Speeches

Special Oxford Research Network On Government In Africa (Orenga) Lecture

Oct 17, 2011 - Thank you very much indeed for inviting me here tonight.

I am told that Cecil Rhodes, after whom this institution is named, was once asked how long he thought his fame would endure in memory. Rhodes replied, with that natural modesty and understatement for which the British are so famous, "I give myself four thousand years."

For the past four years, I have had the great privilege of being Governor of Lagos State. Unlike Cecil Rhodes, I have no great ambition to be remembered in four thousand years time. But if by the end of the four years of my second term I've done something to enhance the reputation of the great city-state which I lead, I shall feel that I have spent my time in a worthwhile way.

We are all too familiar with the images of Africa as a continent which gets itself into the international news largely because of wars, corruption and natural disasters.

Nobody would deny that there are challenges in Africa – and indeed in my state of Lagos itself. But I don't have to tell this audience that alongside all these difficulties Africa can boast great assets, significant achievements and enormous opportunities.

And in all of Africa, I would contend that the place where the opportunities are greatest is my own state of Lagos. Lagos is a megacity. The United Nations definition of a megacity is a conurbation of more than ten million people. Lagos currently has 18 million, and the UN calculates that in another three years time, by 2015, it will have 25 million. That will make it the third largest city in the world – bigger than anywhere else except Tokyo and Mumbai.

Of course it's a challenge finding jobs, homes, roads, schools and healthcare for all those people. But as the city-state expands and flourishes, it offers huge opportunities – opportunities both for our own people and for investors.

We have a long history of international trade with Europe, starting with the Portuguese many centuries ago and later with the British, the latter relationship having endured the longest and even existing till today.

Indeed, improved trade relations and co-operation have been the high points of meetings we have had lately with your government leaders.

I am a Lagosian. I grew up in the city. I was educated there and went on to practice as a lawyer there. I am therefore in a position to speak with some knowledge about the state, but more importantly, with a lot of passion.

My confidence for the future of the state is rooted very strongly in my memory of its past. There have been difficult years, certainly, in that past. In the 1980s and 1990s, we saw great political upheaval. Democracy was curtailed. Investment stalled. The authorities failed to build the schools, hospitals, roads and additional water supply and waste management facilities that were needed to keep pace with the population which was growing steadily. Between the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s the population was estimated to have exploded from about 500,000 people to over 5,000,000 people. In the absence of new infrastructure, to keep pace with the demands of the people, frustration set in, hope diminished, and many of the brightest and the best emigrated to other countries.

I recall that the first set of professionals to leave were the medical doctors out of frustration about their inability to function in hospitals that had no power supply and their unwillingness to continue to watch patients lose their lives in circumstances that were clearly avoidable.

In that period, i was an occasional visitor here on summer holidays, but for some reason, my faith in the ability of my country and her future were too strong to keep me away from home even though some of my close friends and even siblings left to go abroad.

Another reason of course was that, I was old enough to remember a time before that.

In the 1960s and 1970s, we enjoyed stability and prosperity. The schools that I attended were good ones. The electricity worked. I knew that when I went to the bus stop there was a public transport system that was reliable and predictable. The bus Number 88 from Yaba to Surulere would turn up reliably every half an hour on my way to school and back.

During the bad years of the 1980s and 1990s, there were plenty of physical signs of decline: roads that were badly maintained and increasingly clogged with traffic; schools where class sizes became too big for even the best teachers to be able to give young people the education they deserved.

But the most important change was in the attitude of people. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a spirit of optimism. People looked forward to their city becoming steadily better – to their lives becoming more prosperous – to their ambitions being fulfilled, their talents properly used. They looked out for each other. And they valued integrity and honesty. There was a culture of hard work and the dignity that came with industry.

That spirit became eroded. The military who took over government were not trained to manage by persuation and debate. They did their best, but it was not enough. What the country needed was a government based on freedom and rooted in ideas in which they could participate.

This is what our democratic experience has brought on since 1999.

In this new millennium, we in Lagos have turned another corner. And when I became Governor in 2007, I was determined that we would fully recover the attitude which I remembered from my own young years in the 1960s and 1970s.

