Foreign media platform UK
Telegraph in a wonderful piece titled "Meet The Man Who Tamed Nigeria's Most
Lawless City", chronicles how Governor Fashola came into office and his
great developmental achievements in Lagos state.
Read the piece below...
He famously claims to be
"just doing his job". But in a land where politicians are known for
doing anything but, that alone has been enough to make Babatunde Fashola, boss
of the vast Nigerian city of Lagos, a very popular man.
Confounding the image of Nigerian
leaders as corrupt and incompetent, the 51-year-old governor has won
near-celebrity status for transforming west Africa's biggest city, cleaing up
its crime-ridden slums and declaring war on corrupt police and civil servants.
Next month, he will come to
London to meet business leaders and Mayor Boris Johnson's officials, wooing
investors with talk of how he has spent the last seven years building new
transport hubs and gleaming business parks.
Yet arguably his biggest
achievement in office took place just last week, and was done without a
bulldozer in sight. That was when his country was officially declared free of
Ebola, which first spread to Nigeria three months ago when Patrick Sawyer, an
infected Liberian diplomat, flew into Lagos airport.
Health officials had long feared
that the outbreak, which has already claimed nearly 5,000 lives elsewhere in
west Africa, would reach catastrophic proportions were it to spread through
Lagos. One of the largest cities in the world, it is home to an estimated 17
million people, many of them living in sprawling shanty towns that would have
become vast reservoirs for infection. To make matters worse, when the outbreak
first happened, medics were on strike.
Instead, Mr Fashola turned a
looming disaster into a public health and PR triumph. Breaking off from a trip
overseas, he took personal charge of the operation to track down and quarantine
nearly 1,000 people feared to have been infected since Mr Sawyer's arrival.
Last week, what would have been a
formidably complex operation in any country came to a successful end, when the
World Health Organisation announced that since Nigeria had had no new cases for
six weeks, it was now officially rid of the virus.
"This is a spectacular
success story," said Rui Gama Vaz, a WHO spokesman, who prompted an
applause when he broke the news at a press conference in Nigeria on Tuesday.
"It shows that Ebola can be contained.
The WHO announcement was a rare
glimmer of hope in the fight against Ebola, and even rarer vote of confidence
in a branch of the Nigerian government, which was heavily criticised over its
response to the abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls by the Boko Haram
insurgent group in April. As a columninst in Nigeria's Leadership newspaper put
it last week: "For once, we did not underachieve."
For Mr Fashola's many supporters,
it is also yet more proof that the 51-year-old ex-lawyer is a future president
in the making, a much-needed technocrat in a country dominated far too long by
ageing "Big Men" and ex-generals.
"He is the best governor we
have ever had," said Odun Babalola, a Lagos-based pension fund portfolio
manager. "He's made a lot of progress in schools, railways, and
infrastructure, and unlike a lot of politicians, who are corrupt, he's a good
administrator."
True, the successful tackling of
the Ebola outbreak was not Mr Fashola's doing alone. For a start, the doctor's
strike that was under way when Mr Sawyer collapsed at Lagos airport turned out
to be a blessing in disguise. Rather than being taken to one of Lagos's vast public
hospitals, where he might have languished for hours and infected numerous
fellow patients and staff, he was instead admitted to a private clinic. There
he was seen by a sharp-eyed consultant, Stella Adadevoh, who spotted that his
symptoms were not malaria as had been first thought.
She then alerted the Nigerian
health ministry, and along with other doctors physically restrained Sawyer when
he became aggressive and tried to leave the hospital to fly to another Nigerian
city. Her quick thinking help stop the virus being spread more widely, but also
cost her her life: she caught Ebola herself while treating Mr Sawyer, and has
now been recommended for a national award.
But even by the time Mr Sawyer
had been isolated, the virus was already on the loose. Knowing that he had
passed through one of the busiest airports in west Africa, health officials had
to try to track down every single person who had potentially been infected by
him, including the other passengers on his flight. The list started at 281 people
and grew to nearly 1,000. as eight others whom he turned out to have passed the
virus to subsequently died.
