In a piece titled “Meet The Man Who
Tamed Nigeria’s Most Lawless City”, UK
Telegraph chronicles how Governor
Fashola came into office and transformed
Lagos and also how he effectively
managed the Ebola epidermic in the state.
Read below…
He famously claims to be “just
doing his job”. But in a land
where politicians are known for
doing anything but, that alone
has been enough to make
Babatunde Fashola, boss of the
vast Nigerian city of Lagos, a
very popular man.
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.
Next month, he will come to London to
meet business leaders and Mayor Boris
Johnson’s officials, wooing investors with
talk of how he has spent the last seven
years building new transport hubs and
gleaming business parks.
Yet arguably his biggest achievement in
office took place just last week, and was
done without a bulldozer in sight. That
was when his country was officially
declared free of Ebola , which first spread
to Nigeria three months ago when Patrick
Sawyer, an infected Liberian diplomat,
flew into Lagos airport.
Health officials had long feared that the
outbreak, which has already claimed
nearly 5,000 lives elsewhere in west
Africa, would reach catastrophic
proportions were it to spread through
Lagos. One of the largest cities in the
world, it is home to an estimated 17
million people, many of them living in
sprawling shanty towns that would have
become vast reservoirs for infection. To
make matters worse, when the outbreak
first happened, medics were on strike.
Instead, Mr Fashola turned a looming
disaster into a public health and PR
triumph. Breaking off from a trip
overseas, he took personal charge of the
operation to track down and quarantine
nearly 1,000 people feared to have been
infected since Mr Sawyer’s arrival.
Last week, what would have been a
formidably complex operation in any
country came to a successful end, when
the World Health Organisation announced
that since Nigeria had had no new cases
for six weeks, it was now officially rid of
the virus.
“This is a spectacular success story,”
said Rui Gama Vaz, a WHO spokesman,
who prompted an applause when he
broke the news at a press conference in
Nigeria on Tuesday. “It shows that Ebola
can be contained.
The WHO announcement was a rare
glimmer of hope in the fight against Ebola,
and even rarer vote of confidence in a
branch of the Nigerian government, which
was heavily criticised over its response to
the abduction of more than 200
schoolgirls by the Boko Haram insurgent
group in April. As a columninst in Nigeria’s
Leadership newspaper put it last week:
“For once, we did not underachieve.”
For Mr Fashola’s many supporters, it is
also yet more proof that the 51-year-old
ex-lawyer is a future president in the
making, a much-needed technocrat in a
country dominated far too long by ageing
“Big Men” and ex-generals.
“He is the best governor we have ever
had,” said Odun Babalola, a Lagos-based
pension fund portfolio manager. “He’s
made a lot of progress in schools,
railways, and infrastructure, and unlike a
lot of politicians, who are corrupt, he’s a
good administrator.”
True, the successful tackling of the Ebola
outbreak was not Mr Fashola’s doing
alone. For a start, the doctor’s strike that
was under way when Mr Sawyer
collapsed at Lagos airport turned out to
be a blessing in disguise. Rather than
being taken to one of Lagos’s vast public
hospitals, where he might have languished
for hours and infected numerous fellow
patients and staff, he was instead
admitted to a private clinic. There he was
seen by a sharp-eyed consultant, Stella
Adadevoh, who spotted that his
symptoms were not malaria as had been
first thought.
She then alerted the Nigerian health
ministry, and along with other doctors
physically restrained Sawyer when he
became aggressive and tried to leave the
hospital to fly to another Nigerian city.
Her quick thinking help stop the virus
being spread more widely, but also cost
her her life: she caught Ebola herself
while treating Mr Sawyer, and has now
been recommended for a national award.
But even by the time Mr Sawyer had been
isolated, the virus was already on the
loose. Knowing that he had passed
through one of the busiest airports in
west Africa, health officials had to try to
track down every single person who had
potentially been infected by him, including
the other passengers on his flight. The list
started at 281 people and grew to nearly
1,000. as eight others whom he turned
out to have passed the virus to
subsequently died.
That was where Mr Fashola stepped in.
