The Governor Magazine

governor
the
SPECIAL INAUGURAL EDITION
Twenty Years of Democracy in Lagos State
As an elder statesman who served as a
commissioner under Senator Bola Ahmed
Tinubu, what significant difference would
you say Lagos has experienced before and
after 1999?
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Going down memory lane on happenings in
Nigeria before 1999, we were deep in the
thrills of militarism for a number of years
from Jan 1st, 1984 to May, 29th 1999, that's
quite a number of years if you do the
arithmetic.
During that time, we were strictly under
military decrees, edicts and there was a total
absence of democracy, it was a rule of force
by the military establishment, and given the
nature of the military, is obey the last order,
orders were issued, there was no single iota
of pretenses to carry along the public
because the military usually shot its way to
power, there were no campaigns, no
programs, no policies, no elections… nothing,
so you found yourself listening to the radio
and just hearing about a change of
government. Once the military got there,
they did everything according to their whims
and caprices and so the nation was held
down, held by the jugular for those number
of years, and it took its toll on the
development of the country, on the progress
of the country, on the socio-economic and
political emancipation of the country. And
some of us were in the vortex of it all,
because of the absence of democracy, there
was no parliament, no houses of assembly,
no senate or house of reps, in short there
was no legislature, no participatory
democracy, no representative of the people
to promote democracy.
Shortly before Democracy Day on May 29th
1999, Gen Abdulsallam had opened the
political space for political activities; of
course, parties were formed but the major
Mr. Dele Alake
ones being Alliance for Democracy (AD), the PDP
and a host of others. Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu
came back, and insisted he was coming to take
part in political activities. So he did and we joined
forces together. I remember he actually came back
wanting to go to the Senate, but by the time he
got back a lot of things happened to change his
mind, and I remembered it was in my office at
Concord; myself, Segun Babatope, Tunji Bello and
himself in my office when I said “look, my own
view was that he had to go for the governorship
because it would afford us the opportunity of
coming to implement the programs and policies
and philosophies of June 12 which we were all
part of but that had been aborted” and he agreed.
We took on the whole challenge, we went into the
campaign and after a very acrimonious primary
and highly contentious election, he won. Then we
started the business of forming a transition
committee and sub-committee, for
conceptualizing various policies and programs for
the incoming Asiwaju government, and the rest is
history. That's what happened before 1999.
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