Recently in the media and in the weeks building up to the February 28, 2015 crucial elections in Lagos state, a squad of keyboard assassins with their paid pens trained on Senator Musiliu Obanikoro have emerged and will continue to emerge. This squad, financed by the Bourdillon Cabal will not only attempt to stand history on its head but also attempt to rewrite recent history. The tactics vary – from photoshopping Senator Obanikoro completely out of a picture (see The Nation Newspaper Wednesday, July 30, 2014, Page 6) to yet another missed missile shot in ThisDay newspaper on Tuesday 11th of November, 2014.
The writer of this latest missive is one Tunde Akanni who describes himself as a Development Consultant, which indeed he is, as well as a lecturer with the State owned Lagos State University. Surreptitiously, the writer finds no fault in Obanikoro’s academic background but questions why his alma mater in Houston, Texas, United States would honour him as they did last month. He finds no faults with Obanikoro’s achievements as Minister of State for Defence but queries why those achievements were publicized via social media. Where the writer’s pen bullets goes into rapid fire mode is on ‘Greater Lagos’ – the Lagos 2015 campaign slogan of Senator Obanikoro.
A campaign to govern Lagos State must be run on a platform of intellectuality and must be issues-based but the stock in trade of the APC has always been to fight dirty.
That the blind since time immemorial have made their way to Lagos is a testimony to the allure of this state where even the blind can see that Lagos is great. We hasten to say that the greatness of Lagos is a combination of many things which include: the diversity of its people (which Obanikoro as Home Affairs Commissioner managed successfully to ensure that there was no single ethnic crisis during his tenure), its status as the former capital of the nation (which acknowledgement Obanikoro moved for as a Senator of the Federal Republic between 2003 to 2007). Lagos is great because of the people who live in Lagos – the commercial Ndigbo populace, the Bureau de Change Hausa and Fulani residents, the young entrepreneurs who on sighting a problem immediately provide a solution to it and thus earn themselves a living – the greatness of Lagos has always been its people and their engagement in commerce ever since the Portuguese merchants set foot on Badagry Beach and gave Lagos its name and spirit of trade. Lagos works because the people work, not because one man works.
To say that the past few years have not witnessed some steps forward is to put forth an obvious lie but to deny that the steps backwards are non-existent would make the first premise a false one. The setting up of a traffic management authority is commendable but to deny that the traffic situation has not become worse due to bad roads, non-existent driver education, lack of infrastructural maintenance would be false. International loans have been granted to Lagos for the improvement of secondary schools even as recently as the $42m granted by the World Bank in March this year – to deny this would be false but to say that secondary education has witnessed a commensurate improvement would be to deny an obvious reality – the development of Lagos in the past fifteen years has been a ritualistic dance of one step forward and two steps backwards: gains in one area always seem to favour the pockets of a cabal of people and leave the poorest of the people in a worse situation than they were in 1999.
The major hindrance to a Greater Lagos is this compromised leadership that masquerades as what it is not; it is a leadership imposed by one man and thus owes its loyalty to that man, not the people. Had this leadership put Lagos on autopilot, as in the days of the military into Alhaji Lateef Jakande’ s administration where the brilliant civil service men and women provided the machinery for the advancement of a great Lagos, there would be no need for a Greater Lagos campaign. But this leadership has infiltrated, corrupted and politicized some parts of the civil service and led to a situation where land grabbing permanent secretaries are now rewarded with senatorial seats and accountants-general who falsify records are invited to continue the governance of Lagos by proxy from Bourdillon.
One area where the paid writer made a mistake is in putting forward like some others do that Bola Tinubu is responsible for Obanikoro’s rise in politics – nothing can be farther from the truth: Obanikoro contested for local government chairman in 1990, won the party primaries but was not allowed to contest, was elected deputy state chairman of NRC in 1991, was caretaker chairman of the old Surulere Local government, served as Director Lagos Bulk Purchasing during Otedola’s tenure, all this was before Senator Bola Tinubu’s emergence in Lagos politics. These are verifiable facts!
To stand against this plutocratic cabal which has stopped Lagos from becoming greater in reality rather than in the media is a righteous call which all residents of Lagos (indigenous or non-indigenous) must stand up for. The only platform with an organised structure and a transformational agenda in the state remains the PDP as led by the game-changing Adamu Muazu and the transformational President Goodluck Jonathan. The only candidate that can stand on this platform with the confidence of the mandate of its members and lead this change is Senator Musiliu Obanikoro.
