Good of you governor BRF, i like you as i like President OBAMA of America, may God be with you. aminho: At what point did you really develop interest in public service?
Public service is just perhaps another stepping stone in my life’s journey. There was no desire for that. I didn’t like public service, make no mistake about it. I was posted to the Ministry of Justice in the University of Benin as a corps member. I was posted to the Office of the Solicitor-General. She was away appearing in some other sittings outside Benin and for three days, nobody could attend to me and I told myself, this is not the place you want to work. By the time the Solicitor-General came on the third day, I just went to her and said: Ma, I have been waiting for you, I don’t want to work here. Please just transfer me. And she said: How can I transfer you without even trying you? And I told her that I would not work there. She was a very nice woman, Mrs Omorude. She later became a judge of the High Court in Edo State. She asked me if I didn’t have a wig and gown and I did. Yes, She asked: Why don’t you want to work here? I said: Well, I was here for three days; you were not around and nobody seemed willing to take responsibilities. The impression I get is that I wouldn’t do anything unless you approve of it. So, if you are not around, we won’t work and I don’t want to be in an environment where I can’t think on my own and take decisions. She said: No, it’s not like that. I said: Well the evidence I have is like that. And I remember her words; she said: Young man, your mind seems to be made up and I’m not going to stand in your way.
Where do you want to go to? Do you have another place? I told her yes but I didn’t. I just wanted to get out of the place, so she let me go and I started pounding the streets of Benin, looking for my seniors in the university who were already lawyers and looking for a place where somebody could accommodate me. By night fall, I had gotten a place and that was where I did my youth service. That was my impression of government. Coming back home, I saw that if you wanted to get anything done in any department of government, it could go on for weeks and weeks and I said no, this is not for me.
I used to be very critical of government in my own small corner. But one day, Governor Tinubu sent for me and said: Tunde, Lai is going to Ilorin; he wants to be governor, I need help. You were part of the people who supported my campaign, you can’t leave me to do the work alone; so come and join me. That was on a Wednesday. Well, he scheduled the meeting for 4pm on Wednesday but I didn’t get to see him until 1:00am on Thursday morning. We were all there in his office. I got home around 2am or so and went to my office in Igbosere. Later in the day, I think the GSM had come then, I got a call from the Head of Service asking for my address and before the end of the day, I got a letter asking me to resume in Alausa the following day, which was Friday August 16, 2002. I called my partner and said: I won’t see you tomorrow; I am gone.
That’s all because the way we ran the chambers, everybody knew what the other person was doing. I was head of the chambers, I was managing it. All the cases we tried, we prepared them in a conference type environment. So, it was easy for them. I told them I would be one phone call away if they needed any help. After that, they found their feet. So, I didn’t plan to be in government. I went into government also with some air of arrogance which was quickly deflated. I must say this; I thought that those of us outside knew more than those inside and I was proved wrong. There are a lot of talents in government; not just in Lagos State and the power of government is so awesome that we do ourselves a great disservice.
I joined at 39 and I thought it was too late and we must encourage many more people to join very early. And there is no use for us to just continuously criticize the government; that’s the easiest thing to do. But getting things done; getting people to agree, it’s like having a party for 10 people. It is easy to serve them but when the party becomes a thousand people, some people will come and not eat. For some people, the food would have become cold. So, when the people you now have to serve multiply to 21 million people, you see how difficult it is to please everybody.
What would you say prepared you for public office as governor of Lagos state?
Well, my knowledge of Lagos and things that I picked up from my childhood days. I played football across virtually the whole state. Where I didn’t play football, I went to swim and I lived in many parts of Surulere.
I lived at Sam Shonibare,Aina Street off Lawanson, behind Idi-Araba and I lived at Ijeshatedo. I also lived at Aguda as a bachelor. But as a child, I remember we used to go from Aina Street through the canal to go and cut bamboo to make cages to trap birds. So, I knew the flood, the canal in Idi-Araba. It helped me ultimately to address the flooding problem that solved the River LUTH. And I knew Oshodi as I told you, apart from going with my grandmother. When we started living in Ijesha, I used to take a bus to Oshodi bus-stop and from Oshodi, we would trek to Airport Hotel because we were going to swim. And we would save the money for transportation on our way back because we would be hungry after swimming. I used to go and rent bicycle at Bank Olemoh.; We used to go and play soccer at SOS children’s village in Isolo, play soccer at Akerele junction at Alhaji Masha because it used to be a big open field. We played table tennis at Sholeye Crescent, Rowe Park and the only place you could get good bats was in a store (I have forgotten its name) in Apapa. We would come to Marina, take the ferry or a canoe across to go and work behind flour mill to be able to get the bat.
Then in my home, there was freedom, love and fear of God. Stealing was unforgiveable; you couldn’t forget your classmate’s biro in your bag because you would receive the anger of my parents. And you will never forget it. We couldn’t go to a neighbour’s house to eat even if were hungry; my mother would be staring at you. She would ask: are you hungry? And you would quickly say no. You may say that they were very strict but many of my generation went through it. It curtailed greed, built discipline and it reinforced self- denial. So, no matter how sweet that food was and you remember the one at home, if they ask you outside whether you were hungry, you would say, no, I have eaten. I remember once my younger brother and I were walking through a footpath and we found an old three pence in the sand and we cleaned it up. Of course, we couldn’t take it home. We saw these Nupe/Kanuri women selling roasted peanuts. We just gave her the three pence to give us peanuts and it literally bought everything she was carrying.
