For President Bola Tinubu, the inauguration of the Lagos Red Rail, on February 29, was a tri-triumph: an iron will that won’t be bent, a clear vision that won’t be smashed, a soaring dream that won’t be downed — no matter how hard others tried.
“I am pleased to declare to you that the momentum of greatness we kick-started a quarter of a century ago has become an unstoppable reality,” he gushed. “It’s not a crime to dream big. Just stay focused and stay on course …”
The PDP Abuja powers actually thought it was a crime — to be crushed with vicious federal might. President Olusegun Obasanjo, flexing, bristling, rippling and preening, would share his rail right-of-way glory with nobody! Lagos had better forget that rail pipe dream, or else …
That was the titanic struggle for Lagos urban rail — the audacity of a federalist governor that dared to dream; dreams that must die as long as the overlords lived!
Yet, that dream has lived, even if those powers have lived to see its bloom, in contrast to the inevitable wilt of own threats and muscle-flexing!
Tinubu, the underdog of Lagos in 2003, just returned in triumph to actualize his Lagos rail dream as president in 2024 — and in tough times too, that proclaim rail as central to any economic revamp.
Call it the triumph of brain over brawn. It’s the supreme spice of history!
Still, Obasanjo wasn’t the only federal czar against rail liberalization, even if he would blow an opportunity for redemption, though his government cobbled together a comprehensive national rail development road map, late in his second term: 2006.
President Muhammadu Buhari, who like Obasanjo was military Head of State before serving two terms as elected president (2015-2023), grabbed that redemptive chance.
Major Gen. Buhari got fairly docked for junking the Lagos Metroline rail project — the vision of Alhaji Lateef Jakande, the 2nd Republic iconic Lagos governor.
But it was President Buhari, with Rotimi Amaechi, his rail czar, that gave rail its stunning rebirth. Buhari went after rail — and Amaechi sure was walking the talk! — with such a harried hurry that branded fleeting time enemy No. 1: which indeed it was.
Ironically, Buhari latched onto Obasanjo’s national rail master plan for own rail redemption, though he traded his old military command mindset with a liberal rail temper, that hugged federal-states rail corridor-sharing.
That suited Lagos just fine. But for former Governor Akinwunmi Ambode that somewhat froze the Mile 2-Orile-Lagos Marina Blue Line corridor for four years, the Blue Rail could perhaps have come on stream during his tenure (2015-2019).
With Amaechi bursting to and fro to secure the Lagos end of the Lagos-Ibadan standard-gauge rail, to get the Lagos-Ibadan section of the Lagos-Kano rail ready before the 2019 elections, it was rail business unusual!
Ambode’s successor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, somewhat cottoned onto Amaechi’s zeal — and born, in record time, was the 37-km Agbado-Oyingbo Red Rail corridor, co-sharing tracks with the Lagos-Ibadan rail, now set to tame the soaring cost of doing business along that long corridor — much the same as the Blue Line has been doing, at its own much shorter Lagos Marina-Mile 2 end.
Imagine what routinized urban rail would have meant to petrol subsidy removal: neutering cost-push inflation from soaring transportation costs, smothering today’s soar-away inflation on food, arresting the mass hunger in the land?
Imagine the smooth take-off of Lagos rail in, say, 2007, without having the federal arid bedlam of clinging to the rail right of way — a ferocious dog in a manger that can’t dream but won’t allow sub-nationals who can?
Imagine other states following the Lagos example? Imagine what difference penetrating rail would have done today to Nigeria’s struggling real sector?
If only blind central powers of Abuja had allowed right things done at right times!
Which brings the matter to the sweet myth that Buhari handed over an economy that was a “dead horse standing” — the hysteria now echoed by some Tinubu administration prime voices, to fend off momentary pressure from taunting opposition.
A “dead horse standing” was original to Anambra Governor, Prof. Chukwuma Soludo, a former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), under Presidents Obasanjo and Umaru Musa Yar’Adua (God bless his sweet soul!).
In a Channels TV video clip that went viral, Soludo, renowned professor of Economics, cooed and crowed, regaling how his five-year stint at CBN brought forth hitherto unknown monetary policy glories — with foreign reserves thundering, the dollar parity to the Naira crashing and sundry glad tidings, from the government’s banker.
He now juxtaposed the activist tenure of the well-lampooned Godwin Emefiele, knocking it for contesting the fiscal space with the Federal Government, granting reckless ways-and-means facilities and dubbing that era a “failure” — which could well have been. That has prompted the mass singsong: Buhari was a total failure.
Still, the monetarist purity of the Soludo years: how many additional kilometres of highways nationwide did it avail the fiscal authorities? How many extra kilometres of rail? How did it revamp agriculture and boost food security? How many old refineries did it fix; and new ones, built?
Yet, the “failed” Buhari years accounted for the 2nd Niger Bridge, the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, the Loko-Oweto Bridge, the Lagos-Ibadan standard gauge rail, the Dangote Refinery, which offered the Tinubu government the swagger to remove fuel subsidy, the raft of roads and bridges in marshy land, which, when completed, will link oil-rich Bonny to the Rivers mainland for the first time; and of course, rare agricultural strides that thrust Nigeria from “nowhere” to be Africa’s No. 1 rice cultivator, overtaking Egypt in five short years!
Now, if infrastructure is the spur of the economy, how can a Buhari government that doubled infrastructure to GDP ratio (according to the government’s exit stats) from 1:5 to 2:5, in ultra-lean times, be a total economic “failure”; but one that flaunted brilliant books, with hardly a dent on infrastructure, in times of robust earnings, a rousing economic success?
Is that claim itself not a severe contradiction in terms? Or the economists are just having fun, beatified in their “leisure of the theory class” — as Palladium, The Nation on Sunday back-page columnist, dismissed the Soludo Strategic Agenda for the Naira of 2007?
The idea here is not to rubbish anyone — that would be rude and uncouth.
It’s rather to remind the Tinubu administration to re-angle own narratives from 2015. De-coupling Tinubu from the Buhari government is, at best, short-term cold comfort. At worst, it’s strategic disaster: for the administration would have failed to show the salvage mission started in 2015, after the umpteenth PDP mess that lasted 16 years.
That would give the arch-wreckers of yesterday — who now rail and screech more than anyone at the gargoyle their centralist stonewalling created — the delusion that they could be the arch-saviours of tomorrow.
