Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) of Lagos State spoke with Sam Omatseye, Mobolaji Sanusi and Femi Macaulay on a wide range of issues:
IF you go round Lagos State in the past couple of months, we have been seeing commissioning, road work and all that, the sense one gets is that you are in a hurray – are you under some kind of legacy pressure?
There is no legacy pressure on me. I see this as an opportunity for simply what it is: to serve. As I have told people, there is a job here and there is an office here. I have taken the job and in that sense the job is about looking after people; people who put so much trust and hope in your abilities. It is a job that will never finish. Just as you complete one policy or solve one problem, many more will open up. That is why the motto of our government, which I developed, is that the only reward we would get for any hardwork we do is more work. I see also missed opportunities over time and therefore, there is so much to catch up on. Because it is a human problem; people are still procreating and those who are here already are saying it’s tough, so we can’t lie at ease. At this time, it is not just about me anymore, I am trying to ensure that whoever takes over from me has even a better start than I did and can take off from where I left. There are so many things that engage my time: ten-year projects that we are tidying up, getting ready. If possible, we start them and hand them over; if it is not possible, the blue print is there, the financing is in place or almost concluded. That is as best as I can explain it, there would be no lying at ease until the last day.
But there would be some projects or some ideas that you think obsess you more than others as you turn the corner to the last two years…
You could never define the achievements of your tenure by projects. I think that if anything has driven me more, it is the idea that change is possible. That hope can be restored and once there is hope, it is a most potent weapon for development. I think that at this time, I am happy and I can say that we have restored hope. The people of Lagos believe again. I was telling my colleagues in the executive council meeting that I was watching a programme where there was some TV coverage of the road project from Mile 12 to Ikorodu and they spoke to one respondent and he said: “The road is good, but you know what? We don’t want roads again, we want rail.” And I said to myself, now that is it! People believe that it can happen, they could not ask for rail 14 years ago when there was no bitumen. So, that for me was a defining moment because once they can aspire to it, the work is half done. You can sit down with them and say this is what will take us there. These are the sacrifices.
I have been fascinated by this Progressive Governors’ Forum, why would you call yourself a progressive governor and what is your idea of progressivism?
The life of human beings must progress and the progress is measured by the amount of social goods and the happiness that social good brings. In that sense, if you look at the trade mark of all of us today who are members of the Progressive Governors’ Forum, from where we started, whatever developments existed, we have added to it. That on its own qualifies us. What we have added is what is behind us. We are redefining our journeys as we get to what was our initial goal. It is a never-ending cycle of development. For me, that is the underlining theme and the mantra of Eko o nibaje -Lagos you must continue to prosper – and the prosperity of Lagos has rubbed off not only on our party but on our nation. Some of the things we have done have become benchmarks and starting points for other states. They have taken what we have done and improved upon it in some cases or applied it as it suited their needs. But it is not just the Nigerian state, it’s even African nations who are coming here to understudy, to share with us their own experiences as well and say we see something here.
Does that mean that given the fact that you have done a lot in terms of development that has been hailed by those who ordinarily would not be called progressives, that the whole idea of progressives has become difficult by definition?
Unfortunately, perhaps this throws up the question of an ideology. There are very few things that are new in our world so when you say hailed, is probably because we built it first because all of us are responding to the same stimulus – the stimulus of service by our people. How quickly you find the answer is a matter of commitment and passion. There was a traffic management problem in this state before and my predecessor said “you know what, let’s start LASTMA.” Starting LASTMA was only the beginning, the project continues till today because the men have to be retrained to deal with new challenges, their conditions of service have to be reviewed to inspire, their engagements with the citizens have to be redefined to make them citizen-friendly and even when I leave, the traffic management problem will not stop. But beyond LASTMA, we have added a traffic radio; we are looking at multimodal transports, so those ideas are not new. There has been a traffic radio across the world before, it probably didn’t appeal to someone, it appealed to us and we picked it and there is more to come.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, in over six years of governance of Lagos State, you have become the governor of example and legacies have been ingrained. I am much more concerned with the issue of housing in Lagos State. I want to know the situational checks being put in place to make sure that long after you must have left power, mortgage system will not distort the entire housing policy that you have fought with so much vehemence and commitment?
