by Nchekwube Efunesi

On a cool, breezy morning in January 2013, Babatunde Raji Fashola, the charismatic Lagos State governor, arrived the site of the Iganmu Light Rail Station. He wanted to inspect the rail tracks and coaches.

The Track-Laying was the first phase of an ambitious rail line that would connect Marina, in Lagos Island, to Okokomaiko, near the Nigerian border with the Republic of Benin.

Sporting a face cap on a blue, double-breasted jean shirt, well groomed in the role of no-drama man of the people, Mr. Fashola smiled and acknowledged waves and cheers from the citizens that had gathered at the site.

“This is what we have been talking about,” he said, in transparent self-satisfaction. “It may (take) sometime but this is the dream we have, it is manifesting itself more clearly.”

Also undergoing construction side by side with the rail line is the Lagos-Badagry expressway, expanded to a 10-lane road, stretching all the way to the border.

An ambitious project by all means, it is also perhaps one that, if appreciable progress is made before the next election, would define Mr. Fashola’s legacy as he bows out of office next year. He will be known eternally – like Lateef Jakande and housing – as the governor who delivered the 50 kilometre super-highway that linked Lagos, by road, to the rest of West Africa.

Action governor
“I think by the time Fashola will leave office, he would have left Lagos State better than he met it,” says Jiti Ogunye, a Lagos based constitutional lawyer. “Specifically, his achievements are in the area of infrastructural renewal, environmental renewal, and in the area of responsible governance.

“Here you (also) have a governor who, for eight years by the time he leaves, who would have governed a state that is so chaotic in terms of traffic congestion and yet would not use a siren.”

Indeed, the personality cult aside, much of Mr. Fashola’s footprints have been stamped on infrastructural renewal and urban development across Lagos.

From the hugely successful Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) scheme, to the Ikoyi-Lekki link bridge to the ferry services on the waterways linking the mainland to the island – though most of the projects, it must be said, were conceived during the regime of the also-popular Bola Ahmed Tinubu – Mr. Fashola has wowed the public by his preoccupation with transforming Lagos into a mega city.
Some would that it be called an obsession.

See as Exhibit A, the Eko Atlantic City, unveiled by no less a person by former United States president, Bill Clinton in February last year. Another ambitious project under Mr. Fashola’s watch, it began in 2003 when the state was searching for a permanent solution to the severe coastal erosion at Bar Beach, as well as protecting Victoria Island from the threat of flooding.

The project, as audacious as it is unprecedented, when completed will be a brand new city reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean and housing about 250,000 people, another 150,000 workers commuting into it every day. Five million square meters of land reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean.
“Whilst building on the legacy of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu,” says eminent lawyer, Itse Sagay, approvingly. “Fashola has established a modern, enlightened democratic and civilized state and society in Lagos under the rule of law.

“Quite rightly, emphasis and considerable attention have been devoted to the infrastructural and physical development, transformation, indeed revolution, Fashola and his predecessor have deployed in changing the face of Lagos State, and the standard of life enjoyed by its people. All of us people of Lagos are beneficiaries of this physical transformation which has introduced, so to speak, ‘another life,’ in Lagos,” Mr. Sagay added.

Yet, as critics have been quick to note, the ongoing physical transformation of Lagos into a much-talked-about mega city has have come at a devastating cost to the poor and slum dwellers in the state.

In February, last year, bulldozers and backhoes notoriously arrived at a slum settlement in Badia East, while the inhabitants were still rousing from their morning sleep, and demolished hundreds of homes.

More than 9,000 people were rendered homeless immediately, according to Amnesty International, residents watching helplessly as their homes were reduced to a mass of broken bricks and woods.

Throwing the word mega-city in as defense, the state government said it planned to replace the settlement with a block of 1,000 flats. One year after, despite funding from the World Bank, this is yet to be done – residents still crying out for fairness to the media as recently as last month.

Badia East, however, is only one of many. Its demolition preceded by similar displacement of slum dwellers at Makoko, Agege, and Ajegunle. At Idasho and nine other neighbouring communities in the Lekki area, community members have continued to be at loggerheads with government representatives over their ‘seized’ parcels of land.