The pen firing squad has its facts mixed up deliberately and maliciously – the writer demonstrates amnesiac tendencies by remembering the tenure of Ademola Adeniji-Adele as Lagos Island Chairman but forgetting Obanikoro’s whereas it was during the tenure of Obanikoro that the Jankara police station was built which helped combat the armed robbery incidents of the late 90s and as someone who had served briefly in a bank (Union Bank to be precise), Obanikoro introduced the payment of salaries directly into the account of public servants rather than paying them cash in hand – this was a first at
the time in Lagos State, among many other accomplishments.
It was during Obanikoro’s glorious period as chairman that on a weekday, parts of the chairman’s office and a part of the legislative hall of City Hall got burnt. Buba Marwa as the then Military Administrator of Lagos State visited the place and set up a panel under the late Engr. Tunde Pinheiro, the Commissioner for Works an accomplished engineer who stated in his report that the incident was occasioned by a power surge and the failure of fire fighters to come quickly to the scene. During the period when Obanikoro was in the Alliance for Democracy, the committee report was never challenged or faulted by anyone in the party until 2005 when seeing Tinubu’s dictatorial tendencies, he crossed over to the PDP. It was only when he decided to contest as Lagos governor that the Bourdillon Cabal remembered the City Hall fire incident as a political tool. Even if we do not believe Pinheiro’s report, we must ask logically: if it was arson and the aim was to destroy financial records, wouldn’t it have made more sense to burn the Accounts Department where such financial records would be kept than the chairman’s office and the legislative hall where only hansards of parliamentary records are kept?
If the records were in the office of the chairman and he needed to make them disappear, would it not have been wise to take them somewhere and destroy them? And if arson was involved, would it not make more sense to burn the place on a weekend or in the middle of the night as it happened to Tejuosho market before it was taken over by government and resold to elite owners at NGN770, 000 per square meter or NGN6.9 million per shop? Who attempts to burn a place down around 10am on a morning where workers and elected leaders are going about their duties? As the Pinheiro committee rightly pointed out, this was no arson, but an accidental power surge and would have been curbed early enough if the fire services were up and running.
This was why when Obanikoro was appointed as the Commissioner for Home Affairs and Culture, he presented a memo to the then Governor Bola Tinubu on the need to set up fire service stations in each local government in Lagos and the need to train the fire fighters. Then Gov. Bola Tinubu tore up that memo. Tinubu is still alive today and can confirm or deny this if his conscience still allows him to be truthful and honest. As commissioner, Koro personally spearheaded the Black Heritage Festival, attracting up to 13 mayors from America in the second edition.
As a senator, he moved for the Senate to consider granting Lagos State special status as a former capital of Nigeria and also spearheaded many causes on behalf of Lagos State including the issue of the surging Atlantic Ocean. Seeing that Tinubu was gradually becoming a tyrant, Koro joined the PDP in 2005, years before the frontline candidate at the time Engr. Funsho Williams was brutally murdered. In PDP, Obanikoro as a team-player worked with other aspirants after winning a run-off gubernatorial primary election against Hilda Funso-Williams.
Appointed High Commissioner to Ghana by the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Obanikoro expanded trade between Nigeria and Ghana from $600 million to $2 billion and worked closely with Nigeria students resident in Ghana. From there he became the Chairman of Industrial Training Fund (ITF) before he was made Minister of State for Defence where his efforts are well documented by no less a publication by NewsWatch among several other media platforms. The issue then became whether he would resign his appointment and throw his hat into the ring as most party members wanted – he has done that, the APC is understandably jittery because his courageous decision to let fly the bird at hand in pursuit of a Greater Lagos is a threat to their divisive strategy of making the PDP field one of the APC moles who was used to divide Afenifere, who was a major voice in support of the Occupy Nigeria movement to embarrass President Goodluck Jonathan in Lagos, was part of the consultation teams for the formation of APC and remains a loyal scion of Bola Tinubu.
The advice that writing assassins like Tunde Akanni should be giving to their pay masters should echo his thoughts on May 26, 2012 at a seminar where he championed the cause of the FoI Act for effective use by media persons. Interestingly, the FoI Act was passed into law by President Goodluck Jonathan and is yet to be ‘domesticated’ (whatever that means) by this current administration in Lagos State which the keypad warriors hired against Obanikoro commend to the high heavens.
Is Lagos great? Yes, it is! Can Lagos be greater? Yes, it can!
Written by Demola Olarewaju.
