By Bukola Ajisola
SIR: Kudos for the Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu knack for speed and quality in road infrastructure delivery. However, infrastructure globally, is wholesome.
It is high time the governor shifted his attention away from road construction to the industrial quadrant.
What can Lagos produce to make the league of export driven economies? There is need for Lagos to begin to scale down her debt burden and apply her Internally Generated Revenue to boosting ventures. Lagos has the capacity to build at least one hospital that can be a reference point for medical tourism in Africa.
The state has the comparative advantage to compete with the federal government in revenue metrics but the major means of achieving that is left to lie redundant and held in perpetuity by a few class of bourgeois.
Why must land be allowed to be held in an undeveloped state spanning the entire tenure of the leasehold?
Some of these leases have expired with owners hoping to transfer the interest to their children who have no idea what to do with them other than sell them and repatriate the funds abroad to service an illusory lifestyle.
Lagos has three assets more realistic and more enduring than crude oil which is LAND, LAND and LAND but the approach of past governors including the incumbent on land use is overtly perfunctory.
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Why must a state like Lagos be allowed to out-borrow other less endowed states when it can afford an abandoned federal secretariat sitting on acres of premium land to be in disuse for decades, leaves a moribund post office on acres of land on Bourdillon road, looks away from abandoned bungalows on several acres of land in old Ikoyi that can put Lagos in a global map of smart cities like UAE? These assets are left to house hoodlums and the lunatic for want of better description.
I doubt if there is any city the world over that is this laidback in optimal use of land resources.
For instance Falomo Post Office could be re-developed on a Joint Venture partnership between Lagos and federal government to create a multi-billion-naira investment hub.
What about Falomo shopping centre? What about National Theatre and a host of other sprawling assets left in callous obsolescence?
There is no excuse whatsoever for this negligence as long as the Federal Minister of Works and Housing remains a Lagos former governor since the inception of this administration.
So long as Lagos refuses to take her place as the poster boy for the national renaissance the way California has done in the USA, Lagos remains principally complicit in the silhouette of ineptitude keeping Nigeria behind.
- Bukola Ajisola, bukymany@yahoo.com
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