I don’t anticipate that it will be a programme without difficulties because mortgages for me mean a new way of life, so it is not the houses that are the problem; it is the attitudinal change that must come with mortgages. Why I think that mortgages will be the solution is, first, they have worked in other societies to increase human productivity, to inspire people to work, to build their economies and also to give citizens the dignity of shelter and the dignity to resist temptation. There is no society where the stimulus and the scourge of corruption do not exist but if citizens are so vulnerable, their threshold to resist is low. I am convinced without a doubt that with mortgages, you can strike a decisive blow at corruption because human needs start from food, shelter and clothing. Even if people don’t all get houses, the idea that it can be my turn is a great impetus and I am going to pursue it. That said, I don’t know any other society where the middle class and the poor buy houses as if they are going to buy yam. They do so by being given an opportunity to work and during their productive lifecycle, they pay off. Now what does that mean? Your job becomes tied to your roof, if you lose your job, you will lose your roof and therefore you cannot joke with that job. So you cannot then come to Lagos citizens in 5/10 years’ time and say you didn’t get services in four days because he knows that the pay cheque first goes to pay for mortgage. Let me give you an example: I have had cause to travel abroad to meet some friends and relations; if you are lucky, they will come and receive you at the airport and drop you at home and go straight to work. Here, when we go to receive them, we shut down for the whole day, that’s not productivity. Hundreds of thousands of people are working there supplying sands, woods, nails, feeding the workers, companies who do contracts are keeping their employees at work and a whole economy is moving. On one construction site alone where we are building, just on one hectare, we had 1008 people working there. The real impact will come post-construction. Those homes have to be furnished; curtains, carpets, household appliances. For me it is a winner for the economy. Would there be challenges? There are already challenges. We have decided because we see cynicism of our people. The easiest thing to do was to sell those houses and say I have done housing but I don’t choose the easy way. It is easy to build houses but it is more difficult to provide homes. Many governors have done this in the past, who buy the houses? It is not the people they were intended for. The people they were intended for end up being tenants because they can’t come up with the money. This time around we are building with tax payers’ money; we are not borrowing to build, so you must show me that you pay tax before you are eligible. You must show me that you are a resident before you are eligible, so go and register under the LASRA. I am building for residents and tax payers. It is only fair! We are saying this time, as much as possible, government doesn’t want to be involved in the process, so we are going online. We have set up the website (we haven’t released the URL until we are ready to launch) so that when you click the ‘enter’, one of the things you see is a mortgage calculator.
It won’t crash?
Even if it does, it is part of the challenges that we would have to deal with. A mortgage calculator that enables you to see where the houses are, calculate the choice of the house that you want, match it to your salary and you will know immediately whether you are eligible or not. We have set thresholds and it gives you an automatic number on your form when you now download the form. The most likely interaction you will be having with us is when you come to submit your forms and you meet our mortgage counsellors who will take you through how to take a mortgage because if you default we will repossess. We mean business! We have set up housing rules, arbitration rules for mortgages, so it is not going to go to court. Twenty one days we are out. We would give you a reasonable time for people who fall on bad times and sometimes it may be that if you take a 3-bedroom house and your income bracket drops, you don’t lose your entire house, we can move you to a 2-bedroom house or we can move you to one- bedroom house. It is only the one-bedroom house people, if they default, we can’t help because we don’t have a half bedroom house. But recovery has been critical to the provision of homes because government alone can’t build all the homes. Private sector must see reasons to build and if the system doesn’t recover, it’s a disincentive to investment. If you default, it means that you are denying other tax payers who are waiting because the recovery curve that we see – we are giving you a 10-year mortgage and we see now that with what we have put inside, in another six years, I would have been gone. The threshold is that the system would have recovered enough to stand on its own without any more government intervention. It’s taken me four years to do this and it is still not finished, that’s why we haven’t started allocation but we are very close; those are the reasons behind it. We can’t continue to complain about corruption if we don’t tackle the root causes. That’s why I have said on occasions that what we see as corruption is the manifestation of a deeper problem of needs and wants and desperation.
