Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s first term was almost entirely devoted to completing and initiating impactful and gigantic projects in line with the state’s master plan. His fidelity to plan and project execution successes were significant enough to fetch him a second term, despite the acrimonious infusion and interplay of ethnic politics. Thrown into the poisonous ethnic mix were a welter of religious politics and sprinklings of Lagos-for-Lagos campaigns. Mr Sanwo-Olu won the election on the strength of his projects and other achievements, relieved that after the shocking outcome of the Lagos presidential vote, which favoured the Labour Party (LP), he did not come to electoral grief. In his first term, he had governed cautiously, wary of offending diverse interest groups, whether ethnic, religious or elite. And it did not also matter whether the groups were upcoming or established celebrities and entertainers, or the youth class to which he, by orientation, age and probably background, belongs. His approach was not quite the model by which great leadership manifests; but at least he got a second term, despite his inability to develop, manage and empower his party into a great army of believers and activists.
Now, he must abandon his wary and excessively cautious leadership style, and must provide the sublime leadership that Lagos, a beguiling smorgasbord and melting pot, really needs. The state is religiously and ethnically complex, with the rich and poor traversing the city-state cheek by jowl. The state needs a different template of governance that is deep, decisive, firm, almost brutal but yet humane, and futuristic. The last presidential and governorship polls exposed the deep fissures underlying the state’s substructure and the molten magma of social and ethnic disharmony seething below the surface. In his inauguration address, Mr Sanwo-Olu, a naturally equanimous man, did not give any indication he was aware of those seething fractures, let alone be troubled by them. Just as his response to the EndSARS protest showed, he seems more inclined to ‘heal’ divisions than grapple with them in a way that shows his awareness of looming danger.
He has a second term now. He must quit the wariness that characterised his first term and the previous Akinwumi Ambode governorship. Lagos’ problems will not be assuaged by cautious and mellifluous words and displays, considering that migration to the state has picked up in inverse proportion to the mediocrity and retrogression of national leadership in the past 14 or 15 years. And since Lagos is not just a melting pot, but also a honey pot, migration into the state may not decline immediately; instead it may heighten, thereby diminishing or even neutralising the state’s best efforts. Mr Sanwo-Olu must, therefore, first recognise that fine words will not attenuate the state’s problems, nor would those who have laid constitutional and unfettered claims to Lagos be mollified by anything other than having their way as well as sustaining their pampered privileges. He must recognise that Lagos’ status as a megacity and aspiring multicultural state have been deployed in the past few decades as a tool of blackmail to compel the state to accommodate cultural, ethnic and political differences, regardless of their harmful effect on the state’s heritage.
Reassuringly, however, the state has, however, begun to rouse itself to confront the contradictions undermining its progress. Whether this awareness has anything to do with the governor is not entirely certain. But the state has begun to take the fight to celebrities who, despite failing in their civic duties, have tried to bend the state to their leprous worldview. After years of flaunting their wealth on social media, buying land and building houses, not to say insulting and ridiculing the state and its people and government, they are now being compelled to take up their responsibilities as taxpayers. The state should not relent. It is scandalous that for many years the state had failed to detect and expose drug barons living big in multiple houses in many choice estates, and it has taken the unsparing sleuthing of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) to expose and apprehend them. How could anyone buy a house or land in the state and not enter the state’s tax and security database so as to query his financial bona fides? Indeed, it should be impossible to even rent or lease property without being captured in the state’s tax and security databases. The laxity of years past needs to end.
It is not yet known where the initiative to make legislations to protect Lagos indigenes is coming from, whether from the executive or the legislature. Re-elected Speaker of the State House of Assembly, Mudashiru Obasa, referenced that legislative responsibility to indigenes when he won another term to preside over the legislature. So far, it is difficult to impeach his reasons. He should not downgrade that responsibility. Lagos-for Lagos was a potent campaign slogan directed against the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in the last elections, and clearly Lagosians have felt undone by waves of migrations into Lagos, not to say the convoluted politics of the past two decades or so. They have nowhere to go, unlike many of the vocal and entitled nouveau riche who hide behind the country’s unitary constitution to commit excesses. It is one thing to settle in Lagos, it is another thing to imbibe, respect and protect the state’s cultural and political worldview. Sadly, the ‘Lagos is no man’s land campaign’, a campaign that recrudesces at nearly every election cycle, has done grave injury to the Lagos psyche and continues to engender difficult and intractable problems between ethnic groups.