I realized that like many of my generation, we had been too detached from Government and public office to fully appreciate how much we were needed by the process.

I was convinced that the quickest way to achieve a turn around was to persuade people, especially professionals and our brightest brains about the nobility and values of public service and secondly to restore hope to our people that all was not lost and that everything was possible.

I think that I can say very confidently that those two objectives have been largely realized.

Our Government in Lagos State has the record of being the most efficient in the country today because of the quality of personnel it keeps and continues to attract from within and outside the country. It has the highest record of budget perfomance in the public sector of not less than 70% every year since 2007 and the people of Lagos have found a new reason to believe again and they speak of their state with a lot of pride and a can-do spirit.

We have exploded many myths. The refuse has disappeared, the broken transport system is being fixed, new taxis have returned to lend support to the public transport system, an intra-city rail transport is under construction and visible for all to see, cinemas have returned, malls are opening, a state that once shut down at 7p.m because of darkness and insecurity now has a night life with street lights and Policemen on 24 hour motorised patrol in many parts.

Hope has been restored and it has become our most important building block for constructing the future.

There were big challenges on the way to rebuilding the physical infrastructure of the state and our work is far from being finished.

But the greatest challenge was to rebuild the mental infrastructure of the people, to the values on which our society was originally founded.

We decided to pursue the old well beaten path. To return to hard work, to plan, to pursue dilligently and with belief in our abilities. To seek knowledge wherever we could find it, to compete against the best, to set very high standards and never be afraid to fail.

We are not there yet.

There are still sceptics, unacceptable levels of need, a difficult global economic environment from which we are not immune, but with the commitment of the very talented and hard-working team who support me, we are doing our best to bring on the change that the majority of our people now feel is within touching distance.

I have been described as a technocrat. I don't mind that description if it means that I am committed to efficiency and to getting things done. And there is certainly room for that kind of commitment in Nigeria.

Management of time for me has become like a religion. Time is one of the many resources we have to work with. Unlike other resources however, lost or wasted time is irreplaceable.

One of the first things that I did when I became Governor was to insist that meetings started on time. I made it compulsory that members of the Executive Council - that is the Commissioners and the Special Advisers - arrived on time so that our Monday agenda-setting meeting began PROMPTLY at 9a.m - not ten past nine, not 9.30 - nine o'clock on the dot. I once, after a very late night working, had to come to an early morning meeting without taking a shower.

Showering is important – but punctuality in my book is even more important. I knew that, if I was ever late, it would be hard to persuade others to be on time. But don't worry – I don't make a habit of skipping my ablutions!

But being a technocrat is not enough. You have to have a vision as well. And our vision is firmly rooted in those values which I have outlined and which we are determined to pass on to the new generation of Lagosians.

When I was young, like other people of my age, I was encouraged to join the Boy Scouts. Bodies like the Scouts, the Boys Brigade and the Red Cross do an enormous amount of good work in teaching young people the values of service, teamwork and leadership. I am proud that our Government has revived these organisations in all of our public schools today.

Lagos may be a megacity. But its future depends on the individual effort of each of its citizens. If we capture the hearts and minds of those individual citizens when they are young, we have the opportunity to make a huge difference for the future.

And Lagos is a city-state of young people. We mirror the demographic profile of Nigeria as a whole. About 70% of the population of the country are below forty years old. It means we have the qualities of youthfulness, energy and enterprise that any developing nation requires. It also means that there is a good proportion of people in the workforce earning money and paying taxes to support those who have retired.

Contrast Nigeria – the biggest country in Africa – with China, the biggest country in the world.

China has accomplished a great deal in recent years. Its progress has been remarkable and its growth rate has been extraordinarily high. But in the coming decades, the Chinese face a real problem. Because they have pursued their one child policy for so long, their workforce is ageing and the proportion of retired people to those in work has been steadily rising.

That is a problem that Nigeria – with our young dynamic population – simply doesn't have.

