SPEECH DELIVERED BY HIS EXCELLENCY,THE GOVERNOR OF LAGOS STATE,MR BABATUNDE RAJI FASHOLA (SAN), ON THE OCCASION OF HIS 2200 DAYS IN OFFICE AT THE LAGOS STATE UNIVERSITY ON THURSDAY JUNE 6TH 2013.
PROTOCOL
We gather again today to review the progress of a journey we started 2200 days ago and the performance of our social contract.
Our regular 100 day accounting and reporting program has facilitated communication between us and many sections of members of the public who are our employers.
Today it has brought us to the critical stakeholders. The ones I call the leaders in training and in waiting. And I will explain why.
The decision to move this edition of our 100 day accounting period to LASU and dedicate it to communicating with higher education institutions and the undergraduates in training is deliberate.
The reason is simple. Our human resource is the most important resource we have and will ever have.
Our students in tertiary institutions are in the generation right behind us. They are the ones who are being prepared for the job market and leadership responsibility.
They are the ones who will replace me and the commissioners, the permanent secretaries, the legislators and the judges, indeed the entire public service.
They are the ones who in a short time will bear the responsibility to refine our crude oil, generate our electricity, produce our water, manage this university, build our trains, secure our state and country and generally be responsible for our people’s well-being.
All of these will happen very soon.
The question then is this. Do these leaders in waiting and in training understand what we are doing?
Do they understand why we are doing it?
What are the choices of study that they themselves have made?
Why did they make them? Does our society still require those skills they are learning?
Is there an inherent flaw in the training we are offering in a way that it does not connect with our societal needs?
Why do we have so much to do in our country and yet still have so many unemployed people?
It seems clear from what I hear from our experts that the GOWN (which is the generic word for our higher institutions of learning such as LASU, AOCOED, LASPOTECH, MOCPED.) is not communicating with the TOWN (the generic word for the larger society comprising the government and its institutions, as well as private sector)
So the GOWN and the TOWN must begin to talk. There must be a handshake.
It seems to me therefore that our training methods must be re-orientated to retain the critical building blocks but they must also become adapted to the real needs of society.
That is why we have started a school of transportation here, to prepare a new generation of professionals that will become our transport planners, transport managers and transport operators.
The reason is simple. Transportation is a global problem and it is no less so in Lagos or any other part of Nigeria.
Major cities and countries including our state are building transport facilities such as the rail project on the Badagry corridor and the Expressway expansion.
But how many Nigerians have the knowledge about rail construction and how many are involved in building our bridges and highways?
That is why I advised the University management not to move the Transport School to Epe but to leave it in Ojo, so that the students can use the on-going construction as their laboratory.
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, this is why I am here today:- To facilitate and encourage the discussion and communication between the GOWN and the TOWN.
We need to build more water works. But how many of us even know how the current water supply is being produced?
We need constant power supply. But how many of us have visited our power generation, power transmission and power distribution facilities?
How many of us know how cars are made from design to assembly?
Twenty five years ago I was still in school and I did not have an answer to these questions.
I studied in Nigeria, in a government owned University of Benin, like LASU, so I understand this problem.
Twenty five years later I have become your Governor with the responsibility to solve these problems.
I expect many of you to assume leadership responsibilities even earlier than I did.
I am here because I want you to be better prepared than me.
I am here because I want you to leave school with the jobs waiting for you rather than you looking for the jobs.
Or better still to leave school with a clear idea of what you are going to establish or produce and how you want to go about it, instead of idling at home looking for employment.
But whatever you do, there are three things you must do.
First you must become adaptive. Secondly, you must be innovative and thirdly, you must be creative.
But I will come back to these issues if you just permit me to quickly digress and deal with the reporting part of my 100 day programme.
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, since the last time when we presented our 100 days report on February 26 this year, your government has made some more progress.
First I am pleased to report the first quarter budget performance which was 61%.
The impact across various sectors has been encouraging.
The implementation has helped us to continue to progress many civil works projects such as the Adiyan Phase II water works, the Lagos Badagry Expressway, Mile 12 – Ikorodu Road, over 200 inner city and neighbourhood roads across Lagos, educational projects within LASU, AOCOED and other institutions.
Many housing projects across Lagos are now at roofing stage while we have commenced many more as we prepare to start allocation later this year.
