Road, Oregun is a double-lane highway equipped with sidewalks, traffic lights, duct pipes, drainage channels and traffic medians. Two decades after its construction, the road does not have even a single pothole.

The same is true of other major roads constructed, dualized and modernized under Tinubu such as Awolowo Road, Ikoyi; Akin Adesola Road, Victoria Island; Adeolu Odeku Road, Victoria Island; Agege Motor Road; Ikotun-Igando Road; Yaba-Itire-Lawanson-Ojuelegba Road; LASU-Iba Road, Ojo; Ajah-Badore Road, Eti-Osa; Oba Sekumade Road, Ikorodu; Adetokun Ademola Road, Victoria Island and the Lekki-Epe Expressway to name a few. No more is Lagos routinely described as one of the dirtiest cities in the world as used to be the case as at 1999 as an effective Private Sector Participation (PSP) system in waste management has been institutionalized and the Lagos State Waste Management Authority (LAWMA) has been re-equipped and modernized to handle industrial waste in Lagos. Indeed, the challenge of refuse has been turned into a job creation opportunity with thousands of men and women gainfully engaged through the PSP scheme.

As at 1999, car snatching and bank robberies in broad daylight were daily occurrences in Lagos. The security situation in the state was anarchic. An insensitive President Olusegun Obasanjo described the state as an urban jungle in Y2000 without lifting a finger to help Lagos or compensate the state for her enormous economic contribution to the polity. Lagos contributes the highest component of Value Added Tax (VAT), Petroleum Tax Fund (PTF), Education Tax Fund (ETF) among others all of which accrue to the Federation Account and shared among all tiers of government.

Through re-organizing, re-equipping and providing better motivation for the Rapid Response Squad (RRS), a detachment of the federal Government controlled Nigeria Police Force (NPF), as well as the establishment of the Lagos State Neighbourhood Watch Security Corp, among other initiatives the megacity has become one of the safest havens in a country confronted with severe security challenges. The Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola administration consolidated on the foundation laid by Tinubu on security through the establishment of the Lagos State Security Trust Fund (LSSTF) just as the Mr. Akinwumi Ambode administration enhanced the state’s employment generation capacity by creating the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund.

Anyone who asserts with Adelakun’s kind of authoritative ignorance that Lagos has not progressed over the last two decades must be living on outer space. Before 1999, the transport landscape in Lagos State used to be dominated by the notorious Molue buses as well as the unruly yellow danfo buses. While the former is becoming extinct now, the latter is gradually and methodically being phased out. The riotous and dangerous Okada operators are also being eliminated from Lagos roads in phases by the governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu administration. The Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA), which is a permanent feature on Lagos roads today maintaining traffic sanity, was non-existent in 1999. Today, the revolutionary Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system begun by the Tinubu administration is being systematically extended across diverse routes throughout Lagos State. The ultra-modern buses are decent, clean, comfortable and safer despite inevitable mishaps on occasions.

The 27 km Lagos Blue Line Rail Mass Transit which will run from Lagos Marina-Orile Iganmu- Mile 2- Okokomaiko and ultimately down to Badagry will commence commercial shuttles in January 2023 while the Red Line which runs from Agbado to Lagos Marina will come on stream in the first quarter of next year.

As the Commissioner for The Environment, Mr. Tunji Bello, explained on an online platform recently, “Asiwaju Tinubu designed seven rail lines for Lagos in 2005 and I was a member of his cabinet as well as a member of the committee that designed it including the present governor. First was a cabinet team sent to three South American countries that came back and we decided through modifications that Lagos needed part of what we saw. Out of our committee came seven rail lines out of which Fashola who succeeded him started the Blue Line. And Sanwo-Olu who was also a member of the team started the Red Line. The Green Line is for Lekki corridor all the way to Epe and Epe to connect the Purple Line to Ikorodu.

Mr Bello continued: “Tinubu also started the Lekki-Epe Expressway and I was in the negotiating team with the consortium that financed it. A senior lawyer in this our estate was one of the lawyers for the consortium. Setting up the toll gate was part of the ways to be able to pay back the funds raised by the consortium. Just like when they claimed Tinubu owned Oriental Hotel and I laughed. My ministry gave the Hong Kong owner of the Steel Company in Ogba, Ikeja and famous owner of former Golden Crown Chinese restaurant since the 1970s the drainage clearance to build that hotel and when they were opening it they labeled the underground restaurant there after Tinubu and some have repeatedly said Tinubu owned it despite the owner’s repeated claim”.

Incidentally, the whole stretch along which such iconic structures like Oriental Hotel, the Civic Centre and the Boat Club lie today along Ozumba Mbadiwe Way, was as at 1999 a vast refuse dump. Before 1999, there was perennial flood at the Bar Beach, which not only destroyed properties on Ahmadu Bello Way, forcing the Federal Government as well as state governments to abandon their guest houses and liason offices along that stretch but also threatened the submergence of large swathes of Victoria Island. The Federal Government annually spent about N4 billion to pour sand into the ocean to prevent the flooding to no avail. At the request of the Tinubu administration, the Federal Government handed over the beach to Lagos State and a bar beach flood prevention line was first constructed and later this challenge was transformed into the ongoing construction of the Eko Atlantic City, a brand new city emerging from the bowels of the ocean. Last month, the United States announced that it is building its largest embassy in the world in the Eko Atlantic City.

Today, the entire country is waiting on the take off the Dangote Refinery to stop the embarrassing importation of refined petroleum and the massive fiscal haemorrhage occasioned by the opaque and fraudulent fuel subsidy payments. The facility is located on the Lekki Free Trade Zone another notable Tinubu initiative, which is only one of several signature projects being undertaken in that axis, which certainly ranks among the fastest developing corridors in Africa.

There are those who argue that Lagos State would still have developed at this pace even without Tinubu as governor. That is crass ignorance. Yes, Colonel Mobolaji Johnson helped lay a solid foundation for the state, governor Lateef Jakande made impressive path-breaking strides and General Buba Marwa had flashes of brilliance in his short term as administrator. But Tinubu’s administration brought a paradigm shift in the governance of the state that unleashed the current unprecedented level of transformation.

A former Solicitor-General of the State and Commissioner of Lands in the Tinubu administration, Mr. Fola Arthur Worrey, gives an example of Tinubu’s exemplary developmental leadership in this regard in a 2012 essay. In his words, “For special projects, Lagos State was the first state to approach the capital market to raise development funds through the issuance of bonds, and these development bonds were successfully floated. Again this was a first even though the laws enabling the process had been on the books for years. It was a very involved process requiring a deep understanding of the financial and legal requirements and market factors especially how investors would react to state government bond offers, but the mix of Tinubu’s top notch knowledge of financial systems with the legal and financial knowledge inherent in his team and among the civil servants in the finance and budget ministries and the debt office, the fact that Asiwaju had ensured that there was an up-to-date state finances audit report (a rare event), and with the input of external experts, we saw it through…Now, virtually every state relies on the floating of bonds to raise vital development funds, though not all of them get it right as we saw in a recent case. So here again was Asiwaju, changing the paradigm and setting the pace for the rest of the country to follow”.

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