Special Inaugural Edition

governor
the
SPECIAL INAUGURAL EDITION
something good in that so-called“ one-man
rule for 20 years”, and now come to the nittygritty
of it, I would disagree vehemently that
it's a one-man rule, No, it is a system, that's
why I ab-initio analysed the major difference
between the Tinubu system and those other
systems. Tinubu has put in a system that is
grounded in a forward-looking progressive
philosophical framework and it has an
ideological perspective. Now when you want
to put a system in place, you have to
establish the philosophy behind that system.
That is the envisioning; what do you seek to
achieve? The methodology, how do you seek
to achieve it? Then the knowledge. There are
three attributes of leadership in any clime of
progressive leadership. The attributes are
vision, knowledge, and the will which is the
courage. You must have the vision, you must
be able to envision long term goals for your
society or the sphere in which you operate,
you must have the knowledge to translate
the vision into reality and to chart the
methodology of achieving those goals and
lastly you must have the will, that is the
courage to push through those policies that
would achieve your set goals. Those three
attributes are fortunately for Lagos State
embedded in Bola Tinubu, and the bane of
the progress of Nigeria till date has been that
we haven't had a leader nationally that has
those three attributes combined. We've had
one or two with one aspect of those three
attributes or two aspects of the attributes,
but we haven't been lucky to have a leader
with the three major attributes combined in
him. We are lucky to have had that in Lagos.
I have worked with Tinubu, I have known
him, I have been with him in the trenches
during the NADECO days before we got into
office, I know the stuff he is made of, he is a
man with vision, he can envision long term
goals and I would give you examples. Take
the revenue of Lagos State for instance, when
we came in 1999, the IGR (internally Generated
Revenue) of Lagos State was 600 million naira,
what we were receiving from the federal
government as allocation was a little over 1
billion naira, meanwhile the wage bill of the
workforce and the civil service alone of Lagos
was about 1.6 billion naira, that is excluding the
tertiary institution, the Judiciary, capital
expenditure, administrative charges and all of
that. Then the man put on his thinking cap, and
he started crafting what we call social
engineering, and by that time we were in the
executive council and he brought out a memo
into the EXCO for us to discuss about how to
make sure Lagos was put on a path of financial
recovery and eventual path of financial
independence, we argued for weeks on end on
that policy and he insisted that was the way to
go, and we started implementing the mechanism
he had put in place.
I remember vividly at a point in 2005, after we
had started implementing those policies and
putting the mechanism in place, the IGR started
climbing, and at a point in the executive council
in 2004 or 2005, he did say quite unequivocally
that, “if we went on implementing those policies
at that pace we were going, that the
administration or the successive administration
that would take over from us will start swimming
in money”, and he became prophetic. Today, you
know the IGR of Lagos State, where it hovers.
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