He broke off from a pilgrimage to Mecca,
flew home and then helped set up an
Ebola Emergency Operations Centre,
which spearheaded the mammoth task of
monitoring all those potentially infected. A
team of 2,000 officials were trained for
the task, who ended up knocking on
26,000 doors. At one point the governor
was being briefed up to ten times a day
by disease control experts. He made a
point of visiting the country’s Ebola
treatment centre, a way of
communicating to the Nigerian public that
they should not panic needlessly.
“Command and control is very important
in fighting disease outbreaks, and he
provided effective leadership,” said Dr
Ike Anya, a London-based Nigerian public
health expert. “He also said exactly the
right things, urging for the need to keep
calm. Regardless of whether you support
his politics, he has been very effective as
a governor and I would be happy to see
him stand for leadership.”
Born into a prominent Muslim family but
married to a Christian, Mr Fashola trained
as a lawyer and went into politics after
being appointed chief of staff by the
previous Lagos governor, Asiwaju Tinubu,
a powerful politician often described as
Mr Fashola’s “Godfather”. But while he
has long enjoyed the backing of a political
“Big Man”, is his role as a rare defender
of Nigeria’s “Little Men” that has won him
most support.
Once, while driving through Lagos in his
convoy, he famously stopped an army
colonel who was driving illegally in one of
the governor’s newly-built bus lanes,
berating him in front of television
cameras.
“The bus is for those who cannot afford
to buy cars,” he said. “I want a zero
tolerance of lawlesness, and those who
don’t want to comply can leave our
state.”
It was one of the first times Nigerians had
ever seen a civil servant confronting a
member of the security forces, whose
fondness for committing crime rather than
fighting it has long contributed to Lagos’s
legendary reputation for lawlessness.
Armed robberies – sometimes by
moonlighting police – used to be so
common that few people ventured out
after dark. Foreign businessmen would
routinely travel with armed escorts, and
the few willing to live there would stay
mainly in a heavily-guarded diplomatic
area called Victoria Island, a rough
equivalent to Baghdad’s Green Zone. Add
to that the suffocating smog, widespread
squalor and regular three-hour traffic
jams, and it was no suprise that the city
had a reputation as one of the worst
places in the world to live.
Today, much of the problems remain. But
members of the vast Nigerian diaspora
say they now notice big changes
whenever they go back. “When you
return you see an absolute difference –
things have improved 100 per cent,” said
Nels Abbey, a London-based Nigerian
journalist and businessman. “Traffic is not
what it used to be, bus lanes have been
introduced, and it feels a lot safer.
Fashola has been like a Tory mayor for
Lagos – he is trying to make it attractive
to the well-off.”
Styling himself as Lagos’s answer to Boris
Johnson has not endeared him to
everyone. As well as laying plans for a
vast offshore business park intended as
an “African Dubai”, he has accelerated
programs to clear the ever-expanding
shanty towns, ordering their occupants to
return to their homes in Nigeria’s poorest
east and north. That has led to criticism
from human rights groups, although
others say it is hard to see how Lagos
will ever improve otherwise. “Do I
endorse it?” said Mr Nels. “I am afraid it
is a bit of a necessary evil.”
Another big achievement has been
increasing tax revenues, vital in a city
where the GDP of $43 billion makes it the
fifth-biggest economy in sub-Saharan
Africa. Mr Fashola has tried to sweeten
the pill by putting up signs on all new
infrasructure projects, saying “paid for
by your taxes”. It is a rare
acknowledgement of gratitude in a
country where a guaranteed stream of
state oil wealth has historically allowed
rulers to remain aloof from the ruled.
However, despite being relected with 80
per cent of the vote in 2011, the main
hailed as Nigeria’s brightest political hope
in years is far from guaranteed a life in
office. Having served two terms in office
already, he is not allowed to run as Lagos
governor again. And as a member of a
minority tribe and the country’s
opposition All Progressives Congress, he
currently lacks the political backing to go
head to head against Goodluck Jonathan
in next year’s elections.
In the meantime, fresh from ridding Lagos
of Ebola, he is focusing on an arguably
even tougher challenge, launching a new
initiative to stop motorists stuck in traffic
jams from blasting their horns all day. As
he put it: “If we can overcome Ebola,
then we can overcome noise pollution.”
Culled from UK Telegraph…

Its men like fashola and Donald duke who should be running this country.