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Fashola:Tollgates,Oke Afa and Jesse Disasters
By Ken Tadaferua
Newsdiaryonline Tuesday Jan31,2012
Fashola
Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola is worthy of honour. But
I would return to this matter of honour after a brief detour on
the uncharacteristic meanness and insensitivity which Fashola
has subjected the people of Lekki and Ajah to with his toll
gates schemes. I am forced and reluctantly so, to associate
Fashola with a Jekyll and Hyde personality. But that will be
going too far really. Still I am mystified that a man as
level-headed as Fashola would enforce the building of three
tollgates on the only highway leading in and out of
the Lekki/Ajah axis of Lagos State. The peninsula is one
area where government presence is near zero. No public
hospitals, no public schools, no public water supply and public
road network is limited among others.
The impression, often, is that only the well heeled live in
Lekki and Ajah. Yet the truth is that huge swarths of villages
and slums hide behind the modern estates lining the sides of the
Ajah highway. Thousands of people living in the low cost housing
schemes built by former governor Jakande are eking out a living
just like their counterparts in say Surulere. Yet Fashola has
meticulously tarred all the key roads in Surulere and other
parts of Lagos including Ikoyi without erecting tollgates.
Imagine citizen Tunde, an average worker with a tokumbo car. He
pays N120 to leave his house and go to work and pays again to
return to his house. Anytime he has to return to his house,
maybe his child is sick or to collect a forgotten document he
pays at the toll gate. Two more toll gates are coming up. This
guy will pay an average of N1000 a day at the toll gates or
N30,000 a month or N360,000 a year for leaving and returning to
his house over the expansion of an existing dual highway built
in the 1980s by the indefatigable Baba Kekere, Alhaji Lateef
Kayode Jakande, an outstanding manager of resources. Jakande
neither imposed a tax nor built a toll
gate on that road that stretched all the way to Epe. What
is citizen Tunde's sin? Living in Ajah? Where is he expected to
get N360,000 from? His salary? Is he so much better off than
Ikoyi or Surulere citizens for that matter?
Those toll gates are a monument to man's inhumanity to man. The
respect and love that I have for Fashola has suffered a huge
dent. A good brand is often defended by those who believe in it.
It is widely rumoured that Fashola's hands are tied over this
tollgate matter owing to alleged political godfather intrigues.
It will do well for Fashola to stand up and be counted on the
side of the people. I will paraphrase former US President Ronald
Reagan words to the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev over the
Berlin Wall and say to our governor: Fashola tear down those
tollgates today.
I return now to the issue of Fashola as a man of honour. For in
spite of my seething rage over the unjust heavy yoke of the
lekki tollgate tax, I must grudgingly applaud the man over his
recent effort to ease the trauma suffered by the families of the
estimated 1000 victims that drowned in the Oke Afa Canal tragedy
in the aftermath of
the Ikeja Army Cantonment bomb blasts that shook the entire city
of Lagos on the terrible Sunday of January 27, 2002. He donated
N17.5 million to 70 families of the victims.
But it was not the money. It was his sense of history,
the nobility and symbolism of his message to the families that
grabbed my heart. For he asked the families to let go of their
grief and march on. He unveiled the ceremonial Wall of
Remembrance and laid a wreath at the foot of the Oka Afa
Memorial Cenotaph. He said and I quote:
“We must take solace in the fact that there will always
be a special place in history for people whose deaths bring
about change, and we must take solace in the fact that our loved
ones will never be forgotten.” He gave this people, common
Nigerians who lost their lives there, honor and respect. That is
how it should be. That the dead may rest in peace and the living
be comforted. Until tomorrow, I know not of any Cenotaph marking
the death of millions of our brothers and sisters who died
during the civil war nor of a Wall of Remembrance to remind us
that that horror must never happen again. We are a nation
without a history.
As Fashola noted, the Oke Afa victims did not die in vain and
listed things done to prevent a reoccurrence and to improve the
lives of citizens. There is now the change to disaster
management with a more proactive training of emergency
responders, establishment of relief camps at Agbowa, another
ongoing at Alimosho, and construction of the new Ajao-Ejigbo
link bridge and road and ferry terminals that would be
constructed at the Oke Afa and Ejigbo ends of the canal which
will open up water transportation from Ejigbo to the central
business districts of Lagos Island and Festac.
Fashola said eight school blocks containing 82 classrooms have
been fully built and operational at the Ikeja Military
Cantonment since 2010. More importantly, the damaged hospital in
the cantonment has been rebuilt and fully equipped. Thereafter
he inaugurated four projects undertaken by Ejigbo LCDA: The
Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu Primary School, the Babatunde Raji
Fashola Public Healthcare centre, which the governor rededicated
as January 27 Primary Healthcare Centre, “in the spirit of the
period”, Professor Yemi Osibajo Courthouse and modern public
toilets all located on Dauda Ilo Street, in the LCDA.
Fashola’s humanity over the Oke Afa tragedy is better
appreciated on comparative terms. Let’s relate the responses to
the Oke Afa tragedy to another tragedy of almost same scale of
horror. This is a tale of two tragedies. The one is the Oke Afa
Canal disaster which claimed about 1000 lives, 10 years ago in
Lagos. The other is the oil pipeline tragedy in which about 1000
people also died in Atevwo village in Jesse clan, Delta State.
The Jesse fire disaster occurred 14 years ago on October 17,
1998. The then military head of state, General Abdulsalami
Abubakar flew to the
site of the Jesse fire disaster and announced like the head of
an occupation army, that the fire was an act of sabotage and
therefore no compensation was to be paid to the families of the
victims. Most of the victims of that fire died because the
nearest hospital to that village was over 20 kilometers away. It
did not occur to him that the 16 inch petrol pipeline linking
Warri refinery to Kaduna which exploded leaving hundreds of
villagers dead and injuring hundreds more was laid in the early
1970s and that the people had lived with the pipelines for
decades without even a dig with their farmer hoes. It is still
not clear how the Pipelines and Products Marketing Company, PPMC
and Abdulsalami arrived at the sabotage allegation they slammed
on the over 1000 dead citizens. At some point the PPMC decided
to build a cottage hospital for the community. After raising the
block work and putting on the roof, the PPMC abandoned the
project to rodents and decay. That place is today over run by
thick bush.
In 2002, the then President, General Olusegun Obasanjo visited
the site of the Ikeja Cantonments bomb blasts and told the
unruly crowd of frightened and angry citizens to "shut up.....I
don't need to be here." I am not exactly sure what these two
military leaders were thinking but it's amazing the lack of
sensitivity on their path.
Today, Fashola has laid the ghosts of the Oke Afa tragedy to
rest. He has unveiled the Wall of Remembrance for the victims
that we may never forget. Today the Governor of Delta state is
too busy with state affairs and understandably so, to remember
the 1000 Deltans and Nigerian citizens that were burnt to death
in a village where no cottage hospital stands till today. PPMC
which is saddled with the arduous task of overseeing the dubious
importation of over N1.7 trillion worth of fuel into our country
cannot be bothered about the cottage hospital it abandoned in
Jesse. The birds will come home to roost someday. Fashola, I
thank you for the dignity and respect you have accorded our dead
brothers and sisters at Oke Afa. I urge you to earn my full
respect and love by tearing down the toll gates at the Lekki –
Epe expressway or at best build the alternative coastal road.
Ken Tadaferua,Lagos based public commentator
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