The governor of Lagos State may not look it, but he is one of the most hardworking chief executives we have ever had, anywhere. It belies his sunny exterior, casual grace, folksy bonhomie and genial good nature.
Never combative, he does not require what locals call ‘gra gra’ to leave imprints of industry. Before last week when the second in a chain of colour-coded trains hooted into being, he touched the heartstrings of the masses. A soup kitchen might have quelled taste buds, but he had given a food hub. After the food hub, we might not have expected the money he rolled out for traders in the lower-tier of the entrepreneurial ladder across the local government areas. Or slashing of transport fares. He heard the rumble over cost of living, and he bared his heart with palliatives.
But the launching of the red line train in Lagos was a sort of mini-festival. It was a day of memory and a day for memory. It was a day of memory because it was time to recall how such a milestone project began. It was a day for memory because the dream came to fruition, a day for infrastructure diary entry not only for Lagos but for Nigeria. A day of recall and a day to remember.
Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the BOS of Lagos, was happy. With his vintage cap and good humour, he looked like a man who did not have much sleep the last night. But joy outshone furrows of drudgery as he spoke about how it all began. It was a time for humility as he gave kudos to all who started the work. He thanked the visioner, now president, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, who in 2003 wrote the vision. And others ran with it. First it was the then governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, and then his successor, Akinwunmi Ambode. Yet, in the exchanges of baton, Governor Sanwo-Olu turned it all into bells and whistles. He finished the tape. All is well, as Shakespeare writes, that ends well. But he did not just do that. He propped them with interlocking infrastructure in roads and overpasses. Between the blue line and the red line, he erected five overpasses. Trains are ground transportation, but they often glide above road arteries. He laid the groundwork. He spoke with gusto about the other colour trains in the works, including the green line that will snake through Marina to Lekki corridor. Projects like this re-echo Shakespeare’s line when he asserts that “fancy outwork nature,” or when he says, “nature must obey necessity.”
Within two-weeks, Governor Sanwo-Olu showed a full-rounded performance, reflecting the hardware and software of governance. It is the triumph also of the imagination. As Lucille Clifton wrote, “we can’t create what we can’t imagine.”
That day was a sort of toast for the man who dreamed. President Tinubu drew mockery during the campaigns about what he did for Lagos, and one of the highpoints was the colour-coded trains. Some who would not accept evidence, even if it drowned them, denied the barebones of the project and wailed that work had not started on the train. While denying the dreamer, they also denied the dream.
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That red line day became another red-letter day for President Tinubu and a funeral for the naysayers. The day provided a platform for the president to give the country a taste of what is to come on a national scale, a cautionary note for the critics and their amen corners. He said something the media chose to pass over. He said corruption was fighting back. With a face of casual gravity, he warned that he would fight them to ruins. What was he referring to? Who was he referring to? Does it concern the Central Bank of Nigeria reforms, the reports about drainage of public till, the N23 trillion printing extravaganza of our money with no gold-paved mansions or roads to tell the story.
A fellow journalist asked last week, “is the president going to commit class suicide?” I said let us see. The man has always been a thorn in the hide of his class, and it was in such a tempest that he rode to power, clawing the musclemen of the class with their gog and magog. He is the ultimate contradiction in that narrative, abiding the class but also rebelling against it. He has always managed the delicate balance like a chess player. It is that special skill he will need to manoeuvre a stormy Nigeria of feudal sharks, wily intriguers and lurking upstarts.
Hence, he gave a swipe at labour, Agbaero and company, for their resort to strike with their enabling lawyers. They are strike-happy now, but neither they nor their enabling lawyers stoked the flame of street unrest when the Buhari men and Emefiele tossed the naira overboard last year in the runup to the presidential polls. They thought it might buoy their candidate to Aso Rock paradise. Rather, they met Dante’s divine comedy. They are not laughing, though. They scowl on the streets when their tortured brow on television and boilerplate rhetoric do not prove adequate. Now that they are in the wrong end of fortune, they have suddenly realized the ire of the oppressed.
For all the power and preening class in Abuja, Lagos remains the test tube of Nigerian politics and governance. And the BOS of Lagos is demonstrating it with all its range and intensity.
