Decoding the chaos of Lagos

sElection 2007(84 days(state)/91 days(federal) to go)
part of a series of blog entries on the Nigerian elections in April 2007.


Just stumbled on this interesting article about Lagos
'The Megacity - Decoding the Chaos of Lagos' (by George Packer), it was printed in the november 2006 edition of The New Yorker
I couldn't find the full article on the New Yorker site but i found lots of references to it on the web.
Here's a reproduced copy of the article from nigeria village square

and what did the governor have to say about the deplorable state of Lagos ?

from the article:
I met the Governor in his large, gilt-trimmed flat on New Cavendish Street, in central London. Heavy-lidded and barefoot, wearing jeans and a striped T-shirt and sunk into an overstuffed sofa, Tinubu seemed to be temporarily convalescing from the job.
I gave him the letter from the Maroko Evictees Committee; he cited his achievements in employment and housing creation, on an annual budget of three quarters of a billion dollars, and he blamed the federal government --which is based in Abuja, two hundred and fifty miles to the northeast, and has long had a hostile relationship with Lagos--for politically motivated financial neglect. "I need ten times what I'm having today," Tinubu said. "The money that Lagos state is having is not enough to maintain a county hospital in New York."

The Governor, who once worked for Mobil Oil and for Deloitte, the accounting firm, brought out the report of a consultant hired to draw up a new master plan.
It was much the same as the old, neglected one. The key, Tinubu said, is "to arrest the unplanned growth in different directions, the octopus of unplanned and uncontrolled building." In London, the Governor sounded optimistic. He presented Lagos, with its phenomenal annual growth rate, as a victim of its own success.

Really "a victim of its own success", wow talk about someone living in denial. Its quite easy for him to blame all the problems of Lagos on the federal government but his government is no better. What has he done with the money generated by his government for the past 8 years?

Of course he can sit in his half a million pounds flat in London and talk shit. We can only hope that Lagosians will vote out his party at the next "elections"

just in case anyone is interested in contacting Bola Tinubu to find out why Lagos is in such a state. Please send him a letter at his flat here in London. He seems to spend a lot of his time there (rather than in Lagos)