Have you considered the serious issue of unemployment that is much more relevant to mortgage system. Comparatively, you know the high level of unemployment in Nigeria and save for the civil service, there is a high turnover in the employment market. People get employed today, by tomorrow they are out of job. If such a person gets a mortgage, what are the plans of your government knowing full well that by 2015 your successor, if he does not believe in the policy then that will be the end?
We are not infinite in our knowledge but we consult a lot. There are almost 30 people who worked with me on this project. I think only about 10 of them are in government. We meet at least once in a month – we have been meeting like that for about four years. We are going also to small businesses; we are the promoters of small businesses, self-employed people. So, apart from people who have salaries, people will qualify by showing us an income stream and that again helps us to formalise the economy because we must see your profit and loss, no matter how small your business. So, the woman even in the Oyingbo market, once she gets support to put together her numbers, we would be able to determine that you are eligible for the house or, wait, you can’t afford it because you are going to default. Is there any society that has provided homes for all of its people? I don’t know of any! We want to open a door and a ladder to prosperity. In any event, people are living in rented homes, they have paid rents for almost 15 years in some cases, they lose their jobs, they lose their homes, and they have no equity. Our system is going to take you to a place where you have a home, you will have equity once you begin to pay. In the unlikely event that you lose your job and we have to sell your house, you will go with equity what you have put in, except for the cost of administration that we would deduct. You know what would have happened? That house would have appreciated in value, so if we pay you off, you don’t lose anything. So a house built 10 years ago, put on the market 10 years later will have a capital acquisition, that is how the system becomes self-sustaining. Whether my successor will like it or not, it is not the responsibility of the servant of the people to always dictate the menu for them, it is a social contract. It is the people who say on the basis of what it offers them that ‘oh this is what we want’ and housing will be a topical agenda in every society that I know coming into elections. As I have said, this is no longer about me. If it is, we would sell all the houses and go. It is about the next thing.
Housing is a major challenge, evidently; could you identify other fundamental megacity challenges specific to Lagos and the possible solutions?
Every problem here is a mega problem. I tell some of my colleagues that given the size of my population, if they have headaches, I have migraine. You see all you need to do really is what I do from time to time whether when I am flying in from Abuja or whether I am taking off and landing from a plane. The first thing I do is to look across Lagos and see how wide it is and it keeps my feet on the ground so there is no time to lie at ease. The problems can be solved, if they can’t all be solved, they can be managed. If flying does anything for me, it is a reality check for me. It is when I see how expansive, built and so dense that Lagos is. It just reminds me that this job will never finish.
What are the fundamental challenges?
The fundamental challenge is to make human beings happy, that’s all.
In specific terms?
You can’t isolate one for the other. Let’s go to unhappiness: for a family, unhappiness may simply be defined by the fact that a man lost a baby during childbirth. So if I put in a primary health care system that makes sure that children arrive safely, then that means that there is happiness in that home. For another family, happiness may be defined by the fact that their children can’t pay school fees in private schools, so if I put up a public school and say come for free, I have provided happiness in that home. For some, some of those problems are solved, it is only how they can drive their Lexus without feeling bumps and I do the road. They will be happy with me and with our government and our party. For some, it may be that their children have sat down at home after graduating from school so if we put in our agric programme and turn them into farmers or admit them into LASTMA or BRT operators or use our microfinance scheme to provide taxis for them and they are making like 200, 000 naira, that’s happiness, as far as they are concerned. If our street-lighting policy now enables night clubs and restaurants to open and young people can go to work at night, put some money in their pockets and go home. Have you ever been robbed before? I have been.
Outside office?
Yes, outside office! The notion now that there is a police force that is supported by this government that is able to patrol, that some streets are now lit up, even though not all are lit up, is a measure of happiness. It is an unending definition. What works for one, doesn’t work for the other. For some people, happiness is defined by the fact that they can now process their building permit quicker. In January to June this year, we issued 706 building permits. In the run up to Governor Tinubu’s election in 2003, one of my colleagues said ‘look, I don’t like your boss but I am going to vote for him. By building the courts, he has given me a platform to earn a living. The cases are moving faster so I can build my clients.’ That is happiness for him.