That was where Mr Fashola stepped
in. He broke off from a pilgrimage to Mecca, flew home and then helped set up
an Ebola Emergency Operations Centre, which spearheaded the mammoth task of
monitoring all those potentially infected. A team of 2,000 officials were
trained for the task, who ended up knocking on 26,000 doors. At one point the
governor was being briefed up to ten times a day by disease control experts. He
made a point of visiting the country's Ebola treatment centre, a way of
communicating to the Nigerian public that they should not panic needlessly.
"Command and control is very
important in fighting disease outbreaks, and he provided effective
leadership," said Dr Ike Anya, a London-based Nigerian public health
expert. "He also said exactly the right things, urging for the need to keep
calm. Regardless of whether you support his politics, he has been very
effective as a governor and I would be happy to see him stand for
leadership."
Born into a prominent Muslim
family but married to a Christian, Mr Fashola trained as a lawyer and went into
politics after being appointed chief of staff by the previous Lagos governor,
Asiwaju Tinubu, a powerful politician often described as Mr Fashola's
"Godfather". But while he has long enjoyed the backing of a political
"Big Man", is his role as a rare defender of Nigeria's "Little
Men" that has won him most support.
Once, while driving through Lagos
in his convoy, he famously stopped an army colonel who was driving illegally in
one of the governor's newly-built bus lanes, berating him in front of
television cameras.
"The bus is for those who
cannot afford to buy cars," he said. "I want a zero tolerance of
lawlesness, and those who don't want to comply can leave our state."
It was one of the first times
Nigerians had ever seen a civil servant confronting a member of the security
forces, whose fondness for committing crime rather than fighting it has long
contributed to Lagos's legendary reputation for lawlessness.
Armed robberies - sometimes by
moonlighting police - used to be so common that few people ventured out after
dark. Foreign businessmen would routinely travel with armed escorts, and the
few willing to live there would stay mainly in a heavily-guarded diplomatic
area called Victoria Island, a rough equivalent to Baghdad's Green Zone. Add to
that the suffocating smog, widespread squalor and regular three-hour traffic
jams, and it was no suprise that the city had a reputation as one of the worst
places in the world to live.
Today, much of the problems
remain. But members of the vast Nigerian diaspora say they now notice big
changes whenever they go back. "When you return you see an absolute
difference - things have improved 100 per cent," said Nels Abbey, a
London-based Nigerian journalist and businessman. "Traffic is not what it
used to be, bus lanes have been introduced, and it feels a lot safer. Fashola
has been like a Tory mayor for Lagos - he is trying to make it attractive to
the well-off."
Styling himself as Lagos's answer
to Boris Johnson has not endeared him to everyone. As well as laying plans for
a vast offshore business park intended as an "African Dubai", he has
accelerated programs to clear the ever-expanding shanty towns, ordering their
occupants to return to their homes in Nigeria's poorest east and north. That
has led to criticism from human rights groups, although others say it is hard
to see how Lagos will ever improve otherwise. "Do I endorse it?" said
Mr Nels. "I am afraid it is a bit of a necessary evil."
Another big achievement has been
increasing tax revenues, vital in a city where the GDP of $43 billion makes it
the fifth-biggest economy in sub-Saharan Africa. Mr Fashola has tried to
sweeten the pill by putting up signs on all new infrasructure projects, saying
"paid for by your taxes". It is a rare acknowledgement of gratitude
in a country where a guaranteed stream of state oil wealth has historically
allowed rulers to remain aloof from the ruled.
However, despite being relected
with 80 per cent of the vote in 2011, the main hailed as Nigeria's brightest
political hope in years is far from guaranteed a life in office. Having served
two terms in office already, he is not allowed to run as Lagos governor again.
And as a member of a minority tribe and the country's opposition All
Progressives Congress, he currently lacks the political backing to go head to
head against Goodluck Jonathan in next year's elections.
In the meantime, fresh from
ridding Lagos of Ebola, he is focusing on an arguably even tougher challenge,
launching a new initiative to stop motorists stuck in traffic jams from blasting
their horns all day. As he put it: "If we can overcome Ebola, then we can
overcome noise pollution."
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