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Setonji Samuel David
Once upon a time, the State was an “urban jungle”. If you walked around the noise-polluted streets, which were overcrowded with rickety commuter buses, cars, cart pushers and wheel barrows, and thronging with screaming street traders, ubiquitous markets stalls around pole-high refuse heaps and putrefying gutter oozes, you might find one or two human corpses decomposing on curbs, corners or street intersections.
I said, “walked” because if you had chosen to drive, you could spend an entire day trying to get through one single avenue of a stretch not more than 500 metres. Traffic jams were as controlled as bedlam. That way, you would know traffic hell but you wouldn’t get far enough in the adventure to know what an urban jungle looks, screeches, groans and stink like.
Relief could come swiftly, sometimes, from this suffocating crowd of people, corpses, howling automobiles, and refuse heaps and puffs of exhaust fumes, soot, smoke and dust; it could come when a truck load of armed robbers pay your side of town their usual visit, take shots at vultures on roof tops and pandemonium happened, and the crowd took to their heels and the next moment, the roads have magically thinned out. And shops and their keepers are robbed, cars that ran into one another in panic and got stuck had their trapped drivers robbed or killed.
Lagos State was such an urban jungle in 1999. The then president Olusegun Obasanjo called Lagos that (I didn’t) to spite those who were in charge there. That was when Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu had just taken the job of governing Lagos. That was Lagos then. Talk about dysfunction, forlorn and chaos. Ask the residents, then, about despair.
Do any of these sounds familiar? Do we have a template for examining Nigeria today or not? Take your pick of descriptive words for security nightmare, economic despair and existential dismay.
Like Nigeria today, that jungle —that was Lagos— had serious and grave revenue problems. It was over 6 million strong in population, lacking in all it lacked but only generating internal revenue of N600,000 a month, N7 million a year, which was mercilessly guzzled down month by month by a civil service that was stuck with an “unaccountable” wage system. Financially, Lagos was going broke, insolvent; successive military governments were content if they could pay salaries of government workers and hobbled on with the wieldy status quo.
Just as Nigeria has recklessly remained a monolithic economy for decades, depended on oil and still depends on it to fund her budget today and has consequently reeled from one economic downturn to recession to instability or the other, Lagos —like most of the states— once depended on federal allocation to meet its financial, social service and development obligations. Tinubu, as governor, had just created additional local councils in the state and Obasanjo ordered him to reverse it or forfeit federal allocation of funds to Lagos LGAs. Tinubu wouldn’t; he was done with the state’s dependence on external revenue handouts anyway.
Tinubu dared and weaned Lagos from dependence on monthly federal allocations from Abuja. His administration was funding 57 Lagos LGs and LSDAs for the entire period of his two terms as governor. Lagos continued to fare better than many other states economically. In relative terms, Lagos even fared better than Nigeria in growth and GDP indices while being so starved of federally allocated funds.
The model that resulted from Tinubu’s restructuring of governance is still working the magic for Lagos. Lagos is financially viable, generating over 75% of its revenue independent of federal grants derived from oil revenues. It is on the backbone of a working, modern and accountable financial system, operated by a highly trained and motivated public service, that the state had risen to become the fifth largest economy in Africa. Imagine if all the states of the federation are inspired and motivated by the centre in a competition to match the Lagos experience. That is the kind of economic revolution we as Nigerians should look forward to beyond 2023.
The urban jungle breathes because nobody obeyed traffic rules; roads were dilapidated; laws were disregarded whether they were ones regulating refuse collection and disposal, the payment of rates and taxes, or the approval of building plans and permits. While retooling other relevant agencies, Tinubu created new ones like Lagos Internal Revenue Service (LIRS), Lagos Waste Management Authority (LAWMA), and Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA). Their duties were as essential as they were labour intensive so Tinubu could absorb tens of thousands of unemployed youths, removing them from the streets where some had added to the menace of insecurity.
In other words, Tinubu was cleaning up Lagos and restoring orderliness through these agencies, and creating thousands of well-needed jobs at the same time; that was not all, these agencies were turning into big revenue earners for Lagos State. We get more physical development for Lagos, more jobs for the people and more revenue for the State. This is the kind of social engineering and economic ingenuity Nigeria cannot afford to discount today.
Tinubu created Lagos Metropolitan Area Transport Authority (LAMATA) and established the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system to transform public transportation in Lagos State. Five years into his administration, Tinubu had completed and commissioned 308 road projects out of 422 contracts awarded. Lagos was irreversibly gaining in urbanity and sophistication after losing the “jungle” characteristic. Tinubu speedily completed the upgrading and renewal of the Lagos Island Central Business District Roads project to give the state’s crucial economic zone a new verve: roads and street pavements, traffic lights and markers, modern drainage facilities, and street lightings.
The same Tinubu has thrown his hat in the ring. He has made public pledges on tackling our chronic power and energy crisis and promised to secure Nigeria and her imminent prosperity. He wants the job to govern Nigeria: the same man, same purpose, same intent, and same call, but different specimen and time. It was Lagos in 1999, now it is Nigeria in 2023. I lived in the urban jungle and now I thrive in modern, mega city Lagos. My candid appeal to you, Nigerians: employ this man. He has a will of steel, a passion for success unequalled, a head tuned well for innovation, is practiced and fully-grown in the act of fixing jungles of social, economic and political kinds. And he has his proven ways.
Such widespread support base will come handy when he tackles headlong our intractable security problem, which is a symptom.
Hon. David, chairman, House Committee on Information, Strategy and Security, Lagos State House of Assembly wrote from Lagos.
