Fashola

Fashola: Rooting in for Excellence

Nduka Uzuakpundu

In one of his earliest duties, soon after assuming office, in 2007, Lagos State Governor, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola, made an urgent, brief visit to Abuja. The thinking was that he did so to convince the Yar’Adua administration that he was an unswerving believer in federalism and to, as well, make a truly persuasive case to Abuja for the release of some colossal amount of money, which the Obasanjo administration had, almost deliberately, refused to release to the Lagos State Government during the Tinubu era. The money in question was to have been shelled out to the Lagos State Government in keeping with number of new local government areas and local council development councils – 57 in all – just created in the state; from the previous number of less than 30 – in Tinubu’s conscious effort to bring government closer to the rural areas.

In what, to this day, remains constitutionally controversial, the Obasanjo administration held on to that huge amount of sorely-needed money, which the Tinubu administration wanted to pump into such areas as the provision of infrastructure, like roads, health centres, provision of potable water, decongestion of the notorious Lagos traffic, generation of electricity, transformation of the rural areas, construction of durable drainage systems, financing a healthy refuse disposal culture, building of new, fairly less expensive lock-up shops and markets, improvement upon security in metropolitan Lagos etc. The desire of the Fashola administration to have the huge amount of money in question released to it by the Federal Government is underscored by the close-to-overwhelming, and capital intensive development needs of the state, especially the Lagos metropolis – a metropolis that, in the past decade, has come within the radar of the United Nations as one of the world’s fastest-growing mega cities. That, also, explains why, in purely development terms, the Fashola administration has, in the past two years, embarked – with the verve of an English premier league striker – upon internal revenue collection; the most prominent being income and sales taxes from workers, small- and medium-scale enterprises and big-time industries.

It has, therefore, in registering the imperative and significance of tax in meeting the development needs of the state, gone to the degree of morality and religious persuasions, using some prominent spiritual captains, for effect, on both broadcast and print media. Although Fashola is well aware that, apart from the Lagos economy being on the top 20 league in Africa, he says, with a constitutional touch, that a whole tidy lot could still be done in terms of generation of more money for the development needs of the state. For one, he would have been a lot happier, than he presently is, were it that Alawusa had the constitutional powers to tap into the gold mine that is vehicle registration. The Lagos metropolis, as the Senior Advocate of Nigeria knows, full well, is Africa’s response to Los Angeles, in terms of motorisation: about 35 vehicles per kilometre. It’s estimated that the national agency – Federal Road Safety Commission – that collects revenue from that spring, which is rooted in Lagos State, smiles, every month, to the bank. It does so in an obvious admission that the Lagos metropolis is about the richest of such revenue chests in country.

Still, Fashola thinks quite rightly that – while, within the limits of available resources to his administration – he has striven, with some stubbornness of a clean lawyer, against the grain of politics of wasting tax-payers’ money, in favour of service, prudence and accountability in both fiscal and budgetary matters, the narrative of his administration’s laudable effort to meet the challenges of development excellence would have been a lot more readable; almost to the disarming of the critics of his administration. For a deedy Fashola, every State Executive Council meeting is an occasion to preach against flagitious defalcation of tax-payers’ money by any of the officials of his administration. All that in part because, in nearly two past decade, since Lagos lost to Abuja, as the seat of government, a great deal of decay has set in into the culture of maintenance of federal roads in the metropolis.

Worse still, the coming of the Federal Road Maintenance Agency has not helped matters. Each fiscal year, as a majority of those who see with the Fashola administration have observed, a gargantuan amount of money is voted for federal roads that are ever so busy, as those in the Lagos metropolis. And yet, the impression that is ever so given is that there’s so much corruption within the agency that federal roads are being left to decay: potholes are daily making them less easily motorable; the number of accidents on the roads is on the rise; at the price of smooth driving. And yet some lousy critics of the Fashola administration, would rather the Lagos State Traffic Management Agency (LASTMA) be so ubiquitous to prevent such unnecessary obstructions to easy flow of traffic, if only to save time and money – and help the attendant stress of painfully slow vehicular traffic. Why shouldn’t there be a corps of highway managers to control traffic on

federal highways within the Lagos metropolis; a response LASTMA, if you care? That is just one of the egregious instances of external ugliness and decay that appears calculated to besmirch Fashola’s credential in his attempt to meet the challenges of development excellence. Still, take a close look at the same federal expressways – Lagos-Abeokuta, Fadeyi-National Stadium, Tin Can Island-Mile Two, Anthony-Gbagada-Ifako-Berger, Race Course-Apapa, National Stadium-Ijora, via Breweies, Apongbon-National Theatre-Seven Up-Leventis, Adeniji Adele-Simpson Street, Iddo-Idumota, Osborne-Falomo, Race Course-Bonny Camp etc. – that were constructed some three decades ago, by the Obasanjo regime: virtually all the protective, aluminum railings, lamp posts and cables on them have been lost to criminals. The Third Mainland Bridge, which was constructed by the Babangida regime, is beginning to decay.

Even so, seldom is the public told by the police that they have arrested some of the individuals behind such heinous acts. The lesson that the Fashola administration should learn from the pilfering on federal roads, within the Lagos metropolis, is that there’s a need to always police the recently beautified state highways so that the interlocking paving stones on the curbs, the lamp posts etc. are not pilfered by lawless elements. It would be interesting to see how the Ministry of Infrastructure tackles this very aspect of its duties. But try to explain to the lousy elements, who revel in criticising the Fashola administration, that Alawusa has no police force of its own to shield all the major roads in the metropolis from the activities of criminals; that the protection of such crucial infrastructure does not, necessarily, fall within the ken of Alawusa – that is if the duties of Abuja and Ikeja are clearly spelt out in the former national capital – they’d rather block their ears as though they’ve been paid to start making some calculated political capital out of the rot – in perceived readiness for the next gubernatorial race.

While it is true that Fashola, as an individual, shuns empty and wasteful blitz in selling his administration to law-abiding Lagosians, one thing is pretty much imperative: a stepping up of the on-going state roads in the metropolis. It may interest Fashola’s critics – and one truly suspects that a majority of them are tax-dodgers – that his untiring effort to beautify the metropolis and reconstruct its numerous state roads is about the first time in nearly three decades, and it’s sure to peak in an uproarious and popular approval of the Action Congress administration by tax-payers and voters in the state.