We have also completed some projects in the last 100 days such as the Emeka Anyaoku Housing estate in Ikeja, the flagship twenty-four hour Primary Health Care centres in Lagos Island, Mosan Okunola in Alimosho and Ajara in Badagry have been fully re-fitted, re-staffed and now operational.
Two more will be added in June as we march on to fulfil our commitment to deliver a pilot of 57 (Fifty Seven) flagship primary Healthcare facilities that will set the pace for Grassroots Healthcare and a robust preventive and referral based health care system.
During the last 100 days our Ministry of Tourism hosted our Annual Heritage Week that climaxed with a Boat Regatta and Carnival. They have become the subject of international understudy because they get bigger and better year after year.
Our commitment to Education was also heightened as we hosted our 3rd Education Summit which showed a successful implementation of the recommendations of the last summit.
Permit me to share two quick indices of the successful implementation with you.
From a baseline of an average of 7% of students who passed WAEC in 2007 with 5 (five) credits including Mathematics and English in one sitting, we now have an average of 39% of students who passed as at 2012.
At the University level, from a baseline of a withdrawal of accreditation for 10 (ten) courses, all courses have received accreditation except 1 (one) and LASU is now ranked 11th amongst the list of 129 (One Hundred and Twenty Nine) Nigerian Universities and is the highest ranked State University.
This is of course not to suggest that we are satisfied with where we are or that we will ever stop seeking to improve.
On the contrary, it is to measure how steadily but gradually we are progressing and to encourage you to keep pushing and pressing because our efforts are yielding results.
It is also to emphasise what can happen when disputes which are inevitable, are resolved by negotiation and constant engagement, instead of strikes, lockouts and disruptions.
During the last 100 days we have also approved bursaries and scholarships to the following category of students in order to help them support themselves through school and to ensure that no child is left behind only because the parents are poor.
Some of the beneficiaries are:
• 1,385 LASU Students - N41.635m
• 907 Lagos Students in other Universities – N33.690m
• 109 College Students – N2.460m
• 50 Blind Students N3.0m
• 140 Students in the Nigerian Law School and 21 Students in the Maritime Academy N32.2m
• 390 Lagos Students in other tertiary institutions across Nigeria – N87.5m
• 11 Students overseas N37.124m
We will certainly do more as the requests are evaluated and recommended for approval.
In the last 100 hundred days we have been vigorously battling crime and the security reports I received at our monthly meeting which held yesterday shows that things are getting better.
In addition to the security reports, our security agents and agencies have become more pro-active.
We have published security tips for citizens and we are translating them into the 3 main languages.
Our border patrols have been intensified to ensure that only law abiding citizens enter our State.
We continue to monitor and raid known dark spots and criminal hideouts.
In the last few weeks, 360 (Three Hundred and Sixty) of such suspects have been charged to court, for possession of drugs or other dangerous weapons.
We have also successfully impounded large amounts of drugs and arrested the merchants of such drugs which are used to fuel crime.
We are also intensifying training for investigating officers to provide them with new skills for evidence gathering to support criminal prosecution.
All told, we have raised our game and there will be no comfort for criminals in our State.
I can only urge citizens to co-operate with law enforcement and support our efforts to further equip them by contributing to the Security Trust Fund.
So my message to you is, if you see anything unusual, say something by calling 767 or 112.
But do not be afraid. Be vigilant and safety conscious and go about your business because we are working hard to ensure that criminals do not harm you and that our State continues to remain uncomfortable for them.
Of course just a few days ago, we completed and opened the first cable stayed bridge in West Africa, the Lekki Ikoyi Link Bridge as a transport solution to decongest Lekki, Victoria Island, Ikoyi and access to the Mainland.
I will conclude this part by re-assuring Lagosians that your Government remains focused on service delivery and our commitment to you in the remaining 2 (Two) years will not be different from our commitment on the first day.
Having concluded in summary form, the reporting part of the 100 days programme, let me return to the future and our main discussion, about the GOWN and TOWN.
In order to help the GOWN assist in developing the TOWN, we have created an Innovation Council led by the Honourable Commissioner for Science and Technology and other members drawn from the private sector.
Their brief is to promote innovation and development.
We are also operating an After-School Graduate Development Programme where we are investing graduates with new skills to help them adapt to the needs of our economy and find well-paid jobs or start their own business
We have also created in our State budget, a provision to fund research and I have inaugurated a Committee to set guidelines for access.
