Fashola and the death of an idol

Abimbola Adelakun

When the Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, said
last week Wednesday that Nigerian roads were not as bad as they are
often portrayed, he got a lot of flak from longsuffering Nigerians
who scored his declaration as insensitivity. To redress the
blowback, his defenders circulated the video of his meeting with
state house correspondents where he made the statement so we could
get a fuller context of what transpired. Despite this strident
effort to make it seem he was quoted out of context, one thing
remained unchanged: Fashola wants the media to engineer reality for
their administration.

His point was that a narration of Nigeria that projects the good
along with the unpleasant would give people more hope about their
country, but he might be exaggerating the power of the media.
Nobody looks to the media to be informed of their lived reality.
What they require of the media is an interpretation of those
experiences by putting issues in a broader context.

Fashola himself provides a useful example of why Nigerians are
cynical about their country. Whether you ask him about the state of
roads or power generation, his answers are always a litany of
excuses. If he is not blaming the Peoples Democratic Party for what
they failed to achieve, he rues the weather for stalling road
construction projects. He recites these alibis with such practised
efficiency that one cannot but despair that things will ever
function as they should. If people cannot find hope in their
country, blame administrators like Fashola who give reasons in
place of results.

Anyway, what piqued my interest in the Fashola affair was the
angry public response to him. How did he go from being everyone’s
darling to being booed and thumbed down? Once upon a time, he was
loved from Lagos to Lapai. How did he fritter that goodwill?

In 2007, when he became the Lagos State governor, he grew so
beloved quickly that self-appointed hornsmen declared him the
long-awaited messiah. How could anyone not have loved the young,
brilliant, and charismatic governor called Fashola? He was suave,
cosmopolitan and energetic, projecting traits that embodied the
aspirational ideal of Lagos. When people love a public figure, they
also make an idol out of them by weaving myths around their
personality. People would talk about how impressed they were to see
Fashola move about in Lagos without driving everyone crazy with
siren as his counterparts were wont to do. Another person would
write an article about how genuinely astounded he was to espy a
pile of books in Fashola’s official car, and how pleased he was to
encounter a Nigerian politician who reads!

Then, there was the media, most of whose bureaus were domiciled
in Fashola’s domain. They picked up the public vibe and gave it
resonance. It was all understandable. At that time, Nigeria had
just outlived the boorish government of Olusegun Obasanjo, whose
third-term agenda had not only collapsed but who had also been
replaced by the bland Umaru Yar’Adua. Fashola epitomised collective
desire to have a leader who represented Nigeria’s future rather
than the deadwood that always haunt the country. He was so
venerated his popularity unsettled his godfather.

“Fashola is working” was the most popular anthem in Lagos and
beyond. It was an intonation people readily picked up, not because
it correlated with their reality, but because it was trendy. If you
asked them what exactly Fashola had done that improved their lives
as individuals, they could barely put their finger to it. Lagos
improved under his watch but only marginally. It was still a mega
slum yet people chorused “Fashola is working” as if they lived in
Dubai. They were convinced about his potential, and faith upheld
their hope that we could breed a crop of leaders that would work on
our behalf.

There have been many reasons adduced for the All Progressives
Congress electoral success in 2015, but I do not think we give
enough credit to how much Fashola’s engineered image contributed to
their victory. His administrative success had been hyped to the
point that people who were undecided about voting a military
dictator like Muhammadu Buhari elected to give him a chance when
they saw Fashola on his campaign trail. They reasoned that Buhari’s
absolute lack of knowledge or strategy would be overridden if
brilliant leaders like Fashola were on his team.

When Buhari himself got into power, he did something
unprecedented: he handed over three key ministries – Power,
Housing, and Works – to Fashola. Looking back now, that was the
moment it should have registered to us all that Buhari must be the
laziest President in the world. I am not talking about just mental
laziness, but a physical one as well. Buhari wanted to be
president, but he did not want to do the hard work. Like a pupil
handing over his homework to his brilliant classmate, he gave the
hardest part of his job to Fashola hoping he would perform the same
magic as he putatively did in Lagos.

Unfortunately, Fashola has not lived up to the hype. The factors
that helped his ministry back in Lagos have long receded, and poor
Fashola has unravelled. He not only became an excuse machine; he
responds to legitimate interrogations with testiness and
impatience. Now, he even wants the media to continue to indulge him
like they did when he was in Lagos. He forgets he is being judged
by a different set of expectations now. If newsmen do for him again
what they did while he was in an opposition party, they would not
be inspiring hope in the populace. They would be denying
reality.

Before Fashola talked about roads and hope in the country, he
had an interview with Maupe Ogun-Yusuf of ChannelsTV where he
intoned pretty much the same rhetoric about reporting the good and
the bad in Nigeria with a balance so that people would have hope.
He is consistent in his convictions even though he fails to clarify
how promoting and projecting our country in a positive light will
transform the reality of multi-dimensional poverty that assails
us.

At some point, Fashola gave an example of the changes that have
occurred in our living conditions and which we need to take
cognisance of to encourage ourselves. He said when he became
governor, the security situation was terrible in Lagos and not a
single traffic light was working. But today? There are traffic
lights. People so take their existence for granted that they now
complain when those lights do not work. I was considerably sobered
after listening to that. Fashola became governor in 2007, and in
the 12 years that have passed since then, his measure of progress
ranged from non-existent traffic light to dysfunctional ones.
Really?

People were right to take him up on his statement that Nigerian
roads were not as bad as portrayed. Yet, even if Fashola was right
that only 15 per cent portion of the roads were bad, he is still
wrong. A stretch of road that is only 85 per cent good is still 100
per cent bad because the remaining 15 per cent that he wants to
shrug off could be one’s death trap. To whom do percentages matter
when you are dead or dismembered in an accident? It seems that our
beloved Fashola has developed a mindset that now valourises
mediocrity and passes it off as patriotism. It is not what the
media says about Nigeria that gives people hope about the country;
it is what the leaders do. You cannot have a country where the
President jets out for medical treatment while the rest of the
country, crammed into underfunded hospitals, find hope because a
journalist writes a so-called balanced story about the
government.

Fashola’s trajectory makes me worry about Nigeria’s leadership
future. We are not a country that can draw our leaders from a
nurtured pool of promising, youthful, brilliant, and charismatic
leaders. There are relatively a few people who qualify as
leadership material. One of them was Fashola, but unfortunately he
has become the very thing we wanted to prevent when we made him an
idol.

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