Going back to housing, we had a discussion probably in your first year in office. You talked about an integrated approach to housing and it was quite ambitious. It looked like the real thing you wanted to do at that time, the way you spoke in that conversation about how you have a house, you have a market, you have jobs, it is just like building a community around the house. Looking back, it looked like a long time ago, did you expect that it would take you this long for you to come round to this or were there some distractions?
There were setbacks in the plan as we went on. At the time I was talking to you, we were borrowing money at 10 percent. The exchange rate was 112 or 118, all of those dynamics have changed but what has not changed is my determination that I will not give up. It was something we planned with the banks. By the time we were going to implement the plan, they couldn’t do it again so I went back to the drawing board: “Gentlemen, how are we going to do this?” They said it wasn’t doable and I said, well that is in your own dictionary. If the banks can’t do it, we will. So, what did we start doing? We started redesigning, we settled for a 12-bedroom block – one 2- and 3-bedroom on each floor, we standardised. We settled for roof types, door type and colour. The biggest problem we are having is taking time to finish the houses and again we already have our team working. We are also developing a simultaneous programme where over time government will stop building and the private sector will now start building and government will buy and give it to the citizens on a mortgage.
That’s an important point you have made about your approach to the challenge of developing a mortgage housing project, these impediments you faced; does that give you an insight into why in this democracy and this unpredictable economy, governors and even federal ministers have not been able to carry on with a lot of projects around the country?
Well, I honestly don’t know. I can’t speak for them but I do know that the business of government after developmental stage requires a lot of micro managements. We are not yet at the point where you can free up things and expect them to run. We may have to push but ultimately that will be the ideal and we are reaching that threshold and that is why I keep referring to Sanusi’s questions that what we are trying to do to build now is an action government rather than action governor – getting people involved, giving them responsibilities. Like our next 2004 days, I’m not going out on that day, we are breaking up the team: “You run this government with me, go and explain to people what we are doing, am not talking this time around.” And they’ve done it before and they’ve done it well. But I don’t think that yet we have addressed our developmental challenges with the seriousness and the introspection and the determination that is still requisite. We are distracted by peripheral things. I really don’t work in that government but I see that some unimportant things fly to very high altitudes. Those are things that potentially have distracting consequences and time is lost in the process.
At a point in your administration, the Mile 12 market was shut down by the ministry of the environment and there was no inflow of tomatoes and the likes. Prices of essential household stuffs that usually come from the north went up. I have learnt so much about your Agric ministry’s exploits, what exactly have you done in terms of agriculture and in terms of making Lagos State sustainable and self-sufficient in food production?
I think the point to understand first is that stoppage of food vendors in bringing vegetables to Lagos had nothing to do with Mile 12 market. They were complaining about multiple tolls from state boundaries from the north to the south, that was the cause of the problem. But for us, it was a wake-up call that we were dependent and that is where we started. Can we grow vegetables? How much land do we have? We can’t compete with that part of the country in terms of food production and they can’t compete with us in other areas as well. Our land for example has more commercial value as real estate than as farming land. In terms of land size, we are just 3775 square kilometres, which is one quarter of Ogun State. We are the smallest state in the federation in terms of land size but that does not mean that we don’t have some areas of comparable advantage because of our soil. Vegetables, poultry, fishing, cassava, rice are areas, but because we don’t have the land, so it is to start to do something rather than just tingling your tongue. When you talk about failures and impossibility, I don’t accept them, let’s just start doing something. From zero, today by January in a few days’ time when we switch on our latest hatchery, we would be producing 150, 000 eggs per day, multiply that by 365 days. We are now producing 10, 000 live chickens every fortnight from zero, virtually. We were cultivating 20 hectares of land before; we are now cultivating over a 1000 hectares of rice. We have improved yield from one ton per hectare to two tons per hectare. Can we feed ourselves in the entirety? No! As we are doing this, we are working with other states also to eliminate those tolls which have not led to improved relationships. Somebody sent me a text recently that the successes we are making in Agric, is it not going to threaten Mile 12? So I had to be reassuring him because he is a stakeholder in Mile 12. What we are producing here is not going to solve all our needs but it gives us a situation where there is an emergency during the period of these things, we can look after ourselves; citizens are not without some help. We can’t just be helpless; I refuse to surrender to any situation, I must find a way. Perhaps, in that sense, to explain to you, not just only are we cultivating our lands, we bought farmlands outside Lagos. I have a farm now in Osun that I bought; the governor is still going to give me land. Ogun has given me land, I am planting rice there, Oyo is still processing its own. I think we have gotten Ekiti (I am not sure). What is that going to do? We would be planting there, using local people there. We are creating a transportation business, a packaging business because the food is going to come back here. I have asked my brothers too in Katsina and all of them; I am still waiting for their response. We have a farm land in Abuja we have acquired, we are going to develop, because the land I am told would be very good for bananas and snail-raising and all of that. If they can build liaison houses here, I can have farms in their state.