Nigeria has great natural resources – land, forests, oil, gas, bitumen, coal, cocoa, gold and very plentiful supplies of water. Even more importantly, we have immense human resources in our population of over 150 million people. And we are achieving an economic growth rate of almost 7%, which is the envy of most other countries in the world.

Let me share with you some details of what we are doing in Lagos to contribute to all this. If you have had the pleasure of visiting Lagos in the past, you may have had rather longer than you intended to take in the attractions of some parts of the city because you were stuck in the traffic. We have made road building a major priority. In the past three and a half years, as a city-state, we have built more roads than two of our neighbouring countries – Ghana and Sierra Leone and the need is yet to be fully satisfied because of our population size.

What makes that achievement even more significant is the nature of our topography. Lagos is a very low-lying area. When you build close to the coast, almost seventy per cent of the cost goes into cement and iron rods to construct the drainage.

The route of the new Lagos to Badagary expressway, a road expansion of 10 (ten) lanes over a stretch of 60 kilometres for instance, goes through marshland. That means drainage which is three feet deep and three feet wide.

But we have overcome the problems and the road construction is now well underway.

The rickety old yellow buses are becoming a thing of the past. I intend to keep some of them where they belong; in a transport museum to remind the next generation where we came from, because We now have a fleet of over a thousand new buses, driven by a team of 1,200 professionals, many of whom have returned from overseas.

And we are simultaneously constructing an intra-city rail system the first phase of which will run for 27 kilometers.

Reliable and fast transport is only one of the many assets that this project will offer our people and visitors who come for business or leisure.

We are also constructing a free trade zone in lekki which will be serviced by a deep-sea port and an adjacent airport; and when it is finally fully built it may end up being the biggest free trade zone in Africa - four times the size of Manhattan.

Another essential aspect of any city – whether mega or micro – is that it should be clean and green. For a long time, Lagos was neither. It was known for its dirtiness and could best be described as a concrete jungle. We are well on the way to transforming that image. We've managed to establish a great many green parks and open spaces – good for health, good for the environment, and good for giving our young people the chance for sport and recreation.

We are now recognised as the cleanest State in Nigeria and experts from the other states beat a regular path to our door to find out how we turned things around. The short answer is through the entrepreneurial vision of our people – people like Jojolewa, a lady who works as a street sweeper. Before now she was homeless and jobless. The Lagos Government has awarded her a franchise to sweep her area of the city and she now employs over a hundred people to do it. she has also earned enough to rent her own apartment and take her children off the streets.

Meanwhile our waste managers have bought over four thousand modern compactor trucks to keep on top of the rubbish which a megacity like Lagos inevitably produces.

One of the huge challenges which we face is to provide enough decent affordable housing for our expanding population. Lagos is growing faster than any other city in the world – and space is not unlimited.

We have undertaken two measures to help people get a roof over their heads that they can afford. First we're developing a comprehensive mortgage scheme to make more residents home owners. I have seen here in Britain the benefits of home ownership to the quality of life, and I am determined that Lagos should move in the same direction.

Secondly, we have just enacted a new tenancy law to protect the rights of tenants and landlords. You'll be surprised to know that until now Lagosians renting for the first time had to pay a full two years rent upfront. Even sitting tenants had to pay for a year ahead. The new law reduces the amount of rent a landlord can demand upfront by half.

Another major challenge has been healthcare. We have developed a pilot community health insurance model which we are gradually expanding, that takes account of the particular nature of our population. The majority of people in Lagos work in the informal sector of the economy where incomes tend to be low and irregular and where few have bank accounts. We have encouraged citizens to pay insurance contributions in return for a guarantee that they will be looked after if they fall ill.

The scheme, which is based on global best practice, is being steadily rolled out to the whole population.

So health, transport, the environment and housing are all big priorities. But when I embarked on my second term earlier this year, I put another issue right at the top of the list – law and order. That is the pre-condition for us to achieve all our aims and aspirations.

We have made progress. We have a security model – the Lagos State Security Trust Fund. It has released far more resources to the police and it has become a blueprint in Nigeria for other states to implement. We have reduced crime generally and violent crimes significantly.