The communities accuse the state of forcefully acquiring their lands for the Lekki Free Trade Zone project, a claim the government has vehemently denied.

The Lekki Free Trade Zone, yet another ambitious project launched by the government in 2004, covers about 17,000 hectares and is expected to accommodate over 100,000 residents. Bounded by the Lekki lagoon and the Atlantic Ocean, the project aims to develop the area into a modern city with a multi-use facility with zones for oil and gas, industries, commerce, real estates, warehousing, entertainment and tourism.

In the run-up to the April 2011 gubernatorial polls, amidst the outrage expressed by residents along the Eti Osa-Lekki-Epe axis over the planned introduction of tolls on the rehabilitated expressway; Mr. Fashola announced the suspension of the plan.

“It is to enable the government to further engage with the concessionaire and the concerned stakeholders on the proposed toll which elicited hue and cry from residents within the area recently,” the governor, through Ayo Gbeleyi, the Director-General of the State Public-Private Partnership, had said.

Our governor, the tyrant

The elections had barely been concluded before the consultations apparently had to end.
One Saturday in December 2011, barely eight months after Mr. Fashola had won a landslide in an election, which returned him for another four years in office, armed police officers, acting under the orders of the state government, stormed the tollgate along the Eti Osa-Lekki-Epe expressway.

You would be forgiven if you mistook it for the dark days of military dictatorships. The country observed with shock across traditional and online media as the police officers tear-gassed, pushed, shoved and beat protesters who were demonstrating against the introduction of tolls along the road. Some of the protesters were arrested.

No doubt buoyed by this success, the state government ensured same fate befell the commercial motorcyclists, popularly known as ‘okada’ riders, in the state. After campaigning vociferously around the state, alongside the governor, for his re-election in 2011 (photos relentlessly viral across social media as proof of His Excellency’s alleged deceit); commercial motorcyclists were slammed with a ban in their operation along over 400 roads in the state.

Abiodun Aremu, Secretary of the Joint Action Front, a Labour and Civil Society coalition group, describes the governor’s action at the time as a “crime against humanity.”

“Part of the problem we have in this part of the world is that we lack in the sense of national memory,” says Mr. Aremu, who led the ‘okada’ riders on protest marches that were repressed by armed police officers on two consecutive occasions. “Because if we have the sense of national memory, criminal acts have no expiry date. And that is why even at the international level, people are tried years after they have left office for crimes they have committed.”

Like the Okada riders, who dragged Mr. Fashola and the state government to court over their ban; state-employed medical doctors toed the same path, dragging the state to the National Industrial Court after they were fired for embarking on an indefinite strike.

By the time the weeks-long feud with the doctors was resolved, Mr. Fashola’s name had gone into the history books as the first governor in the state to sack almost 1,000 medical doctors for going on strike. Apparently the costs of having an action governor are that high.

Too high, literally, in the case of students of he Lagos State University (LASU), who suddenly began to confront an unprecedented hike in their school fees.

From a fee regime of N25,000 per head, the school fees were hiked to between N240,000 and N345,000, depending on the course of study, per session. The governor, not one to back down, justified the increment. According to him, the government had considered the cost of properly funding the institution as against what currently accrue to it from all sources.

“Before we took that decision, the state executive council carefully considered the current state of infrastructure and personnel in the institutions vis-a-vis what it should be,” he said.

Those like Mr. Aremu are not at all impressed, noting that the present stalemate with LASU students and the management of the school represents some of the “biggest threat(s) to the so called context of democracy we are said to be promoting.

“The correlation is that if Lagos State cannot pay the N18,000 minimum wage, and at the same time turn education to a burden, so how do you expect people to be beneficiaries of the dividends of democracy that we are talking about?”

