Last week as the Saraki senate and its political Panzer Division began what is to all intent and purpose the final pincer movement against the Buhari presidency, two developments elsewhere warmed the heart and pointed the way forward for a politically cohesive, culturally conducive and economically developed Nigeria despite the fraught circumstances. Both developments took place in Lagos, the old capital of Nigeria and its economic and technological hub.
There is no other Nigerian city configured like Lagos. With its Yoruba core, its multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious accessories, Lagos has always shown the way for the rest of the country. Whether in its colonial incarnation or post-colonial stardom, Lagos has always enjoyed a stellar status among Nigerians. With its sheer pizzazz and razzmatazz Lagos is also something of an old ham actor. The messenger is as important as the message. The form is as vital as the content. Those who went to university in the early seventies must remember the famous cry of “Eko for show” whenever the University of Lagos team arrived with their lordly preening and prancing.
This past week, Lagos laid it on once again in a spectacular display of a developmental template and leadership paradigm which point the way forward for a Nigeria hobbled by the crisis of leadership and development. It was a double whammy, as they say, planned to the last finicky detail and executed with spectacular aplomb. To showcase how far he has come into his own, the Lagos State Governor launched a flurry of projects with the unmistakable panache and precision that has become part of the Ambode brand.
On Monday, Akin Ambode launched the Lagos Neighbourhood Safety Corps, a visionary roadmap for combatting high and low profile crimes in Lagos and its environ. Nigeria and its urban centres are grossly under-policed. The stiff, rigidly centralized and underfunded police force can no longer cope with increasingly sophisticated criminality and its minute localization.
Security-wise, this proactive policing relying very much on local intelligence and community whistleblowing is bound to have an immediate impact on the state and curb the tendency to lawlessness and disorder particularly where it is felt that the state capacity for surveillance is weak or even non-existent. Yet as the governor was politically sensible enough to point out, this state paramilitary organisation was not set up to rival the regular police or to serve as a testing board for a future state police.
On Wednesday, the train moved to Alimosho where the governor commissioned the Aberu-Akesan link bridge thereby opening up communities hitherto delinked and isolated by nature’s adversity. This agrarian capacity-building is bound to have a positive and dramatic impact on the economy and social life of the area in terms of integration and intercommunity harmony. Judging from the joyous expression on the faces of the denizens of these long abandoned enclaves, it was clear that they thought a messiah had come to town.
With the frenetic and frenzied pace of activities of the past twenty four months belied by a calm and demure exterior, Ambode is proving to be the revelation of the season. Not many gave him a chance. Not very many knew where he was coming from. He was not one of the golden boys of politics. He was an obscure technocrat from an obscure department.
Yet within two years, despite his politics of anti-politics which tries to connect with the people in their angst and aspirations without going through formal and conventional political structure, Ambode has managed to connect with the soul and essence of Lagos as well as the restless, self-surpassing spirit that drives this swelling metropolis. It is the spirit of Herbert Macaulay, the spirit of Lateef Jakande, the spirit of Mobolaji Johnson and the spirit of Bola Tinubu.
You can as well afford not to play politics if your path had been cleared for you by a master politician, or if your political palm kernel had been cracked for you by a benevolent godfather. You might as well go into deep sleep or lapse into deep reflection as you plot and plan the progress of Lagos among the commune of global metropolises if you have a warrior-politician as benefactor and protector. Judging from the effusive praises he heaps on his mentor at every turn and the gesture of total deference, Ambode is deeply grateful to Tinubu in a profoundly humble and touching manner.
Last Tuesday, the cream of the Nigerian political society rose as one to celebrate and heap even more effusive praises on the man widely regarded as the architect and visioner of the Lagos miracle and the presiding political genius of its post-military renaissance. It was a moveable political feast replete with native drumming and joyous singing. In the bumptious and fractious world of Nigerian politics, this is as close to the political apotheosis of one exceptional individual as you will ever get.
