First, we must observe that Lagos is a mega city with the associated mega-city problems similar to those you find in New York, Los Angeles, Cairo, Sao Paulo or Mumbai. It attracts all manners of people with deviant behaviour. In nearly all cases, most immigrants are out to eke out a living by taking advantage of the opportunities the city offers. In pursuant of their objectives, they often exhibit deviant behaviours. The immigrants despite their lack of sense of commitment to their host communities often exhibit sense of entitlement. But something positive has always come out of productive engagements between successive past Lagos State governments and the urban poor.
As Governor, Jakande doubled the number of schools in Lagos, introduced free education and built low income houses. Former Governor Tinubu expanded the free education and free health programmes building General Hospitals in nearly all the Local Government Areas. He integrated the once notorious ‘Molue’ drivers through Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) ownership structure or as members of LASTMA. Fashola sustained this by turning the urban miscreants known as ‘area boys’ to environmentalists. There is no doubt the ongoing encounter between ‘Danfo’ drivers and their senior partners LASTMA, whose members according to Mike Akinyuli, a security consultant, own about 70% of the buses we see on the roads’, will produce identical result.
The current encounter between Ambode’s government, ‘danfo’ drivers, LASTMA, their senior partners, and The Economist is about Lagos traffic gridlock which has become a source of nightmare to Lagos motorists.
First, long before The Economist’s report on state of insecurity and traffic in Lagos, Governor Ambode, a man said to be very cerebral, had during a retreat for his new team, identified ‘traffic congestion as a daily challenge with highly undesirable socio-economic and environmental effects, increasing stress and pollution levels which reduce several productivity’ for Lagosians. As a response he was also quoted to have said the state was ‘set to introduce a world-class traffic information and management system to drastically change the face of Lagos traffic’.
But The Economist says ‘the increased traffic gridlock was due to the governor’s new traffic policies which has encouraged a culture of impunity in Nigeria’s most populous city’, and went to aver that the policy was ‘being sabotaged by the traffic controllers banned from impounding cars’. In the opinion of the newsmagazine, that was a failure of governance.
The government has spent the greater part of last week engaged in needless defence describing the report as “reckless”, “slanderous” and “ill-conceived.” But Joe Igbokwe, the Lagos APC spokesman admitted that the governor’s directive that the traffic managers be more humane was abused and sabotaged by the traffic officers leading to traffic snarls. He added the governor’s expression of ‘deep concern about the feedback from Lagosians whose worries range from security, traffic gridlock and environment itself’; it was obvious the new policies designed to alleviate the sufferings of Lagos residents were yet to yield dividends.
As at the time of the report, ‘danfo’ drivers had turned the highways into bus stop and traffic officers were nowhere to be seen leaving motorists at the mercy of lawless ‘danfo’ drivers. The only thing the governor and his team can therefore quarrel with was The Economist’s conclusion that the shaky take off of the policy amounts to failure of governance. And in this regard, the magazine is entitled to its opinion despite Lagos State’s argument that such conclusion did not indicate application of sufficient intellectual rigour. That the governor said “We are repairing potholes and we are deploring more men to ensure the free flow of traffic”, or that “We have already hit the ground running’, did not preclude The Economist from expressing its cynicism or oblige it to share the governor’s optimism until those efforts bring forth dividends.
It is as if the government expects sympathy from The Economist even after its own admission, that ‘recalcitrant traffic officers refused to carry out a directive by their employer”, or expects the defeated PDP looking for relevance not to exploit the current traffic crisis to declare triumphantly that “the worsening traffic situation in the state is a reflection of Governor Ambode’s inability to manage the state and a reflection of his unpreparedness to lead”.
Since it is not likely that Lagosians will write off the governor they elected shortly after constituting his team based on jaundiced report of a magazine or comments of opposition looking for relevance, the government should be more concerned with finding answers to the deviant behaviour of ‘danfo’ drivers. Why for instance will a ‘danfo’ driver with full compliments of passengers take one way while oncoming vehicles scramble to avoid head on collision?
Asiwaju Bola Tinubu who initiated the laudable LASTMA scheme back in 2000 had initially thought some of the deviant motorists especially “Molue drivers” were sick and doomed inmates of psychiatric hospitals. Not a few I was told, were forced to visit such hospitals. Fashola saw heavy unreasonable fines as deterrence. An exasperated ex-Governor Fashola once reminded the LASTMA traffic officers that their primary responsibility was to make the traffic flow and if impounding cars will derail that objective, the deviant motorist should be let off the hook. But both the ‘dreamer and the actualiser’, by applying inputs of intellectuals changed their perception at the end.
It might be useful for the Ambode’s government to borrow a leaf from the findings of Vidal de la Blache a French Cultural Geographer and Lucien Febvre, a French Historian who in their theories of ‘environmental determinism and environmental possibilism,’ tell us that man is the master of his environment. Nature advises us of options available before us which we exploit to our own advantage or ignore at our own peril and eternal damnation. The ‘danfo’ driver is a thinking animal and not a caged goat. If he needs to make 30 runs between Ojota and Berger bus top, a distance of about five kilometres which should naturally take about 10 minutes in order to meet his obligation to the owner of the bus and gets his own extra to take care of his family as one who survives on a subsistence primitive consumption, he is not likely going to spend two hours on 10 minutes journey. As a rational being, he will look for alternative and that may include taking one-way if he can get away with it.
If however we think he is not mad, but on a suicide mission, his passengers who held on to their breath as he manoeuvres dangerously facing an oncoming vehicle are not about to commit mass suicide. Among the passengers, we probably have a young nursing mother scheduled to pick her four months toddler from a day-care centre that has a closing time; a newscaster programmed to be on air at a scheduled time or a poor miracle-seeker rushing to meet evening service in one of the numerous churches dotting slum areas of Lagos who will fit the identity of a man apprehended by the governor driving on ‘one way’ and claimed he was rushing to church.
‘Danfo’ drivers, their LASTMA senior colleagues, share the same fate with peddlers of fake products on the streets of urban centres and the AK47-wielding cattle herdsmen marooned in the forest for over 10 months. It is all about the struggle for the survival of the fittest. And in this struggle, the privileged often define the state of sanity or insanity of the underprivileged.
There is however a promise of hope in the ongoing engagement since those who worked along with Tinubu and Fashola to decree the sanity of those once regarded as mad ‘Molue’ drivers who are today part owners of BRT buses and the wasting away miscreants called area boys who are today celebrated environmental ambassadors. The team can ensure those currently proclaimed mad ‘danfo’ drivers get integrated into the Light rail system or aided to own their own commercial farms.
