SO far, it is difficult to form any distinct impression from the Minister of Works, Senator Adeseye Ogunlewe’s performances as the chief mender of federal infrastructure. All you can say for sure is that he is a great improvement on Chief Tony Anenih, his predecessor, as far as road maintenance goes. At least, unlike Anenih who busied himself seeking ways of undercutting Nigeria’s institutions and processes to advance President Olusegun Obasanjo’s political interests, Ogunlewe is on the job. Where Anenih was more in the news for fleshing out Obasanjo’s cryptic political equations than in performing the duties of his portfolio, Ogunlewe has been more evidently on the job, even if he raises clouds of controversy as he moves along. Until now.
Going in Ogunlewe’s favour is the activation of the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA), a Federal Ministry of Works sidekick that has been decentralised to take care of roads, state-by-states. However, doubts do exist over the quality of work that FERMA is doing in many parts of the country, particularly Lagos State. One of the roads that the Agency has “fixed” is the Lagos - Abeokuta Express, a major federal artery linking Ikeja in Lagos with Ota in Ogun State.
This road is important in that it serves a large portion of the Lagos middle/working class, who had to massively relocate from Ikeja and Surulere to escape the steep rise in house rent in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Due to this influx, the traffic on this stretch in the mornings (6.00AM – 10.00AM) and evenings (3.00PM – 10.00PM) are heavy and slow, even with the road in the best of conditions. But when portholes develop the traffic comes to a virtual standstill, taking heavy tolls on vehicles and their owners as well as man-hours of work.
Only in March this year, FERMA came and patched portions of the road. But the quality of work was so poor that one wondered if at all qualified engineers supervised the works gang that did it. In many areas, FERMA patched one side of the road and left the portholes on the other. Barely a couple of weeks after they left the site, all the patched portholes have reopened, joining their un-patched colleagues to make motoring on this road that leads to the President’s farmhouse and home town a living nightmare.
Ogunlewe has long listed this road as one of the 500 roads he has fixed within one year! If this can happen to a road the President is supposed to use when he visits home by road, what more can we expect of roads in far-flung parts of the country like the East, South South, the North and even the hinterland of the Yoruba country?
IT has become increasingly clear that Ogunlewe’s perceived governorship ambition come 2007 is distracting him from his primary assignment. We have always observed that portfolios like Works and Housing, Finance and Petroleum should never be assigned to politicians to man. Given them to professionals who are hungry to see Nigeria develop like other countries of the world.
Part of the reason for the failure of our infrastructural development is that such elite portfolios are given out to politicians whose qualification for the post range from political jobbery to pimping for the president or advancing the President’s political ends by perpetrating evil against the state, its institutions and processes. Therefore, these portfolios are given away as “rewards” to the appointees for their services to the President, rather than challenges to be tackled by qualified and competent technocrats.
IT has been observed in several quarters that Obasanjo made Ogunlewe his Works Minister because Ogunlewe had enough personal motivation to fight Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu of Lagos and his Alliance for Democracy (AD) to finish.
Ogunlewe, an ex-Abacha politician, surfaced in the AD in 1998 and tussled for the post of Governor. Tinubu, a NADECO operative, returned from exile and swept to Alausa. Ogunlewe grudgingly went to the Senate and midway dumped the AD for the ruling PDP. Most of those who lost the fight for the political soul of Lagos State drifted into the PDP. Their fortunes for the 2003 polls appeared to have been swollen by the fact that retired Commodore Bode George, a “Lagosian”, had become a close confidant of Obasanjo, for which reason he was made the National Vice Chairman of the PDP, South West Zone.
In spite of all that, the PDP still lost again to Tinubu in Lagos in 2003, even though it managed to dethrone the AD in five other Yoruba states. This rankles deeply with George, Ogunlewe and the Lagos PDP. Apparently, the President also feels “disgraced” by his inability to “win” in Lagos, the most prized of the South Western states, Nigeria’s economic nerve centre.
As a result, we have seen a well coordinated series of measures bordering on the abuse of power authorised by the President with the help of the Lagos PDP politicians around him. In April, with George, Ogunlewe and Governor Fayose egging him on, the President authorised the over night detention of Tinubu and two former AD governors, Segun Osoba of Ogun and Adeniyi Adebayo of Ekiti, where they had gone on a funeral visitation.
Tinubu’s creation of more local councils in Lagos attracted Obasanjo’s unconstitutional seizure of funds in states where new local councils were created. Lagos was clearly seen as the real target, because the councils creation was perceived as a Tinubu trick to hold tighter to the grassroots and prevent PDP making any inroad in 2007.
The most current phase of the PDP’s operations in Lagos is the move to remove agencies of the Lagos State Government from operating on Federal roads. Tinubu had created a number of agencies to help in his renewed effort to decongest traffic on Lagos roads, clear refuse and beautify some of these roads. Some of them are federal roads, and for this reason Ogunlewe has been fighting Tinubu to withdraw his agents from the federal roads. He proceeded to create his own agents to control the traffic, and before long, street fights have ensued between the Tinubu and Ogunlewe gangs.
Funny enough, Ogunlewe himself has admitted to appointing 30 “Special Assistants”, 95 per cent of them being from Lagos and whose activities are to be focused on Lagos. They obviously form part of the Ogunlewe brigade who will, with the help of the new Lagos State Police Commissioner Israel Ajao, be expected to muscle the Federal Might into Alausa in 2007.
As a Nigerian whose money Ogunlewe and the PDP are spending I want to know what, other than filthy politics, a Federal Minister of Works wants 30 special assistants for? From where else would those chaps be paid and kept other than Nigeria’s coffers? More importantly, why should FERMA traffic controllers be only for Lagos? What is the necessity for FERMA traffic controllers when the Federal Government already has a poorly equipped and motivated Federal Roads Safety Corps and the Traffic Section of the Nigerian Police active all over Nigeria?
One is not, by any long stick, presuming that Governor Tinubu has been without blame in his handling of Lagos affairs. The refuse that has taken over most parts of the city (despite the gallants efforts of my friend and colleague writer, Tunji Bello) needs a lot more financial attention paid to it. My former most favourite Commissioner, Rauf Aregbesola (Works) seems to have stopped working. His bad roads are competing for dubious awards with Ogunlewe’s bad roads.
BUT the fact remains that if Ogunlewe and the PDP are to snatch Lagos State from the PDP in 2007 they must come up with imaginative strategies. The way they are going about it right now is laughably infantile. Ogunlewe’s primary aim should be to give Nigeria a first class service as the chief minder of federal infrastructure.
He should strive to become the best Works Minister Nigeria ever had, just as his colleague, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is already emerging as the best Finance Minister Nigeria ever had since Chief Obafemi Awolowo during the war. If I were he, I would leave the roads and bridges in Lagos in shipshape conditions throughout my tenure, rather than waste public money maintaining glorified thugs going by the tag of “special assistants”.
The PDP’s approach does not seem designed to win the hearts of Lagosians. Rather, the impression is being given that Bode George, Ogunlewe and the PDP are gearing up to take Lagos by “Federal Might” as Oyo and Anambra were taken by the NPN in 1983. Indeed, there was Oyo and Anambra in 1983. There was also Ondo and Imo! Above all, there was December 31, 1983.
