Fashola Brings the Lagos Impact to the Centre
Perspective
Emeka Odikpo foresees an impressive change in the
administration of President Muhammadu Buhari
with former Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos
State as a minister
Politics is not a game for the feint of heart. This
truism has been reiterated in various shapes and
forms. American politics is one of the most brutal.
Nobody comes out of it with his reputation intact.
Your political adversaries will pound at your name
until it reeks of filth. Barack Obama confessed that he
usually hides the Newspapers from his Children,
because he hates their reaction when they read the
hate filled diatribes against their father.
Nigerian politics has swiftly descended into a chasm,
where hate and filth are routinely hurled at people on
the other side of the political divide. This has led to a
situation where even though we have had more than
100 governors since 1999, not a single one of them is
considered by our internet warriors of hate as being
good enough for the highest office of the land.
Babatunde Raji Fashola was Governor of Lagos State
from 2007 to 2015. The Chance to evaluate his
performance by residents of Lagos came up in 2011.
That election offered a clear window into his
evaluation by the people of Lagos. The Peoples
Democratic Party’s nomination of an opponent for
him for the election turned into a non-event.
This is apropos of the fact that no heavy weight in the
then Federal Ruling party wanted the nomination.
Musiliu Obanikoro did not bother to vie for the
nomination neither did the ebullient Jimi Agbaje.
The only reason these gentlemen did not want the
poisoned chalice of an opportunity to run against
Fashola was because they knew that the performance
of the Governor was stellar and any contest against
him was futile.
Fashola’s impact on Lagos despite all attempts by
revanchists to change history has been phenomenal.
In evaluating Fashola, you do not discuss tarring of
roads, because he did this in their thousands of
Kilometres, rather you discuss the reinvention of the
multi-modal means of transportation in Lagos.
The reality of the Mass Transit Light rail lines steadily
emerging and innumerable flyovers that are being
constructed from Okokomaiko to CMS has been the
defining issue for experts on modern city
reconstruction. The construction of the first Cable
Stayed Bridge in West Africa from Ikoyi to Lekki
brought a refreshing dimension to the idea of
governmental vision and delivery of a beautiful and
well-designed project.
The reinvention of water-ways transportation of Lagos
clearly showed the trappings of counter-intuitive
thinking. The sudden change of Lagos from a city of
dirty dingy bus parks, such as Oshodi, Ojota and
others to a city with beautiful gardens was the result
of detailed planning and decisive actions. The ongoing
constructions at the Eko Atlantic City that has
created tens of thousands of construction jobs and is
billed to eventually create a whole new city from the
formerly flood ridden bar beach remain the stuff of
legends.
It is impossible to capture a significant part of the
works by Fashola in a short essay. Therefore, I will
suspend the discourse for another day. The poser here
is actually how the Fashola impact can be transferred
to the National level. The onus will of course rest on
the President and the role he decides to assign to the
vision driven Fashola. Even more important will be a
decision by the President to give this particular
Minister some creative space. Any role that does not
admit of counter-intuitive thinking and application
will be a no-no for him.
Most of the problems we have in Nigeria emanate
from the poor quality of thinking by our leaders. Every
leader, even the most ridiculed, actually had an
ambition to be hugely successful. The catch is that
leaders with low quality thinking are soon
overwhelmed by the problems they are meant to
confront and they succumb to the easy part of
regarding the problems as part of the “Nigerian
Factor”.
Great Leaders on the other hand realise that there is
no such thing as the Nigerian Factor and that iron
will ultimately melt at the right temperature. That is
exactly where a man like Fashola will be useful to
Nigeria. His uncanny ability to see solutions, where
other Nigerians see problems have made him one of
the most successful Governors in Nigeria’s history. A
fitting evaluation of Governor Fashola by Time
Magazine op-ed writer, Alex Perry on May 2, 2011
illustrates this:
“Fashola is not your usual politician. Rather than
barging through his way across town with sirens
blaring and lights flashing like other Nigerian leaders,
he chooses to endure Lagos traffic with his fellow
citizens. Also Fashola reads economic theory for fun.
On his bedside table are books by development
economists who see potential in poverty, people like
C.K. Prahalad of the University of Michigan or
Hernanado de Soto of Institute of Liberty and
Democracy (ILD) in Lima.”
I can hardly evaluate the uncanny ability of Fashola in
better perspective than Alex Perry. But I dare say that
Lagos is a much better space because Babatunde
Fashola happened to have been the governor for eight
years. A continuation of the constructions, vision and
plans he and his team have clearly commenced and
mapped out for Lagos will ultimately resolve the
transportation conundrum that is the greatest
problem of Lagos. The apposite hope herein is that
the man will also affect an area of our National life
positively at the National level if he is adroitly utilised.

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