An underperforming Lagos needs to be repositioned

Editorial Board 
To most people and based on every development index, Lagos sits atop the hierarchy as the leader and best state government in the country. Not surprising, the state has the sobriquet, Centre of Excellence. Lagos state is both the economic and financial live wire of the country, with the two major and viable seaports, the busiest international airport, and largest industrial and real estates development.
Its previous position as the federal capital of the country put it ahead of others in basic infrastructure, residency of the best human capital, the largest commercial activities with all the banks, international oil companies, IOCs, and other multinational corporations hosted by the state. It has been generally acknowledged as the fifth largest economy in Africa, if it were a country.
The actual population total is disputed between 16 million by the official Nigerian Census of 2006 and a much higher figure of 20 million claimed by the Lagos State Government. But experts say that the state’s population will be as high as 50 million by 2030. Its location gives it unique strategic importance. The state is bounded on the north and east by Ogun State. In the west it shares boundaries with the Republic of Benin. Behind its southern borders lies the Atlantic Ocean.
This geographical advantage has been its greatest asset as largest commercial centre and biggest melting point of cultures in the country, hosting the nation’s most viable sea ports, international airport, and all the banks and oil companies.
However, these uniqueness and importance of the state are also the bases of its challenges, which expose its arrested potential conditioned by the poverty of leadership and asphyxiating social atmosphere and collapsing infrastructure. It is patronizing to claim that Lagos is the best in the country because that would presuppose a comparison.
There is no other state like Lagos and therefore should not be compared with any but itself. The truth is that Lagos is dysfunctional and unprepared for the challenges of the future. From the present situation in the state, it is very easy to surmise what lies ahead for it. Without a visionary leadership and futuristic planning, Lagos will eventually lose most of its current advantages and indeed, degenerate a human jungle.
No other state has enjoyed and continues to enjoy the privileges and opportunities available to the state since national independence in 1960. Its acclaimed developmental accomplishments are the legacies from its position as a former federal capital. What value has the leaders of the state added to what the federal government left?
With the huge resources at its disposal, it is a tragic fate that the state has been so hobbled by inept and uninspiring and visionless leadership. Every year comes with one international report painting harrowing pictures of life in the state. If it is not the most dangerous, it is either, the dirtiest state, the worst traffic gridlock or the most expensive. Hardly anything positive is reported about the state. This report should make its leaders ashamed. But it doesn’t.
In fact Lagos has ceased to be an example to most other states especially where it matters most: leadership and governance. Elections in Lagos are the most manipulated and leadership is not accountable, as the people are denied the capacity and constitutional power to determine and decide who governs them. Worse still, the state would go for the most corrupt in the country because its finances remain inaccessible to public scrutiny. Nobody knows what goes on in the state.
Unlike other states, nobody knows how much is allocated to what or what is owed by the state and to who. The state is a like blind people being led by the blind. Lagos is no longer a democracy as the people are mere spectators. Democracy is a function of participation and consent; without reflecting these characteristics the system loses its attraction. And the chicken seems to have come home to roost as the collapse of governance stares us in the face.
The complete dysfunction of governance in the state is a logically progression of the despotic and selfish leadership that has been imposed on the state which negates its massive potential. By the uncanny twist of fate, Lagos seems to represent the microcosm of the large entity called Nigeria, where the vilest control the best and noblest. Nothing good can be expected of such travesty.
With its self centred leadership Lagos is not looking beyond the present and such may have sentenced it to an ignoble future. Experts project that in 50 years, the population of Lagos will reach 80 million. Records show that there are about five million cars in the state and still counting. Housing needs is acute and waste management has become unmanageable. What plans are the leaders making to save the future?
These are existential challenges capable of degrading and jeopardizing its future, yet the only language here is about power and the next election. Traffic gridlock is increasingly removing the shine on the attraction of Lagos. With the steady decrease in productivity and stress which will raise demand on public healthcare delivery, the state may be unwittingly selling itself cheap.
It has failed to live up to its big brother status, having failed on some indices of development and teeming with a sprawling urban slums and infrastructural deficit at a level unimaginable, given its internally generated revenue which is bigger than all the revenues of the countries in West Africa.
The State House of Assembly in March passed the state’s 2019 Appropriation Bill of N873. 532 billion which is a decrease from the over a trillion naira in 2018. In the view of this newspaper, this is a huge sum that could be deployed to close the infrastructure gaps in the areas of road construction and repair of existing ones, provision of water which is a major lack for the population and development of health and education sectors.
Since last year, the average monthly Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) of N34billion is maintained compared to monthly averages of N22bn, N24bn and N30bn in 2015, 2016 and 2017 respectively. It is hard to identify the areas of excellence in the state to justify its claims. Lagos needs urgent intervention to save it from ruin. In the view of this newspaper, the enormous potential and promise of Lagos has been betrayed and hobbled by poor governance, the hallmark of which is the opaque nature of its internal workings and dynamics, including its financial records.
Though generally viewed as much better than other states, however, the reality is that the excellence of Lagos is a product of its cosmopolitan character anchored on diversity of population and the high levels of enlightenment of its inhabitants who are mainly people from other states, and not on account of performance and quality of leadership and live standard.. This excellence is not state-sponsored as a result of any kind of good, pragmatic socio political engineering.
More disturbing and disrupting is the poor dynamics of ethnic relations fostered and cultivated by political leadership that encourages setting up the so-called indigenes, in this case, the Yoruba against other ethnic nationalities, especially the Igbo for cheap political advantage. It is our considered position that Lagos is yet to live up to its full potential, and it can only do so when certain dynamics begin to define it, especially the issue and need to deemphasize statism and encourage merit to define relations and politics irrespective of tribes and tongue.
The state has the largest collection of the country’s intellectuals and a sprawling middle class, a necessary ingredient for development, but the internal politics of exclusion has made it impossible for this intelligentsia to make meaningful contributions to the growth of the state.
This newspaper calls for a new model of governance structure and a brand paradigm shift in terms of financial transparency and accountability, as well as management of ethnic diversity and relations in order to get the best out of the huge potential in the bowels of the state and reposition it for the future..