BAYO ONANUGA: Knowing The Tinubu

• He Is A Courageous Politician, Fighter That Built Bridges Everywhere

How did it feel to be at the commanding height of the messaging of the Asiwaju Tinubu Presidential Campaign?

YOuknow the campaign was in two phases: We had the campaign for the primary election and then the campaign for the presidential election.

Asiwaju asked me to lead the Media and Publicity Directorate because he wanted me to be there. We’ve come a long way since 1992 or so. So, I knew him and he also knows me very well. That is why he said there cannot be any better person than someone who has been with him for a long time.

I also happened to have been his Publicity Secretary when he ran for governor in 1998/ 99. So, it was a familiar role. And you know, you can only sell a brand if you know the brand very well. So I know him.

During the campaign, what we tried to do at the two phases was to sell him as a candidate who has a lot of things to offer. In my interaction with him, I have known him to be a man of deep knowledge, a man of very great ideas. He has profound ideas about a lot of things. When you talk to him, what people will call the native intelligence, he has it. The way he is able to solve problems really astounds and you wonder, where is this man coming from. And things like that.

So, the central message of our campaign was to say, here is a man who has a lot of ideas, who has been governor of Lagos State and who did very wonderfully well in Lagos State. If you were in Lagos in 1999, you should have known that the Lagos he inherited was in a total mess. Somebody visited me from the USA, a woman, and she asked me to take her out. While driving round Lagos, the first thing she said was, Mr Bayo, you don’t seem to have road signs in Lagos. This was in 2000 or so. I said road signs? I have been in Lagos since 1977 and I never noticed that there were no road signs. So, I went to Governor Bola Tinubu and told him about the observation. He too had not noticed it.

He immediately called the Commissioner for Transport, and instructed him to start putting road signs in all parts of the metropolis. That was how they started it. That was even a simple one, because he listens to advice.

In Lagos, when he came in 1999, mountains of refuse were all over the place. He found a solution by involving the private sector. Refuse collection is now an industry in Lagos, employing thousands of people. Despite the population, Lagos is one of the cleanest capitals in Nigeria if not the cleanest capital. Then in terms of revenue, he used to tell us the challenge he was facing in governing a state without money. He worked around it by first of all, cutting waste and plugging financial holes and then developing a template to raise the Internally Generated Revenue ( IGR). Even before Obasanjo seized the money for Lagos councils, he ( Tinubu) has been thinking about how to raise money. He successfully raised it and he left a template that other governors followed. ( Babatunde Raji) Fashola came in, ballooned the revenue. ( Akinwunmi) Ambode came in and increased it also. Today, under ( Babajide) Sanwo- Olu, Lagos is easily, effortlessly, raking in over N50billion every month.

The state does not need to wait for federal money to survive. Along with Rivers, Lagos doesn’t need to wait for federal government allocation. The way Lagos has developed over the past 24 years, it can successfully be a nation state on its own. It was all his ideas. As a person, he is endowed with seeing things we cannot easily see.

Like the idea of saving and developing the Bar Beach for instance, everybody just saw it as Bar Beach, and they come year- in and yearout. The ocean was coming, taking away the sand and everything. And suddenly, the beach wasn’t there anymore. Then, every year, the Federal Government was pouring sand into the sea.

So, he thought this was a foolish idea. He and his team shopped for a lasting solution. The central government was initially sceptical about his efforts. The rest is now history. The Lagos State government has not just protected Lagos from the ravages of the ocean. A new city is springing up in that place. It was all his idea.

He tried to rejig the Civil Service. He introduced computerisation and everything in the service. He built roads that will last. I remembered before he left, around 2006, I went to him and said, you are going next year, what legacy do you want to leave behind? At that time, he was already talking about building the Blue Line and rail line and so on, but nothing concrete had been done. The Bus Rapid Transport ( BRT) was being implemented. He opened his drawer and brought out a detailed map of Lagos Island. He said, he will reconstruct the entire roads on the Island. He did. His government gave the contract to Julius Berger and it was done before he left and handed over to Fashola.

Fashola continued with some of Tinubu’s programmes. That was why Fashola called himself the Actualiser. Lagos kept progressing.

The only problem Lagos had was during Ambode’s time. Although he did a lot of things, he didn’t continue what Fashola left behind and that was why you find the Blue Line, for instance, having a four year- gap, because he didn’t touch it.

The Lagos- Lekki Road to Epe, Ambode did not put one inch of tar on that road, he just abandoned it. He went to develop Epe town itself, leaving the road to the town, untouched. Ambode behaved more like a disruptor, by slowing down many things. If he had continued, Lagos would have gone far. Sanwo- Olu is now building the Lekki- Epe Road and he is now making it a concrete road, not an ordinary road.

Though I was not in government at that time when Tinubu was governor, I was a witness to many things he did and many innovations that he brought to government. For me, it was not difficult to sell him as a man who has a lot of ideas, as a man who can help this country to attain our dreams of a prosperous country. That was why I said, his campaign was easy for me. I knew who he was, I knew where he was coming from and I knew he could do a lot to help this country.