There is always something magical and enchanting about great cities. They seem to have a character of their own. You feel them and you feel for them, as if they are living entities. Their pulse and pulsations register with you. You pray for them and even imagine their travails. You sense that beyond their architectural wonders and epic feats of engineering lies the history of impossible labour and costly exertions. All great conurbations evoke this feeling of being alive and kicking. This is simply because they are a great tribute to modern national pride or ancient ethno-hubris. Just imagine how many lives were lost constructing the Egyptian pyramids or the ancient Chinese walls.
Yet great cities also provoke irrational hatred and malice in people who believe that their own ancestors have been cheated. Rome was reduced to rubbles. Carthage was so fearsomely smitten out of existence that it was only in 1985 that a treaty was signed to forget the past. Paris was going to suffer the same fate in the hands of Adolf Hitler. But when Albert Speer, the great Nazi architect, finally arrived at the beautiful French capital, he was so overwhelmed by its grandeur and sheer magnificence that he decided that if the craven French could create such a human wonder, the Germans, with their Aryan hubris and superiority complex, ought to be able to come up with something even more spectacular. It was a pipe dream.
It is said that adversity often provokes the greatest creative spirit in a people. Now that it is clear that Nigeria is beset by urgent developmental challenges, it is time to begin to think out of the box. There is a time for everything. If Nigeria were not to collapse under the weight of political and economic malfeasance, it should be obvious by now that the era of those who seek access to power as an avenue for luxurious living and unearned social privileges has come to an end. We either come up with our first eleven as pathfinders or we end up with our last eleven as pallbearers.
Thinking out of the box is not synonymous with reinventing the wheel. We have once suggested that Nigerian developmental planners should come up with the concept of autonomous zones which will drive accelerated development and the rapid industrialization of the nation and which must be allowed to develop at their own pace without interference from an overbearing but already overburdened centre frozen in unitary rigor mortis.
These zones, with five in the north and five in the South and with Lagos serving as preeminent national hub, will serve as magnetic lodes for attracting investments and unleashing gigantic human resources now trapped between abandoned farms and collapsed factories. They must be linked with an effective rail and road network and can be grouped around the old River basins and existing strategic landmarks such as the ancient city of Kano and the important commercial and entrepreneurial nerve centre of Aba. If we are serious, Aba should be able to link up with Port-Harcourt in a generation, just as Lagos is linking up with Abeokuta to its north west, Badagry to the west and Ikorodu/Shagamu to the north east.
These were the thoughts that preyed on one’s mind last Monday as one witnessed the signing to law of two historic bills by the governor of Lagos State Akin Ambode. The first bill, the Lagos State Property Development Law, is a much hailed and welcomed breather for the law-abiding citizens of Lagos state in the sense that it criminalized the much dreaded menace of armed land grabbers and murderous miscreants known as “omo onile”.
The activities of these people have turned life into hell for well-meaning investors and developers who are often subject to serial swindles that is if they manage to escape with their life. A lot of people have not been so lucky. Many have been wasted. But it is not only the “omo onile” who are involved. There are also organized criminal syndicates who forcibly expel people from their land and who act as if they are above the law. It is a practice that dates far back.
Those who are not so young must remember the exploits of a leading Lagos socialite of the mid-seventies who specialized in eliminating legitimate landowners and rival speculators by coming up with perfectly concocted alibis until nemesis caught up with him in the guise of General Obasanjo during his first incarnation as a military ruler. Obasanjo made sure that justice was not only done but was seen to have been done.
As many developmental experts have noted, the issue of land is at the core of modern development. Radical theorists of economic growth and rapid expansion have in fact come up with the template that links accelerated development to official valorization of landed resources and their judicious redistribution. You can only begin to talk of the possibility of rapid modernization when land is divested from the feudal clutches of titular barons of antiquity and other seigneurial speculators without any vision or notion of the modern society.
Yet like all human enterprises, this one is also prone to abuse and open mismanagement. When the power of administration and arbitration is vested in a government of disoriented tribesmen lacking in rationality and the imperative of modernization, the allocation of landed resources can also lead to bureaucratic bottle necks, sharp practices and the advent of a new landed gentry which fuels social injustice and a perpetual class warfare between the possessed and the dispossessed.
As it has been famously noted, all the remedial measures on earth can hardly help the poor when the earth is monopolized by a few. The Lagos State government under Ambode would do well to guard against this anomaly in order not to exchange prehistoric monkeys for primitive baboons.
