A journey that has a beginning…

A journey that has a beginning must have an end, says a Yoruba proverb. Another says it is not the beginning that matters but the ending. For the first time in recent times a governor of Oyo State has served two full terms of eight years. This is in itself some record of a sort. Ajimobi deserves our congratulations for this feat . By all yardsticks the governor has done well. Of course he could have done better, all things being equal. He definitely has improved the road infrastructure of not only Ibadan but Oyo State as a whole . Some of the network of roads are still under construction. One hopes the in-coming governor, Seyi Makinde, will not abandon them as it is the tradition of new administrations in Nigeria. The Bashorun and Iwo roads in Ibadan and the Ibadan – Iseyin roads come readily to mind  as unfinished projects. I suppose the lack of money made it impossible for Ajimobi to contemplate building of fly overs at the intersection of Ring road and Molete roads and intersections at Alesinloye and Abeokuta road.

The Abeokuta   Road from Dugbe up to NNPC depot should have been dualised  even though a federal road within Ibadan. Ibadan as a whole needs urban renewal  and transformation from what Canadian professor  Farley called the “biggest slum I have seen “ into a modern maga-city and the down town areas around Gbagi and Old Lebanon streets need up grading. In the good old days a government was judged not only in its infrastructural performance but also on provision of water since water is life but these days every home takes care of itself by digging a wells or boreholes to provide water for the use of the families living in them. This has been my experience in Ibadan in the last thirty five years.

I have on this column asked why Ibadan goes to bed at 7 pm with the dark streets abandoned since there are no street lights. In most countries of the world there is what is known as the night economy of entertainment, catering, cinemas, discos,  shopping, street food, taxis, operas, stage plays, football matches, boxing matches and Sundry other things that make the night tick. It seems 12 hours of the twenty four hour day cycle is wasted in Ibadan and of course in Nigeria as a whole. This means we can easily double the size of the economy and provide jobs for young people if we seriously make provision for night economy in Nigeria. It has to start some where. There is a bit of this in Abuja and Lagos . Ibadan of my youth used to have it but alas not any more. We must not surrender to insecurity. Why do we have the police if honest people cannot move around in the night .Lagos under Raji Fashola and Akinwunmi  Ambode tried very hard to resuscitate Street lighting with only considerable success. My advice to their successors is that they must continue trying. This is also my advice to the coming Governor in Oyo. Please light up the major cities. When there is light darkness and the evil that comes with it will disappear. If we don’t do this the creeping crime of kidnapping will spread to the cities“. Oru o meni owo “ that is “Night has no respect for dignitaries“ but that is when it is dark !

Ajimobi scored himself high on education. I disagree. Yes he has tried to reorganize secondary school administration and has made some physical improvement in some schools like his alma mater Lagelu Grammar School. I went to my late brother Edward’s school , Government College  Ibadan which used to be a pride to Nigeria. It remains disheveled, disorderly and disorganized the way the late Chief Bola Ige and his misdirected UPN policies left it by turning boarding houses in the school into independent day schools. My old school, Ibadan Grammar School wears a sombre look. It is at least better than the way it looked five years ago. I wish Ajimobi had taken a leaf from his brother Rauf Aregbesola, former Governor of Osun State in building modern and revolutionary primary and secondary schools. His so called model secondary schools are caricatures of what Aregbesola did  all over  Osun  and not just in a few places, The Ibadan Polytechnic seemed to have been abandoned by the Ajimobi government. They were practically on strike most of the time. I sponsored a young man for his HND in engineering. A course of four years has lasted six years because of all kinds of industrial action and as I write we are still going there to beg for the certificate of graduation . How can a government that could not take care of one polytechnic upgrade Shaki and Igboora campuses to full fledged polytechnics? How are they going to be funded?

Ladoke Akintola University Of Technology is jointly owned by Oyo and Osun states . There were moves before to let Oyo alone own the university . A rational solution to the problem of joint ownership was sacrificed on the altar of politics . Osun has more than it can bite and chew in its multi campus  Osun State University. It is simply unreasonable for Oyo State to think Osun State  can adequately contribute to the running of Ladoke Akintola University. Oyo should declare unilateral independence for LAUTECH  and save everybody the embarrassment of a university that has the infrastructure for all the disciplines including a magnificent teaching hospital in Ogbomosho but is made to lag behind its contemporaries because of politics of ownership . Let Osun State inherit whatever is in Oshogbo which can then be merged with a OSUN State University. Cutting this Gordian knot will be in the best interest of the two sisterly states. I honestly do not see a need for Ajimobi’s technical university in Ibadan when there is a full fledged faculty of engineering in LAUTECH. In any case ab initio LAUTECH was supposed to be a university with bias for science and Technology. If it was not doing what it was supposed to do the solution is not starting a new university with its expensive administrative paraphernalia. Luckily not much development has taken place there. It should simply be merged with Oyo State owned LAUTECH.

One of the things that amazes me is the fact that governance in Nigeria is largely divorced from relationship with academia.   Was Ajimobi using the expertise and experience of people in the university of Ibadan to solve some of the problems of Oyo State? With the university of Ibadan and the  concentration  of knowledge there one hardly sees their intellectual input into governance. What is the purpose of research which makes no impact on  its immediate environment and the wider  national society. In the first Republic the western region sought second opinions from academics after the politicians and bureaucrats must have advised government. It does not seem to happen any more.  I can categorically affirm that the land use law in Lagos was as a result of what some Canadians working with the Nigerian – Canadian chamber of commerce of which I was president  suggested to Tinubu, ran it and after a year the secretary of our chamber began successfully operating the scheme which yearly brings billions into the coffers of Lagos government. I personally never benefited from it but I can see what a modified form of it can do for  Oyo State. The point here is that Lagos was open to advice.

Oyo State should be financially buoyant if everybody pays taxes and if the state adopts and adapts the Lagos type of land use charge. We can put a ceiling of say N250;000 for commercial houses and N100;000 for homes not occupied by their owners and rented out . Then we have categories of rural and urban, low density and high density and  the various GRA and commercial institutions. All these can be worked out with stake holders in such a way that the taxes do not become onerous. The point is that the people must own the  government.

When I was young those of us who grew up in Ibadan did not defer to our friends from Lagos. But now every young man wants to go and live in Lagos because Ibadan is considered dull , slow, dirty and uninteresting. This was not the way Ibadan was vis a vis Lagos . Of course the  creation of states robbed Ibadan of material and Human Resources but Ibadan remains and will continue to remain the center of Yoruba culture and politics and we cannot allow it to decline. The rate of development can only be accelerated by good governance based on consultations and raising of revenues.”  Eniyan laaso mi” translates roughly into “wealth is in the people “ and Oyo State has millions of good people . This is going to be the challenge of the new Oyo Governor. He must avoid the kind of self- imposed distraction Ajimobi imposed on himself by fixing what was not broken in his diluting of traditional monarchy in Ibadan. Oyo State with the conurbations of Ibadan, Ogbomosho and Oyo should never be poor because people create wealth because they are the greatest factor of production if well harnessed and mobilized. Finally, without peace there can be no development, Ajimobi ensured there was peace in Oyo State and that is no mean achievement.