It was like the coronation of a major political royalty. Speaker after speaker were unstinting in their praise of the Lagos power master. They eulogised his phenomenal staying power and power of absolute concentration, his political wizardry and ability to think on his feet and his boundless capacity to see political possibilities where others see stark impossibility.
President Mohammadu Buhari, through his representative, General Dambazzau, drew attention to the transformation of Lagos under the watchful political guidance of Tinubu. Others spoke in similar vein and about Tinubu’s uncanny ability to spot great talents and to transform political disciples into leaders in their own right. In a delightful feat of political conciliation and diplomatic fence-mending, Kemi Adeosun, the nation’s Finance Minister, drew the audience attention to the fact that the template which dramatically transformed the Ogun State IGR was copied wholesale from the Tinubu Template in Lagos.
To add anything to all this must sound like killing by too much praising. Those close to Tinubu know that he will be the first to admit that like all fallible mortals, he can also be prone to grave errors of judgement and grievous political miscalculations. The important thing is to have the bigger picture in mind all the time. It is this visionary ability which separates him from the run of the mill Nigerian politician and which accounts for his political magnanimity in sure victory and seeming defeat.
For the sake of Nigeria, it is useful to add that there are three major ingredients that form the basis of the fabled post-military transformation of Lagos which are sorely lacking in contemporary Nigerian scene. It is useful to isolate these for public consumption and for a public debate about the future of Nigeria.
First is the modernizing power of ideas and the prodigious deployment of a knowledge-based society and its superb economy of inclusive growth and development. Second is the power and advantage of sheer continuity in a nation hobbled by radical ruptures and discontinuities. Third is the capacity for vertical and horizontal mobilization of elites and masses at the same time. All these are interrelated and have multiplier effects on each other.
Post-military Lagos has witnessed an explosion of technocratic knowledge and cutting edge paradigms of rapid modernization brought in from different parts of the world but domesticated and adapted to local needs in a way that would have been impossible under military autocracy with its centralizing aridity and poverty of knowledge which can never lead to knowledge of poverty.
Second, Lagos has been blessed with continuity having been ruled by the same party albeit in different guises and involuntary mutations since the advent of the Fourth Republic. The transformative power of continuity inheres in the fact that it conduces to political stability and institutional capacity-building. Unlike what obtains at the de-federalized centre, the synergy and symbiotic reinforcement among the three arms of government in Lagos State since the Fourth Republic is the stuff of legend.
All this would have been impossible without the capacity of the Lagos political leadership for horizontal and vertical mobilization. As it is also proving to be the case under General Buhari’s second watch, no Nigerian leader has been successful in mobilizing the people and the political elites behind him in the arduous task of transforming the nation into a genuinely modern polity. The Lagos political leadership has substantially succeeded in this onerous task through constant conciliation, continuous elite pacting and post-election political arbitration and consensus building.
But despite state paralysis and constant leadership failure, Nigeria may yet be redeemed and rescued by certain societal developments which bypass the post-colonial state rendering it irrelevant and surplus to the requirement of the long-suffering multitude of this nation. Ironically, this prospect was also showcased at the colloquium last Tuesday. But it was applauded by the audience probably for the wrong reason.
Whether it was seen in the contribution of Aliko Dangote, the business magnate who hopes to create sixty thousand jobs with one single project that could tremendously boost the federal foreign reserve, or Air Marshal Abubakar Sadique’s uplifting story of how the Nigerian Air force came to source for local electrolyte for powering its surveillance helicopter, or the brief irreverent intervention of Innocent Chukwuma, the man who built an automobile empire from scratch, one can sense a revolution of individual initiative and prodigious creative resourcefulness unleashing itself on the nation.
This is not to discount the posse of local entrepreneurs who came to share their ennobling tales of how they grew their trade from impossible circumstances and even more impossible local raw materials. These are redemptive tropes for a nation in acute economic distress. The creative ingenuity and can do spirit of Nigerians has no match. There can be no greater argument for the devolution of power from the centre to the margins and periphery than what we have witnessed in Lagos this past week. If this is not done, the state may wither away in Nigeria eventually.