As the economic, political and cultural hub of the new nation, Lagos has taken its manifest destiny very much to heart. Ever since its forcible incorporation as a British Protectorate in the middle of the nineteenth century, the sprawling metropolis has served as the intellectual, economic and political pacesetter for the rest of the country. The urbane civility, dignified regality and royal courtesy of its succeeding monarchs are well documented.
The patriotism of its famed anti-colonial pamphleteers and cultural nationalists is the stuff of heroic legend. The decorum, integrity and fair-mindedness of its early business class echoes through history and folklore. In the run up to independence Lagos was a shining exemplar of inclusive politics of a pan-Nigerian hue and multi-ethnic vigour which ought to have served as a template and redemptive trope for post-independence Nigeria. But this gathering of all tribes at the shrine of the new nation has evaporated, leaving a fractured and bitterly polarized nation.
Although predominantly a Yoruba town with an infusion of ancient Edo nobility, the psychic energies that drive Lagos towards metropolitan stardom and its destiny as the first authentic African megalopolis are multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-racial. With its Brazilian returnees, its Sierra Leonean recaptives, its stranded Nupe warrior-class, its Igbo traders, its runaway Hausa soldiers and former European adventurers marooned by choice, Lagos is an authentic mélange; a statement of intent by Africa. This colonial and post-colonial hybridity has helped to foster a sense of oneness and belonging for all bar a few hiccups arising from competition for increasingly scarce resources.
Why then, apart from its obvious advantages, does Lagos seem to excel and to be far ahead of the rest of the country in terms of spiritual independence, economic buoyancy and political gamesmanship despite the advent of military despotism and civilian autocracy? The magical answer lies in political will and sheer economic daring which confirms the thesis about the superiority of thinking outside the box. Lagos has been well-served by the political wizardry and fiscal devilry of its Fourth Republic leaders.
Looking around the hall last Monday morning as Governor Akin Ambode signed the two bills into law, one cannot but be impressed by the dynamic energies among all the branches of government which is sorely lacking at the federal level. Inside the hall were the Chief Judge of Lagos State, Funmilayo Atilade, the Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly, Hon Mudashiru Obasa, the Attorney General, the chairmen of the two committees and of course the top technocrats and bureaucrats who worked the system behind limelight.
But nothing that is worth it comes cheap. The synergy between the Lagos executive and its judiciary is the product of a series of modernizing reforms pioneered by the Vice President Yemi Osinbajo while he served as Attorney General of the state. It has seen the Lagos judiciary top the national table as the best-equipped and best remunerated judicial entity in all of the federation. The succession plan is well-delineated and had never been subject to unwarranted external interference or undue political disruption. Everything works seamlessly. It is a system that has bought into modern rationality.
Despite the occasional legislative firefight and the odd internal power struggle there is also an organic coherence and cohesiveness between the Lagos State legislature and the executive which owes its sustainability to shared vision and what is known as elective affinity. They are birds of the same feather, sired from the same political loin. Since the advent of the Fourth Republic, Lagos has been ruled by the same dominant political tendency, no matter the internal mutations, whether it is AD, AC, ACN or APC.
This total politics, reminiscent of the total football of the famous Dutch masters of the seventies, is often a political beauty to behold in motion as it fires on all cylinders in its vertical and horizontal mobilization of elites and masses alike. It is a tribute to the superior organizational acumen and political wizardry of one exceptional individual, his tested loyalists and engine room strategists. It has created exponential wealth for the state and enough resources to commence a comprehensive welfare package which will rival the modernizing project of the avatar from Ikenne.
Lagos State has been lucky that unlike what usually obtains at the federal level, it fell at the onset of the Fourth Republic into the hands of those who actually fought and resisted military tyranny. Needless to add that they are also cosmopolitan, well-travelled as a result of political adversity, and well grounded in the complex dynamics of the modern economy.
The pay off has been tremendous and even epochal. The political cohesion has enabled Lagos to weather the antics of post-military civilian autocrats and to see off their barely veiled aggression in major legal duels which have become constitutional landmarks for the Fourth Republic. The Local Development Authorities created by the state may remain “inchoate”, but it is the inchoate and incoherent mindset of those who believe that all parts of the country must develop at the same pace and tempo that will eventually spell terminal disaster for the nation.
Either as a British Protectorate, colonial enclave or post-colonial state, Lagos has bucked this dire unitarist arrangement. It is a model of strategic restructuring combined with relentless modernization without any frills or fanfare that commends itself to other parts of the country. This is the heroic legacy that Akin Ambode has inherited. A gifted economic thinker, strategic planner and deeply deliberate administrator, there is nothing to suggest, in fifteen months of brilliant governance, that he is unworthy of these glorious antecedents. Lagos is the first truly African megalopolis.