20th February, 2014
Kazeem Ugbodaga
Oba of Lagos, Rilwan Akiolu, says former President Olusegun Obasanjo is to blame for the poor state of infrastructure in Lagos State, western Nigeria.
Akiolu said Obasanjo should be held responsible, rather than blaming President Goodluck Jonathan.
The Oba spoke on Wednesday at the public presentation of the book The Life of James Pinson Labulo Davies: A Colossus of Victorian Lagos and Worthy in Character and Learning, written by Professor Adeyemo Elebute.
Oba Akiolu said when Jonathan visited him recently, he told him that all through the eight years Obasanjo was in office, he denied Lagos its status and ‘bastardised’ the system.
“I told the President about six days ago that no one should play politics with development. Although he had his own challenges, many of the problems for which we are blaming Jonathan, were problems created by the Obasanjo administration.
“So what is he talking about now? Don’t play politics with Lagos. What is due to Lagos must be done for the state. This isn’t politics. What the British did to Lagos can be linked to what the former president did to Lagos during his eight years of administration. And those who were in position at that time failed to call him to order,” he stated.
He said that the annexation of Lagos by the British over a century ago plunged the state into serious problems, saying that the British only came for commercial reasons and that their action led to Iga-Idunganran, the Lagos Palace, losing a larger percentage of its landed property.
Speaking at the event, Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, urged Nigerians to reflect on the past successes associated with Nigeria as a nation in order to find the right inspiration towards rebuilding the country, saying such reflection would also reawaken their patriotism as Nigerians.
“We must continue to reflect on where we came from and all the past successes we had achieved here. Whatever challenges we are facing as a people today, we must remember from yesterday’s successes, that we did it before and we can do it again,” he stated.
Fashola said the sooner the nation returned to the path of learning the better for her, adding that it is only by useful knowledge that Nigerians would be liberated.
Nigerians, the governor said, must learn to place more value on what people know and what they can do than what they have and how many titles they hold, adding that such knowledge would liberate the people from ignorance and set them on the path of success as already shown in the course of national development.
“So, learning, clearly, will liberate us. It has shown its value in our development and perhaps as we moved away from learning, whether by accident or by developmental limitations, we have found going forward a little more challenging and I think the quicker we return to learning the better we will be,” he said.
Commenting on the book, during its presentation, Fashola said: “The important things for me today are the perspectives that I shared in the book on Davies’ life and how it reveals very clearly or reaffirms the things that I know about the strategic role of the Islands of Lagos in the history and development of the Nigerian nation and also West Africa as a whole.” d.
He noted that such knowledge and enlightenment as portrayed by the book would enable “those who seek, either out of ignorance or out of mischief or a combination of both, if that is possible, to reverse the history of whom we were and how we got here, to have a rethink.”
The governor gave an insight into the illumination provided by the book on the historical evolution of the country saying, “First, it confirms very clearly to me that but for the resources of Lagos there may never have been a Southern Protectorate amalgamation with the Colony of Lagos.
“And those who have been privileged to read the Memoirs of Lord Lugard would discover that in the memo he wrote seeking authorization to amalgamate the Southern and Northern Protectorates of Nigeria because it was impossible to run the two Protectorates financially. Therefore, they sought to use money generated from Lagos in order to administer the country.”