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