But crime fighting and prevention remains a continuous work in progress.

I want to see a society in which everyone plays by the rules – in business and in their private lives alike, where people pay their taxes, drive in the proper lanes, build only where the regulations say you can build – and a society where all these rules apply just as much to the rich as to the poor.

As we deal with all these issues, we appreciate the help that we have had from the international community, and in particular from the Department for International Development in Britain. Today's event in this beautiful hall is just the latest example of the close co- operation we have enjoyed with the British people and their Government. Yes we are proud to be Lagosians and Nigerians, but we are not inward looking. We value international contacts and particularly the chance to trade internationally.

In this year alone like in the recent past I have recently been host both to a number of high-ranking British public officers, the Prime Minister, Mr. David Cameron, the Minister of State for Immigration, Mr. Damian Green, the Secretary of State for International Development, Mr. Andrew Mitchell and the Lord Mayor of London, Alderman Michael Bear all of which speak to the commitment on both sides of the Atlantic to improve trade and socio-cultural and other relations.

Nigeria has long ties with Britain. Many aspects of our society – our democracy, our education, our legal system – are very close to British models. There are many Nigerians settled and working in Britain as there are Britons working and living in Nigeria. Indeed my Government has a Briton in our employment who is helping our youth and sports development.

Nigeria as a country and Lagos as a State offer huge opportunity to British investors. Lagos, incidentally, now has the largest economy of any sub-region in Africa. Like the British Government, we are strong believers in public-private partnerships.

I also look forward to partnerships in the area of education and I am hopefully that a university like Oxford can develop a partnership overseas with our state university and offer the same quality of training and certification in an institution based in Lagos.

They are essential to our vision of the megacity of the future. So we do everything we can to encourage international institutions who seek to expand to a new and emerging economy to partner with us as we build a new future

I hope that Lagos can become something of a role model for the rest of the continent. We generate 70% of our resources ourselves. And we have done that not by increasing taxes but by increasing our tax take.

When I became Governor, the tax burden fell almost entirely on those in the public sector and in large companies where tax was deducted at source from staff pay packets. Large numbers of people in smaller companies – some of them quite wealthy – were able to avoid tax. We have tightened that up very considerably, so that the tax burden is fairer and public funds are greater.

And the response we have had has probably surprised me more than anything I've seen in my time as Governor. It's been on the whole very positive. People have actually come to us and asked where and how they can pay. It's remarkable. What it illustrates is that so long as Lagosians can see their taxes at work – see the new roads and hospitals and schools being built - they are proud to play their part in providing the resources needed.

In Lagos and in Nigeria, we have watched closely the remarkable events of the past year taking place in the Middle East and in particular to the north of us in Libya. As your Prime Minister said in Lagos recently, "The future of Africa is yours. But you have to seize it." He went on, " I hope that, with the Arab spring, the countries of North Africa and of other parts of the Arab world can look to countries like Nigeria and cities like Lagos for inspiration."

We live in a global community. As a consequence, countries as diverse as the United Kingdom and Nigeria share many of the same problems. There's one sense in which we are perhaps becoming closer. Anyone in public life in either country is all too aware of the low esteem in which politicians are held.

It will take a long time to change public perceptions. But I happen to believe that politics is an honourable calling. The opportunity to serve the people is the greatest honour that anybody can have. And if the people you are serving belong to the community where you grew up and have lived your whole life that makes the job even more worthwhile.

I admit the role can be exhausting. I haven't taken a holiday since I was first elected in 2007. There've been many late nights and early mornings. But I am fortunate in having a very patient and supportive family.

And the rewards are immense – when you can see the difference that your policies are making. We are fortunate to be living in extraordinary times, times when change is perhaps faster and more profound than ever before. Amidst all the challenges that these times pose, there are great opportunities for transforming people's lives for the better. And that is what I am determined to do in the next four years.

Not the least of the rewards that go with my role is the chance to come to places like this and to exchange views with people with a great interest and a wealth of knowledge about Africa like yourselves.

So I thank you once again very sincerely for inviting me here and your kind and very patient attention.

Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN
Governor of Lagos State