Already, critics, fearing where the indigene campaign could lead, including perhaps as far as the disenfranchisement witnessed in the last poll, have warned that the Assembly’s pro-indigene legislation would be unable to stand legal and constitutional tests. It is true that Lagos is unusual, with its development often attributed to the influx of diverse people who brought with them ingenuity, investments and large absorptive capacity. It is, however, unlikely that Speaker Obasa or any other Lagosian, assuming such a person can be inclusively and accurately defined, is proposing an insular and exclusionary regimen for the city-state. The Speaker made it clear they were talking of protecting the culture and heritage of Lagos as well as its indigenes. It does not necessarily imply a zero-sum game. The gain of one does not inescapably mean loss for the other. There is hardly any other state in Nigeria that has not retained its distinct identity, whether in the East, North, Middle Belt or South. And there is no state whose political, ethnic and even religious identity is not shielded in large measure. It is dismaying that even before the essentials of the proposed legislations are known, threats are being issued, shockingly but unsurprisingly by the superficial former LP candidate in the last Lagos governorship poll, Chinedu Rhodes-Vivour.
Mr Sanwo-Olu will have to contend with the proposed legislations. They will be drafted. And they will probably not match or take cognisance of his usual cautious approach to politics. He could have lost the elections had those whose umbilical cords were tied to Lagos not risen in his and Lagos’ defence. He must engage with the lawmakers in order to manage the legislations in line with the inclusiveness and progressive ideology of his party. He must be futuristic in his expectations, enough to coax whatever legislations are proposed to remain relevant for all time even if the APC should lose office. And the laws, while they must be clear in their objectives and unapologetic about what they set out to defend, must neither be poisonous to witch-hunt nor distasteful to exclude others who have enriched the state culturally and economically. But they must clearly serve for Lagosians as ramparts against domination and acrimonious miscegenation. The state must not bear the burden of a tedious and contradictory federal constitution that runs as a unitary system and still fails to protect regions and peoples, including their civilisations.
In opening its doors to all and sundry, and despite the gigantic and laudatory building projects all over the state, Lagos is now struggling with its identity. Teenagers operate Okada and keke business without regard to state laws, and are thus not captured in the tax net. The problem is only now being redressed. Meanwhile, transport unions have become a law unto themselves. In addition, months before elections, anyone from anywhere can on account of the country’s dysfunctional constitution register as a voter in the state, any state. The constitution allows it, but it ignores the fact that such a practice sows distrust and seeds of future conflict. The last polls nearly exploded into a paroxysm of ethnic rage in Lagos. It is, therefore, not an option not to do something. The objective conditions on the ground, sometimes falsely and inaccurately attributed to President Bola Tinubu’s alleged implacable hold on Lagos, predisposes the state to a future convulsion. Clearly, the constitution must be reworked to make it truly federal, and for peoples and states to have a sense of connection and exclusivity within a united Nigeria. The goals are not mutually exclusive. More importantly, it can be done.
If White Americans still nurse a nostalgic attachment to a time when their country was nearly lily-white, and many European countries have veered ultra-right to protect their identities, and the Chinese want Taiwan at all cost, and Russia wants Ukraine at any price, and Canada is temporarily banning non-Canadians (read Chinese) from buying properties, etc, it is important to understand why Lagos lawmakers may be seeking legal means to protect their people and heritage, regardless of the factors that made Lagos a megapolis, and notwithstanding the fact that Lagos is a state within Nigeria. The United States constitution is not a fitting role model. The US was founded on the ashes of the indigenous Red Indians. Australia and New Zealand were also built on the diminution and degradation of the aborigines. The Romans practiced the cataclysmic art of transplanting whole peoples as punishment. And the Assyrians transplanted foreigners into northern Israel thus creating half-Jew and half-gentile people called the Samaritans who were subsequently loathed by Jews. Identities are an irrevocable part of politics. They cannot be ignored; they need to be recognised and managed within the context of a reworked constitution that protects and guarantees rights of peoples as well as serves the cause of justice. Nigeria has not always had the capacity to anticipate future crises. The Lagos legislative plan serves as a reminder to everyone that the time to begin anticipating future interethnic and interreligious conflicts and doing something about them is now.
