Egunje spoil Lagos

 In the mid 90s I lived in the same estate in Oke-Afa, Isolo, Lagos, with the lewd Fuji exponent, Obesere, as he reeled out his local sex-themed songs back to back.  But Obesere sang at least one song about Lagos and corruption. He said ‘Egunje’ (bribery) has spoilt Lagos and everyone who worked with government openly demanded a bribe from Lagosians (saa ba mmu – just give me). This phrase later metamorphosed into ‘ki lo ba de? – How much comes with it?’; a question which many civil servants will ask whenever a file passes through their desks. It doesn’t matter how much is involved, Lagos is a desperate place and no one has started the process of its exorcism.  It is that desperation you see at the Lagos international airport where people hustle and beg you for money right from drop-off to the point you board. It does not know tribe. Once you are posted to Lagos – at least for civil servants – you develop the spirit of begging. You must understand and perfect the art of singing praises and corralling gifts.  Not even Osinbajo’s executive order about the airports has been able to reduce this level of desperation. And for Lagos police, the nasty experiences with them are still fresh on my mind. 

I have three experiences to recall about doing business in Lagos. There was a guy who worked for one of the rich parastatals. He would always call my organisation, demanding for brochures, and quotations. He has been doing that since 2007. After several years of obliging him with no business coming through to us, he made a mistake one day and called some of my staff to send him copies of our receipts, and also sample of our training certificates. That was when we knew he had been taking money in our company’s name and only calls to get documentations to regularise. In another instance, when I was lucky to facilitate a retreat for directors in Fashola’s office, I was shocked at how many clerks called or waylaid me because they had seen the file. They wanted in and would let you know they could ‘miss’ the file if you refused to deal. In yet another instance involving a federal parastatal in Lagos, what I got were anonymous calls trying to find out information, and basically grilling me for information because they wanted to snatch the hard-earned job for another company. Wo, Lagos is desperate. Lagos needs to slow down. For the pursuit of money is breaking people’s necks.

And the guys who get into government are the biggest culprit. 

Take Ambode. Soft spoken and outwardly amiable – even though it was rumored that he had issues with Fashola and was laid off from the service – I personally did not give him much of a chance but he soon showed he could shake things up in the old Lagos. Lagos became cleaner and a bit more orderly. He did little things like lay-bys which it seemed no one had thought about. I even liked the fact that he was dynamic in moving his commissioners around and laying some of them off. Soon, he was receiving ratings better than Fashola’s, and people started to think he was his own man, that Tinubu was not breathing down his neck

Then he showed true color; once a Lagosian, always a Lagosian.

The missteps of Ambode manifested in several ways;

1. Bringing a British Company (via Dubai) to come clean Lagos:  As much as I am big on environmental issues and hailed his CLIN Lagos initiative I don’t believe there is anything about sanitation that we cannot do ourselves. In fact we MUST do it ourselves. 

2. Imposition of a stratospheric Land Use Charge which he has had to reduce due to protests

3. Imposition of fees on boreholes: Punishing people for a necessity due to government’s failure.

4. Arbitrary jerk up of toll fees – without regard to the fact that the people have not received any increases in salaries or that business environment is strangulating most SMEs.

5. Jerking up by several thousand percents of motor vehicle registration and renewal fees. 

The problem with Lagos – and many places led by smart guys in Nigeria – is that they are experts at giving bad names to otherwise great ideas. I had written about the need for vehicle tax in Nigeria on this page and elsewhere, but there is the issue of timing, as well as optics. A government that will increase vehicle registration fees from N1,000 to N40,000 must really come with clean hands. It must be popular, and must have given a lot to the people in the hope of getting back. This is not the case in Lagos presently. I just viewed a short clip where Ambode explained – amid much applause – that the state is increasing its fees because it had created more infrastructure. Most of the developments in Lagos in the past two decades are concentrated on the Island and Lekki area.  Also people can claim double-taxation if within the period of ‘rapid infrastructural development; they’ve been paying their normal taxes.  The timing is also wrong because we missed it from the very top. After 3 years of APC’s unmitigated disaster, the people will surely resist anything that will take so much out of their pockets. To make matters worse, we saw the news of spike in motor vehicle license fees, just a day after a scandal broke that the former DG of the vehicle licensing agency, Folly Coker – who has now been elevated to a national position as DG Tourism Development – allegedly bled that agency alongside his wife, for as much as N3bn. How can you increase fees in an agency mired in fraud?

Then the issue of Land Use Charges. The handling showed that those in government have taken their own brand of desperation to even higher levels, or had now started to believe their own propaganda. We saw the valuation of a nondescript house in Omole, Ikeja, upon which the government put a value of N600 – N900million and therefore a yearly fee of N4.5million! If a simple 4 bedroom house should be worth that much in Omole – or indeed anywhere in Lagos – the government should be very worried, because 80% of Lagosians live in poverty. The beauty of a city is when an increasing number of people can afford the luxuries it throws up. There is a reason why thousands of high-end buildings are unoccupied in Lagos presently. Those in government should not delude themselves just because they have access to money. Matter of fact, Bill Gates and some respected Economists are predicting another global economic meltdown. Nigeria must begin to listen to these trends at some point. We cannot just sit here and wait for every crisis to hit us.

Let us settle on the matter of  environmental sanitation. There is great prospect here. I wrote as much in my last book ‘Change is Going to Come’. I was just pouring my heart out then, but I was pleasantly surprised when Prof Pat Utomi at the recent DAAR Communications Awards talked about provisional employment for our undertrained youths and it dovetailed with what I had in mind. I had recommended that Nigeria does something about its millions of unemployed youth and that a good way to start was to launch a program called “Cleanest, Safest and Most-Organized Country in Africa”, where we could key in our youth and offer them 3-4 hours work daily. It was meant to be a behavioral change program. Of course APC passed up on it and headed into the jungle. Now only ANRP can give effect to such. 

To be continued