Currently for this year the sum of N1,500,000.00 (One Billion, Five Hundred Million Naira) was budgeted and to my knowledge no person has applied for the research fund.
Why is all these important? You may ask.
The answer is simple. The key for finding a solution to unemployment and joblessness is in 3 (three) simple words – ‘made’ ‘in’ ‘Nigeria’.
No other nation has done it another way.
We barely competed in the agricultural age before oil overcame us. We missed industrialization, but we can leapfrog industrialization and get on the train of the age of technology.
Do not misunderstand me. Without agriculture, processing and industrialization, there will be no made in Nigeria. So we cannot do without those two.
What I mean is that we must use technology developed by our own people to fast track our deficit of agriculture.
So to get to “Made in Nigeria”, we must innovate and be creative.
They may sound like catchy or fancy words but I think they mean something very simple.
Innovation requires us to start looking for new and more efficient ways of doing the same thing.
Creativity is the hand maid of innovation which suggests we must develop things for ourselves.
This is the road to “Made in Nigeria”. This is the super-highway to a new economy that is home-grown and increasingly self-dependent and self-reliant.
Let me attempt to illustrate what I mean with a few examples.
The training of our doctors must adapt to what we are seeing today. Public health issues, life style diseases like hypertension, heart and kidney diseases and cases of cancers. We must find ways to treat these locally and keep the jobs here.
Our medicine must now focus also on sports medicine which is a growing area of need and which requires specialization.
We must stop thinking about treating malaria, and start thinking about how to eradicate plasmodium or create a vaccine for it.
We have put a research fund there. Please use it.
Our lawyers for example must receive training in either contract or commercial law on how to negotiate PPPs or concessions.
Otherwise we will be forced to hire lawyers from overseas because this is the new way that is gaining ground globally for financing public infrastructure.
The content of our criminology courses must change in order to become responsive to the new types of crime that we have to deal with.
As a State and a nation that has so much to build, our bankers, economists, architects, engineers and town planners must be trained in proper project planning, project implementation and project monitoring.
The essence of these skills explains why projects are not delivered on budget, on schedule and why we have thousands of projects across the country which are uncompleted as we see in the print and electronic media reports.
It is ironic that there is unemployment in a nation that has so much to finish.
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, these examples are not exhaustive.
They are just indicative of how we can do old things differently and I have only sought to use examples that we are familiar with.
My dear students, I hope that I have stirred something in you. If I have, then my mission has been useful because we can start a new journey together today.
It will be a journey of GOWN and TOWN, in which you will have a lot of questions to ask me, starting from when I conclude my address today.
I hope I will be able to answer some of your questions.
As for those that I am unable to answer, I hope you will let us work together to look for the answers.
A critical part of that journey between GOWN and TOWN requires that you get involved in the political process.
The debate for gubernatorial and presidential candidates in other countries takes place in their Universities.
I participated in 7 (seven) debates in 2007 and 6 (six) in 2011. None of them took place in this University.
Maybe we can excuse that omission by the fact that you did not have the facilities to host such debates.
But the facilities are now here in this hall. We are building more. You must create the environment, by being peaceful, stopping violent clashes so that people feel safe about coming here.
Being involved in the political process is the first step to the GOWN and TOWN handshake.
The research you conduct, your term papers, project works on varied subjects must get to us to assist us in formulating policies.
As we constantly engage, you must innovate and be creative to begin to respond to the demands of the TOWN.
This is the only way in which our economy can have beneficial impact on our people.
If we fail to act along these lines and I truly hope not, we will continue to see a growth in the African and Nigerian economy as we have been witnessing but we may not see enough jobs.
The reason is simple. Africa has a young and growing population as we all know. Nigeria’s population is the largest of that population which is a big market.
Unfortunately, the goods that service that market from shoes, wrist watches, cars, underwear, food, writing materials, telephones, televisions, music systems and almost anything you can think of are not made in Nigeria.
This is the reason for jobless growth.
Innovation and creativity from our institutions of learning can reserve this trend.
My dear students, let us seize the moment. We know the problem, the solution is obvious, the only thing that stands in the way is us.
Thank you.
Eko o ni baje o!
Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN
Governor of Lagos State
June 6, 2013
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