You have taken some tough decisions in governance: you cleared Oshodi and most parts of Lagos. You were able to handle properly the problems of the NURTW, Okada and transportation, those to me were some of the most turbulent periods because it directly affected the downtrodden, what is the toughest decision you have ever taken as a governor? Initially at the start of your government, people would say you are a technocrat who was more interested in governance but now you have time for political engagements, what do we expect from you? Reframing the first question: how do you reconcile a tough decision with progress in a democracy?
I think the bench mark must be what is the purpose of the decision? As I have said, our decision making here has been subjected to only one test – will it bring greater good to the greatest possible number? Will it bring happiness? Not everybody will be pleased with us, at least not in the short run. As you said, that I cleared Oshodi, I didn’t clear Oshodi. Oshodi was the euphemism for a logjam, it was for crime, filth, it was also the sore of our nation. That was what anybody who came to Nigeria saw first. It was the first cut, it was the deepest and it wasn’t the best. If my primary responsibility is to protect lives and property and to give happiness; people who were travelling at 11 used to leave home by 6pm, is that happiness? That was only one side. Many lives have been lost in Oshodi to robbery, many young women because daughters had been raped and the lower end and the highest end of the society – everybody was affected by Oshodi. The people in GRA in Ikeja were telling me that they were going to leave. The stench, the vermin rats, rodents were moving into their homes. Go and look at the property values in GRA before we intervened in Oshodi and look at the properties values today. They were going to sell their properties and move to Lekki and add to the congestion. We were looking for how to decongest the place, we came up with some designs going to cost about 16 billion, but the design was to put the market out and we said, this can’t be the solution, so we cancelled it. One day I said, you know what? This is management, I know Oshodi very well. My grandmother owned property there, I used to work there. I said we can clear this place and then we started studying the place. We sent teams out to give us the movement pattern: what was causing the problem, to study the refuse deposit; we looked at the crime dates at the police station there. It took six months, it was a multidisciplinary engagement. I think from about 16 billion when we looked at the maintenance, vehicles, cleaning, hiring, tractors, it came to less than a billion and we provided the answer. Was there pain? Yes! We found out the traders used to come in on Sunday night or Monday morning and they slept there for a whole week and they would leave. Some came from as far as Cotonou. What is the purpose of all of these? We studied the problem; we understood it and we knew that our work was not going to end just by clearing it. Till today, there is a mobile patrol team of vehicles there, every one kilometre. So from Mosalashi to the airport junction is about 10 kilometres. I made sure I pass there from time to time to see who is on his beat. We discipline a lot of people who have left their beats. Over the years we have to replace those vehicles. Now we have CCTV cameras there, we are watching movements. Those people who are displaced, their market is now finished, I am going to hand over the markets. You may argue it took so long – well chicken and egg! But I think that if there was a pole today, a road that was difficult to pass for almost 30 years started to flow. The impact is that we released pressure on Ikorodu Road. Ikorodu Road would have collapsed by now. When Lagos-Ibadan Expressway failed, they started coming in there. That was what accelerated the deterioration. Now the place is lit up, you can walk there at night, the road is not abusing us again but it is not finished. I still want to light up from Oshodi right to Oworonshoki to link up to third mainland. The federal government says it is their road, that they have awarded it; I hope they do it. For me, it doesn’t matter who does it, give it to the people, that’s all.