The elitist (of some sort)

The type of footprint Mr. Fashola would leave behind him will certainly be measured differently by the poor and the rich, the vast different between those that admire a Lagos where one can now stop, literally, to smell the roses, and those who do so only because they have no homes to go back to.
But it can be difficult to square this allegation of elitism, however legitimate, with the character of the governor himself – simple, modest, even exemplary.
“As I observed at an event in April 2013, what is most significant about the Fashola phenomenon is not the physical aspect that we see and touch,” Mr. Sagay says. “But the unseen yet most profound aspect – his vision, commitment, focus, sacrifice, service to the people, transparency, integrity, honour and respect for the governed.

“Fashola has been midwifing the emergence of a modern, democratic state, subject to the supremacy of the rule of law and operating under a civilized and enlightened political and social template in the last six years.”

Mr. Ogunye couldn’t agree more, insisting that the governor has worked deliberately to entrench a culture of responsible governance in terms of conduct of elected officials in the country.

“The way in which he has managed the paraphernalia of office, official flamboyance, even in his outward appearance is worthy of commendation,” he says.

But his critics routinely accuse him of running an elitist government wherein he concentrates major government infrastructures in the high brow areas of the state, leaving the slums and poor neighbourhoods – if they are not demolished – to their own devices.

“For the rich, they can celebrate Fashola as a successful governor in Lagos because they benefit from his exclusive policy,” said Mr. Aremu.

“If you are running a government that you say is for the people, what it then means is that the consent of the people must be sought. If you check the people that constitute the majority of his voters – the market women that are struggling under the sun, traders suffering various degrees of harassment and taxation.

“So in terms of programmes that will benefit those people, in terms of the resources of government being expended for their meaningful life and existence. But that is not the case.”
And for that matter, some note, there is nothing spectacular in the work that the governor is said to do. There are many who note that successive governors of Lagos have been praised for foresight and innovation with the same intensity as Mr Fashola, pointing to the unique position of Lagos as source of the accolades, rather than any supposed excellence.

“My brotha if u said no past governor apart from Jakande i will accept. You just have to look backwards and read about the Lagos project between 1979 – 1983 under Lateef Jakande. He was a dedicated leader who did not amass wealth on the scale we see today,” a commenter on popular forum Nairaland said in fierce debate over the exceptionalism of Mr. Fashola. “(Jakande) did not build a mansion in ikoyi like our past governor has just done , his house i think is still in ilupeju area of lagos if i am not mistaken and it is nuthin extravagant. His achievements and legacy still stands tall in Lagos of today.”

Another commenter put it in more measured perspective. “A bit difficult to measure, guys,” the comment said. “You leave out Gbolahan Mudashiru, who converted a lot of ‘Jakande school’ buildings to modern prototypes. Also Raji Rasaki who did a lot of infrastructure work, like the Opebi Oregun link road/bridge, and rebuilt the sinking Alapere bridge.” Those, like Mr. Aremu, however, have no patience for comparison, insisting only that Mr Fashola’s legacy be viewed strictly as one that has chosen blind development at the expense of those who have very little.

“It is the majority of these poor that constitute the largest of the voting population in his Lagos State. So you have to place it in that background. You talk of infrastructure, for who?” he asks, heatedly. “What is the share of the infrastructures to the poor in Lagos relative to share of infrastructures to the rich?

“Millions of people grappling with under managed infrastructure at Ayobo, Iyana Ipaja, Ajegunle and the rest of them. Governance is supposed to affect at the same level everybody in that society, but when you run a government that is the exclusive preserve of the others.”

To this, his defenders like Mr. Ogunye plead inevitability -transforming a hitherto disorganized city with road traffic as chaotic as its crime rates into (that word again) a megacity will come with a price that cannot be avoided.

“Dwelling houses that were labelled slums, and indeed they are slums, have been demolished to pave way for new buildings,” he says. “Lands have been taken from aboriginal families owning lands in the name of bringing about a mega city estate and buildings.”

“So the cost has been there. And for our people, the majority of Nigerians who are just eking out their existence, who have not had a fair deal in the hands of government. For people who had had to troop to Lagos as their last bus stop, this has been really, really serious in terms of its impact.”
Eko-ile

The criticism however sticks stubbornly to this governor. When he signed the Lagos Tenancy Bill into law in August 2011, critics argued that it would have no impact since the state has failed to provide mass housing schemes to her citizens.