We sat down on the corner of the bush and ate as much as we could, knowing that we couldn’t take it home. But as stupid as we were, we wanted to keep what was left. We dug the sand and buried it there so that we would go back for it later. Of course, when we went back, we could not find it but it was better to lose the peanuts than for my mother to find it with us. Then, the value of human lives; we didn’t see dead bodies on the street; there wasn’t that much violence; there was respect for the dead; there was a sense of sobriety, we were not this loud. And I think that is the critical missing chord. When we talk about students not passing WAEC, they didn’t pass in my time too. If all the students were passing at that time, why did we have FSS because there were remedial colleges? All the students in the UK too don’t pass but constantly, something was being done about it and new opportunities were being created. So, those were the things that still help me in decision making. There were extra classes and that’s why we decided, let’s do Saturday classes in our public schools. And we are seeing the results gradually but it is not enough to continue with the headline, ‘80 percent failed’.
Would you say that you an accidental governor?
I don’t think that I am quite accidental. An accident is something that you don’t have any control of in its entirety and that’s not quite my case. I didn’t plan to run for office but I still had a choice to say yes or to run away and from the day I made a decision to accept the offer. I knew that it came with consequences and the first thing was to begin to prepare myself to deal with those consequences as best as possible. So, in that sense, yes. I think there is nothing esoteric about government. I think if you find the right people, the right attitude, a clear understanding of why you are there, you can make it work. I don’t by that suggest that there is any expertise here but we have tried to do very simple things. We have tried to involve people. Let’s take something as simple as maintaining roads; I want to discuss government not in terms of only the people in public service. No they are a very small part of the population. I want us to discuss government especially in a democracy as something that all of us own and how much ownership we have shown. I didn’t understand. I don’t know then as much as I know now.
There are barometers, at least, in this part, for measuring how well a government is doing. For me, in the very beginning, the idea that a governor must visit a road before it is fixed was extremely outlandish. How many roads could I possibly visit? So, the way forward was, let us get a data of the roads, which we now have. We know all our roads now but we can’t visit all the roads – over 10,000 roads. So, we set up a public works organisation that is increasingly better equipped to deal with those problems. It has a help line that we have made public but are people using it? That’s not even to say that if you call today, they will come this night but they will have a log of the bad roads. When they are making their plan in a budget, then they can fix it in. Recently, I drove through Malu road, going to the Kirikiri Fire Service and I noticed that at the railway junction, we had to slow down significantly because the road had failed at the edge of the tracks and the first thing that came to my mind was, if at the off-peak period, we had to slow down this much, what will happen at rush hour? How much pains will our people go through? And the next thing I did was to call the public works and say, ‘this road must be fixed before this week is over.
Give me a report that you have done it and I am going to check. How many of such roads can I visit? But luckily, by the time I was coming from the June 12 meeting, I saw a text on my phone that the road had been repaired. It gives me a very good feeling that at least the discomfort of citizens in that area has been attended to but will there be a life without problems? No. There are so many other things I didn’t see yesterday. But, even if we now have solutions to all the problems, we don’t also have all the resources to fix them but I think that in the sense that people feel that if they ask, government will respond, then we are on the way. The most prosperous nations still have disgruntled and un-served citizens and that’s why I feel more comfortable with the concept of an action government than an action governor because government is institutional. You don’t need to know me, you don’t need to see me. Even if we can’t serve you, somebody can say to you, ‘we have received your complaints, we will come to it.’ And there is a feel-good factor there that somebody has spoken to me very politely and those are the things we try to continuously promote. But again, on our help lines, what do we get? Sometimes, they are used for purposes for which they are not designed. So, again there is need for all of us to restrain ourselves; to moderate our expectations .
When Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu invited you into his administration, did it ever occur to you that you will stay this long in government and public service?
No. In fact, I remember as I joined in 2002, the campaigns for the re-election were rife and after re-election, he was reconstituting his cabinet. Myself as Chief of Staff, the SSG and Head of Service were the only few people that remained after the end of the first term and there was a lot of horse trading about who and who was going to be in the new cabinet. I recall one night I was at the club and one of my friends just rushed in and said “You are just sitting down here; they are already constituting the new cabinet and your name is not on it.” And I said “So, what’s your problem?” He said “ but you just spent nine months.” I said that was a momentous privilege and that if the governor felt that he wanted to change his chief of staff, I would go and thank him for giving me the opportunity to serve for a few months and get on with my life. So, that was my attitude because being his chief of staff wasn’t fun. Before I was chief of staff, if it rained, I slept more but once I got into government, the rain meant a different thing to me.
http://sunnewsonline.com/new/politics/i-hated-school-failed-waec-and-almost-became-a-mechanic/
http://247ureports.com/i-hated-school-failed-waec-and-almost-became-a-mechanic-governor-fashola-reveals-all/ |
Politics › Re: Photo: President Jonathan And Patience in their University days by jabdock(m): 11:16am On Oct 24, 2014
she has thick moustache like adolf hitler.