by Kolapo Olapoju
Outgoing Lagos state governor, Babatunde Fashola, says he has nothing to miss from the role he held for the past 8 years.
According to the governor, little changed about his life even after he became governor, hence, he won’t be missing anything.
In an interview with Punch Newspapers, he pointed out that he could have done a few things differently.
Fashola stated that having taken hundreds of thousands of decisions in the last 8 years, it was only natural that some of them would have been bad decisions.
Read below an excerpt from his interview.
“I cannot think of missing anything. This is a public trust; it has a beginning and an end. And it finishes when it is finished. My life did not change when I took this job; not in any way that I know. My food has not changed; my clothing has not changed. Perhaps, the only thing I had to do more was travel, and now I will travel less. This is not something to miss; this is something to say that you have done your bit, get off the stage and let the next manager take over.”
“As for things I could have done differently, hindsight is always 20/20. As I said recently at an event, our job is like that of actors on a public stage but the stage is live. We are making videos; live production of cinemas on any production. Unlike the great movies in which you can edit and retake, we don’t have the opportunity to edit and retake.”
“It is done, it is done. In that sense, for two thousand nine hundred and something days – every minute of the day – I am called to act either on a file, on the phone, through text or in a meeting. If you do that from morning till night, almost 16 to 17 hours every day; I have taken hundreds of thousands of decisions. Can I think that I would have got all of them right? Certainly, not.”
“I acted in the circumstance of what I understood the problem to be; I acted in the circumstance of what time of the day it was; I acted in the circumstance of how tired I was. I will rather make a decision than postpone a decision. I will rather make a wrong decision than be found not to have decided anything. In that sense, I cannot get everything right. And I will never know how any people were adversely affected by my decisions. I always make people to understand that this is a public trust; it is not personal.”
