To assert that Lagos is a state that caters to the needs of all Nigerians is re-emphasising a fact. The deputy governor of Lagos State, Dr Obafemi Hamzat, has much to say regarding this fact in his latest TV interview. His promo poster before the interview had the theme “Communicating Governance.” Now, it happened that effective communication between the government and citizens as well as receiving useful feedback was something I called attention to on this page in July. As such, Hamzat’s poster caught my attention when I saw it. But, do I think Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s deputy communicates to us what the Lagos State government has been up to over the past five years?
There were different aspects to this interview – governance, education, economy, transportation, skills acquisition, housing, flooding, etc. In the end, I was like, how come we didn’t get to hear about some of the things he spoke about? It’s an important question in a clustered information space which requires that governments consciously make efforts to be heard. Actually, governments have become the least speakers many citizens want to hear, and that makes the challenge to get citizens to know what governments are doing very difficult. It’s even more so in the case of Lagos State where people and everything else appear determined to move at the speed of light. People simply have so many things they pay attention to. Across the nation, there’s the prevalent culture of everyone hooked on entertainment.
In homes maybe only the father is keen to watch the news, everyone else is for Nollywood. On campuses, football matches – preview commentary, the main match, and even post-match highlights – are watched in the common room in male hostels more than our news stations. In female hostel common rooms, TV channels are tuned to Bollywood and Nollywood. This situation was such that while I was running programmes on some campuses, I ensured I had my own TV decoder in my hostel room. When I travel, as a precautionary measure, I move into hotel rooms with a portable TV monitor, TV decoder, and the kind of antenna that picks signals by just placing it near a window. Of course, as a news hunter, I need to listen to the news.
In the event, I closely follow the activities of our governments. I see what the Lagos State government does in the area of transportation – the railway, the ferry boat, the plan to replace small ‘Korope’ passenger buses on selected roads, the accusation by transporters that the government wants to take from them the money that is available in this sector, and the rest of it. What I didn’t see are many of the empowerment programmes that transformed the lives of citizens and which Hamzat talked about. For me, this is a critical area of governance that I expect every government to focus on in a holistic manner. Governments need to against the backdrop of the high rate of unemployment, lack of gainful employment, youth unemployment, spiralling inflation, downturn in purchasing power of many citizens, and the sense of hopelessness which many indigent citizens display.
This situation makes me have the view that the best government is the one that invests in the lives of our people. Human capital is our best asset so we need to pick our citizens up and get them to be economically productive. In return, when citizens operate at their best economic, educational, skill levels and capacities, the government benefits. There’ll be a less disposition to be involved in criminality. The insecurity challenge will be less, youth restiveness will be less, and only a few youths will engage in vices such as drug abuse. Investment in human capital by the government is actually cheaper than expending resources to deal with insecurity and the rest of the challenges. Investing, and developing physical infrastructure is good. Investing, developing citizens is the better deal. For the same citizens shall yet develop the economy along with the needed physical infrastructure. On the other hand, citizens left undeveloped can be a threat to physical infrastructure.
So each time different tiers of government say what they are doing to lift our people, I pay attention. I believe it’s the high point of anything a government is doing and what it has to say. It must be about the people, the people, the people. I was therefore keen to hear Hamzat “communicate governance” that time, and for this reason moved forward a regular 9 pm activity of mine in order to watch his interview. I wanted to hear him say what the Lagos State government had been doing directly for the teeming population of Lagos aside from the impressive huge physical infrastructure that I have seen. The snippets in this regard that Hamzat had the time to mention were memorable. A company wanted to import welders for a project. The Lagos State government raised an eyebrow. Import welders? The company said there were no welders with the kind of expertise needed for the project.
The Lagos State government subsequently set up a training centre and gave hundreds of people the specific training. The company took the trained welders, paid them almost a million naira per month, and many of them have since been employed by other companies. In the event, hundreds of citizens who would have been left at the bottom of the economic ladder were given the opportunity to climb, as Hamzat explained. The Lagos State government establishes a university to train more medical personnel. These may find their way out of the country, Hamzat says, but the government is determined to continue to train more, after all, they are our people and the more doctors we produce the better for us.
In local government councils, there are training centres. When the government called for a limited number of people to come forward for training in skills acquisition in a specific field, thousands turned up. It meant that people did hear about what the government wanted to do, Hamzat said, and they came to benefit from it. Due to the large turnout of people for many of its skills acquisition programmes, the government plans to set up more centres. From my standpoint, this is good news. But the more interesting part is how the government includes everyone in its programmes, every Nigerian from every state of the country. This is something that doesn’t always happen in most states. Whatever empowerment measures their governments have are for their people alone, as though people from other states aren’t Nigerians who deserve to be lifted and from there the state where they reside can benefit.
As I’ve stated already, one thing that’s clear from Hamzat’s interview is that much of what the Lagos State government is doing to empower and lift people up isn’t heard in the public space. This needs to be addressed. There’s a need to communicate governance to citizens in a proactive manner. It should be deliberate, systematic, and consistent. From what Hamzat has said, I think the government has good content that it should bring to the ears of its citizens. But how it should be packaged and put it out is an issue that requires attention. In the world of governance, effective communication is crucial. It ensures that information is clear and accessible, promoting trust between the government and the public. It aids in citizen engagement, and clear, straightforward communication in governance is crucial to building a more informed society. I took note that Hamzat admitted that their administration might need “to communicate better” to improve in the aspect of communicating its activities. “It’s always good to have feedback, that’s a good thing,” he added.
Significantly, feedback is an item in the cycle we draw in political science to depict the process of governance. And it’s especially important for the Lagos State government that has the task of catering to the needs of all Nigerians under its umbrella, as well as the unenviable task of managing ethnic distrust, and the disaffection for government instigated by some provocateurs. Do I think Hamzat communicated governance pertaining to his state at that time? I believe his ability for lucidness, the wisdom exhibited in thought and presentation, as well as those facts and figures at his fingertips, attest to it. Close to one hour that I spent attentively listening to him was a time well spent.
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