To address the anomaly, Mr. Fashola has embarked on an initiative he named Home Ownership Mortgage Scheme (HOMS) – a process by which Lagosians will be given an opportunity to pay for their homes over a period of not less than 10 years under a mortgage scheme.

To flag off the scheme, the state government embarked on a massive housing scheme across the state.

About 1,104 homes – a block of four floors containing 12 flats of 1, 2, and 3 bedroom on each floor and a block of 12 flats of two units of 2 bedroom flats; and 1 unit of a 3 bedroom flat – have been completed, while another 3,156 units are in various stages of construction, according to Mr. Fashola.

The state also says it is starting 132 housing units in Iponri; 720 in Ibeshe, Ikorodu; 420 in Ajara, Badagry; 648 in Sangotedo Phase 2; 216 in Obele; 36 units in Akerele Phase 2; 48 units in Oyingbo; 1,254 units in Ilubirin; and 1,080 units in Ijora Badia.

“Our view of a home is that it is something you pay for gradually and it is a place of safety, well built, safe and sound, to protect you and your family from the hazards of nature such as rain and heat; a place that will not flood or suddenly collapse; an asset that outlives you,” Mr. Fashola said at launch of the HOMS Ownership Scheme on February 3rd.

“The easiest thing to do would have been to simply sell all the houses today, collect the cash and wait for the next batch and do the same; but it is not our way. That is the simplistic way that does not solve the problem of housing,” he added.

The ultimate plan of the scheme is for government to invite private sector developers who would acquire land, build to the government’s specifications and at the agreed price, and sell to the government. The government then uses funds from the state’s internally generated revenue to buy from the developers and sell to the citizens on a 10 year mortgage payment.

“The LagosHoms is not about providing a home alone. It is also about a total lifestyle change. We are moving our people from a desperation for shelter, to an orderly and planned living,” Mr. Fashola said.

The Lagos legacy

Successive governments in Lagos State have struggled to replicate the landmark achievements of Lateef Jakande, the first democratically elected governor of the state, who ran the government between 1979 and 1983.

To make his mark, Mr. Jakande, arguably the best governor the state has ever produced if you make the judgement based on newspaper column inches, employed a welfarist approach to governance, paying as much attention to mass, affordable housing, as to free education.

While he single-handedly built LASU at Ojo, he also ensured that every Lagos resident, irrespective of state of origin, had unfettered and qualitative access to education.

The administration of Buba Marwa, the Military Governor of Lagos State between 1996 and 1999, is remembered for his daredevil ‘Operation Sweep’ – a joint military and police patrol that suppressed the notorious crime rate of Lagos during the era.

What will Governor Fashola’s legacy be, as he gets ready to hand over in 2015?
“I think it would be unfair to compare Fashola’s achievements with that of his predecessors,” Mr. Ogunye argues. “They didn’t do the same thing. They didn’t use the same resources. They didn’t use the same style of governance.”

“Why would you compare Fashola with Jakande, for example? Jakande came, the entire Alausa secretariat, Jakande built it in record time. He started building schools and many other things. And he was also modest as well. He started LASU and education was free. So how do you compare him with a governor under whose watch school fees skyrocketed to N350,000?”
Well.

During a single outing recently, Mr. Fashola’s inspection covered several projects including the ongoing projects at LASU and Alimosho General Hospital, Igando HOMS and Resettlement Relief Camp, Ejigbo-Ajao Estate link bridge, Maternal and Child Care Centre in Festac Town, Okota-Ago Palace road among others.

Eyes firmly placed on how history will interprete his governance, at the Iganmu Light Rail Station, Mr. Fashola reiterated his administration’s commitment to spending tax payers’ money on projects that bring development to the state.

“This is what we do with the money, which we borrow, we do not borrow money to pay salaries, we don’t borrow money to run our overhead,” the governor told his audience, and the press.
“This is the type of transportation that I dream for this country,” the governor continued, his plea for perspective not quite subtle. “This is the type of transportation that I dream for this state and not mass transportation by motorcycles.”

Silence. His Excellency is making his closing argument.

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