He famously claims to
be “just doing his job”. But in a land where politicians are known for doing
anything but, that alone has been enough to make Babatunde Fashola, boss of the
vast Nigerian city of Lagos, a very popular man.
In
another development, Confounding the image of Nigerian leaders as corrupt and
incompetent, the 51-year-old governor has won near-celebrity status for
transforming west Africa’s biggest city, cleaing up its crime-ridden slums and
declaring war on corrupt police and civil servants.
Reports
says he will come to London Next month, to meet business leaders and Mayor
Boris Johnson’s officials, wooing investors with talk of how he has spent the
last seven years building new transport hubs and gleaming business parks.
Yet
arguably his biggest achievement in office took place just last week, and was
done without a bulldozer in sight. That was when his country was officially
declared free of Ebola, which first spread to Nigeria three months ago when
Patrick Sawyer, an infected Liberian diplomat, flew into Lagos airport.
Health
officials had long feared that the outbreak, which has already claimed nearly
5,000 lives elsewhere in west Africa, would reach catastrophic proportions were
it to spread through Lagos. One of the largest cities in the world, it is home
to an estimated 17 million people, many of them living in sprawling shanty
towns that would have become vast reservoirs for infection. To make matters
worse, when the outbreak first happened, medics were on strike.
Instead,
Mr Fashola turned a looming disaster into a public health and PR triumph.
Breaking off from a trip overseas, he took personal charge of the operation to
track down and quarantine nearly 1,000 people feared to have been infected
since Mr Sawyer’s arrival.
Last
week, what would have been a formidably complex operation in any country came
to a successful end, when the World Health Organisation announced that since
Nigeria had had no new cases for six weeks, it was now officially rid of the
virus.
“This
is a spectacular success story,” said Rui Gama Vaz, a WHO spokesman, who
prompted an applause when he broke the news at a press conference in Nigeria on
Tuesday. “It shows that Ebola can be contained.”
The
WHO announcement was a rare glimmer of hope in the fight against Ebola, and
even rarer vote of confidence in a branch of the Nigerian government, which was
heavily criticised over its response to the abduction of more than 200
schoolgirls by the Boko Haram insurgent group in April. As a columninst in
Nigeria’s Leadership newspaper put it last week: “For once, we did not
underachieve.”
For
Mr Fashola’s many supporters, it is also yet more proof that the 51-year-old
ex-lawyer is a future president in the making, a much-needed technocrat in a
country dominated far too long by ageing “Big Men” and ex-generals.
“He
is the best governor we have ever had,” said Odun Babalola, a Lagos-based
pension fund portfolio manager. “He’s made a lot of progress in schools,
railways, and infrastructure, and unlike a lot of politicians, who are corrupt,
he’s a good administrator.”
True,
the successful tackling of the Ebola outbreak was not Mr Fashola’s doing alone.
For a start, the doctor’s strike that was under way when Mr Sawyer collapsed at
Lagos airport turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Rather than being taken
to one of Lagos’s vast public hospitals, where he might have languished for hours
and infected numerous fellow patients and staff, he was instead admitted to a
private clinic. There he was seen by a sharp-eyed consultant, Stella Adadevoh,
who spotted that his symptoms were not malaria as had been first thought.
She
then alerted the Nigerian health ministry, and along with other doctors
physically restrained Sawyer when he became aggressive and tried to leave the
hospital to fly to another Nigerian city. Her quick thinking help stop the
virus being spread more widely, but also cost her her life: she caught Ebola
herself while treating Mr Sawyer, and has now been recommended for a national
award.
But
even by the time Mr Sawyer had been isolated, the virus was already on the
loose. Knowing that he had passed through one of the busiest airports in west
Africa, health officials had to try to track down every single person who had
potentially been infected by him, including the other passengers on his flight.
The list started at 281 people and grew to nearly 1,000. as eight others whom he
turned out to have passed the virus to subsequently died.
That
was where Mr Fashola stepped in. He broke off from a pilgrimage to Mecca, flew
home and then helped set up an Ebola Emergency Operations Centre, which
spearheaded the mammoth task of monitoring all those potentially infected. A
team of 2,000 officials were trained for the task, who ended up knocking on
26,000 doors. At one point the governor was being briefed up to ten times a day
by disease control experts. He made a point of visiting the country’s Ebola
treatment centre, a way of communicating to the Nigerian public that they
should not panic needlessly.
“Command
and control is very important in fighting disease outbreaks, and he provided
effective leadership,” said Dr Ike Anya, a London-based Nigerian public health
expert. “He also said exactly the right things, urging for the need to keep
calm. Regardless of whether you support his politics, he has been very
effective as a governor and I would be happy to see him stand for leadership.”
Born
into a prominent Muslim family but married to a Christian, Mr Fashola trained
as a lawyer and went into politics after being appointed chief of staff by the
previous Lagos governor, Asiwaju Tinubu, a powerful politician often described
as Mr Fashola’s “Godfather”. But while he has long enjoyed the backing of a
political “Big Man”, is his role as a rare defender of Nigeria’s “Little Men”
that has won him most support.
Once,
while driving through Lagos in his convoy, he famously stopped an army colonel
who was driving illegally in one of the governor’s newly-built bus lanes,
berating him in front of television cameras.
“The
bus is for those who cannot afford to buy cars,” he said. “I want a zero
tolerance of lawlesness, and those who don’t want to comply can leave our
state.”
It
was one of the first times Nigerians had ever seen a civil servant confronting
a member of the security forces, whose fondness for committing crime rather
than fighting it has long contributed to Lagos’s legendary reputation for
lawlessness.
Armed
robberies – sometimes by moonlighting police – used to be so common that few
people ventured out after dark. Foreign businessmen would routinely travel with
armed escorts, and the few willing to live there would stay mainly in a
heavily-guarded diplomatic area called Victoria Island, a rough equivalent to
Baghdad’s Green Zone. Add to that the suffocating smog, widespread squalor and
regular three-hour traffic jams, and it was no suprise that the city had a
reputation as one of the worst places in the world to live.
Today,
much of the problems remain. But members of the vast Nigerian diaspora say they
now notice big changes whenever they go back. “When you return you see an
absolute difference things have improved 100 per cent,” said Nels Abbey, a
London-based Nigerian journalist and businessman. “Traffic is not what it used
to be, bus lanes have been introduced, and it feels a lot safer. Fashola has been
like a Tory mayor for Lagos he is trying to make it attractive to the
well-off.”
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