Kehinde Akerele writes that Governor Akinwunmi Ambode should give governance a human face in Lagos State
The article by an agent of the Lagos State Government which goes by the fake name of Olu Abayomi in a section of the Nigerian media which is a response to an urgent cry by the Ajah people of Lekki Peninsula over their deteriorating traffic gridlock is a representation of crass governance failure. The cause of the government’s acerbic article is the request by the people and residents of Ajah that Governor Akinwunmi Ambode come to their rescue by patching failed portions of the 8-kilometre Ajah-Badore Road which cause motorists to spend up to six hours on the road anytime it rains.
Their request is captured in an earlier article by Engineer Femi Animashaun which reminded the governor that at a town hall meeting held in Badore on August 2, 2017, he pledged to start reconstruction and expansion of the road within one month; in addition, he promised to begin new roads in the area the same month. But the pledge was far from fulfilled as a whole six months has passed since work was supposed to have commenced. No apology given. No explanation offered. The article by Akerele warned the governor that his reputation is at stake, all the more since his worthy predecessors, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and Babatunde Fashola, SAN, never allowed the Ajah axis to be in such a mess.
What people had expected the Ambode government and its agents to do was to, first, apologise to the people and residents of Ajah for not fixing about the only road in their area which causes them to spend as long as six hours on an otherwise 10-minute drive. The apology would be followed with an explanation of why the governor did not keep his word, and finally, an assurance of when the work would be done. Instead of doing the above, the said Abayomi chose to insult, on behalf of the Ambode regime, the audience right from the first sentence which is full of embarrassing grammatical errors like “in a determined but rather futile attempt to make a (sic) capital out of the challenges…â€. This is a perfect example of inelegant thinking.
Abayomi alluded to the relatively late approval of the 2018 budget by the Lagos State House of Assembly as the reason for the non-takeoff of the road project, as the project is captured in this year’s budget. I have news for him: Both Tinubu and Fashola built the two most important roads in the Ajah area without waiting for budgetary allocations. The two roads are the Ajah-Ado-Langbasa Road and First Unity Avenue in Badore.
Tinubu saw how the residents were suffering, especially during the rainy season, and ordered PW, the Irish multinational giant which was providing sights and services in a private estate somewhere in Ajah, to quickly move to the Ajah-Badore Road. The people and residents of the area were asking the state government to merely patch the existing single lane, but Tinubu directed PW to make it a dual carriage way and provide state-of-the-art drainage facilities. Tinubu was so appalled at the suffering of the people that he forced PW to start work to ameliorate the condition of his people even before the engineering design of the road was ready.
Fashola, too, was moved by the people’s plight that he did not wait for the budget to be approved before he directed PW to move its equipment to First Unity Estate. Every government always has contingency funds, from which money is used for emergencies. The current situation where motorists using the eight-kilometre Ajah-Ado-Langbasa Badore Road spend six hours deserves to be treated as an emergency. Wouldn’t Ambode have treated the state of this road as a super emergency if it had been anywhere near Epe, his hometown? Are contractors not working in Epe throughout the clock, whether the budget is passed or not? Has work stopped even for a day on any of the several roads he created in Epe in the name of waiting for budgetary allocation? Why is it impossible for Ambode to spend on the failed portions of the Ajah-Badore Road just one per cent of the expenditure on Epe roads to enable the people in the economically vital Ajah area to drive their vehicles? The governor has to learn compassion, fairness and responsiveness from his two immediate predecessors.
It is tough, if not impossible, for stakeholders in Ajah to believe the timid explanation by the Ambode administration that the late passage of the 2018 Lagos State budget accounts for the failure to do even the simplest work on the Ajah-Badore Road. Frankly, we do not know how much respect Ambode has for budgetary integrity, even though he is an accountant. He provided for some funds for the building of a flood control facility in Badore in the 2017 budget. Of course, nothing has happened to this day. Every time our representatives go to the Ministry of the Environment to obtain a situation report, we were told, “No cash backingâ€, the Nigerian bureaucratic language for refusal or failure to release approved funds. The present administration owes us an explanation. Ambode needs to do a lot to rehabilitate his image in this crucial part of Lagos.
The bitter truth is that it is not only in Ajah people that the governor needs to work on his reputation. His reputation is fast declining all over Lagos. Under his watch, our state is being overtaken by filth. We have never had it so bad. It is a matter of time before the whole of Lagos is consumed by Lassa Fever if Ambode continues on his current trajectory. The people will hold him responsible for whatever health tragedy or epidemic that befalls us. Instead of addressing the challenge of every corner of Lagos turning into a mountain of refuse, the government has been running from pillar to post, offering all manner of excuses. It is time it got serious.
The Ambode government has now inflicted another serious crisis on itself. The increase in land use charges by an astronomical percentage is something no one can understand except himself and his officials. Why any government should do such a bizarre thing at a time of profound economic crisis in the country is, indeed, a mystery. Critics suspect there could be a certain streak in the governor which makes him do stuff, as the Americans call it. A month ago, his government suddenly doubled the Lekki tollgate fare, and the case is in court. While we were trying to make sense of where this government is headed, he inflicted us with a crazy land use charge regime.
The way he has been handling the Ajah and other critical matters suggests he has forgotten that he managed to win the 2015 gubernatorial election with only 100,000 votes. With his All Progressives Congress (APC) taking hits from all over the country on account of President Buhari’s embarrassing scorecard and his own government’s image plummeting rapidly, Ambode had better watch it. His parochialism, insensitivity and hubris are excessive.
.Akerele is the CEO of a leading oil servicing firm with headquarters in Lagos