Tinubu, NASS elections and sceptics
The steadiness with which President Bola Tinubu has been assembling his team gives hope that Nigeria can in fact be redeemed. Eight advisers have just been announced, and their resumes show men and women of first-rate technocracy. Tangentially, too, the states have, almost by uncanny coincidence, elected into office first-rate men who, except in one or two impulsive cases, can be trusted to offer their states surefooted and competitive leadership. On the whole, after decades of national misadventure into predatory military rule, democracy appears in the long run to be capable of producing promising politicians and leaders far exceeding the best the military could ever give. Last week, the 10th National Assembly also elected its presiding officers, four gentlemen who are products of ingenious compromises and consensuses initially thought to be difficult to engender.
It is not certain why that feeling of hope and possibility lingers in the air; but somehow, Nigeria is being dragged away from the precipice which decades of misrule and entitlement had tethered it. Some critics wait for the other shoe to drop as far as the Tinubu administration is concerned, expecting that he would make egregious blunders costing him his reputation. Instead, he has given the public and the media enough bones to chew, enough policies to instigate their angst. Rather than basking in the euphoria of the moment, especially because of the generally lowered tension in the country and the pragmatic retreat from Sudan-like chaos and the nihilistic orgy of social media deviants imprecating everything noble and sensible and possible about Nigeria, a few critics have grumbled about how the administration was getting away with murder, so to speak. President Tinubu has sustained his innovations and political seductions, and has strangely also made the unusual and even emblematic NASS elections seem chic.
The Tinubu administration, despite being led by a consummate politician, must begin to reconcile itself with public deprecations of some of its dashing policies and programmes. However, such public deprecations will probably give way to optimism if the policies take on redemptive value: lower inflation, realistic and market-led foreign exchange rates, significant capital inflow, and quality education and health infrastructure, among other things. The president has had a knack for taking bold decisions in and out of office as Lagos governor, and he has shown a great predilection for tempting fate. He will hope that none of his major policies miscarry with telling consequences. He showed his hands early in the day by backing the quartet of presiding officers of the National Assembly, and they won handily after weeks of rigmarole and permutations. Yes, that support was bold and unflinching; but it could easily have crystallised the opposition against his administration and helped his enemies train their guns with precision on his position, even if that position was mounted on lofty ethical peaks.
It is remarkable that the president got away with that chutzpah of supporting and projecting candidates in the NASS election. It had seemed, curiously, that since the APC has a commanding lead in the Senate with 59 seats, the party would easily get Senators Godswill Akpabio and Barau Jibrin elected. And if they got bipartisan assent to swell that plurality to put the election soundly beyond doubt, that would indeed be a powerful statement. In the end, they got 63, with the other contender Sen. Abdulaziz Yari nearly pulling an upset with 46 votes. The race in the House of Representatives, where the ruling party did not fare too well in terms of numbers, seemed less certain, and pundits had predicted a herculean task before the APC. Surprisingly, despite the president showing his preference, and was indeed accused of trying to impose the Reps’ leadership, Hon Tajudeen Abbas secured an overwhelming victory with 353 votes. His opponents are apoplectic.
However, the Senate race should give the APC reason to ponder on the catastrophe it escaped by a whisker. Sen Akpabio, a Christian, needed to be elected to indicate clearly that the party did not harbour an Islamic agenda, especially in view of its Muslim-Muslim presidency. Why that altruistic and elementary fact failed to persuade those who voted for Sen Yari is hard to fathom. Had Sen Yari been elected as senate president, it would have created a lasting, destabilising and debilitating problem for the ruling party. It seemed Sen Yari’s supporters were more persuaded by the desire of the North to secure political visibility at a time, according to their argument, when the South dominated the three arms of government, to wit, executive, legislative and judicial branches. But under President Muhammadu Buhari, the North also for a long stretch of time dominated the three arms.
Reassuringly, overall, politics in Nigeria has become sophisticated, and the quality of the presidency, state houses, and legislature at all levels has risen significantly. Nothing will henceforth be taken for granted, and even the president, with all his depth and courage, will have to be on his toes to stay ahead of competition, both at the policy and politics levels. His initial successes have been entrancing; however, those early successes make his job and his future all the more precarious but infinitely more enthralling.
