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Governor of Lagos State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, a few days ago, granted a Lagos-based television station an interview where he spoke about a number of issues affecting the state, including how his government is handling reports of imminent terrorist attack on the state. Below are excerpts from the interview.

What would you say to Lagosians as your proactive measures to stop the potential and capacity of criminal elements that want to infiltrate the state?

You know, security is also seen as the bedrock of good governance, because what we preach is that we want to ensure that we protect the people and their property. This was one of the things that we campaigned on.

If you look at my THEMES agenda, the last letter there means security. So, it is not something that we are just waking up to. It is something that we thought of, something that we dreamt, and we knew what to do with it.

However, to answer the question is to look at the security architecture in Lagos. I had the opportunity to be the first interim chairman of the security trust fund that was set up in 2008 and I was part of the board for four years.

Therefore, what you see in Lagos, outside of the regular state police command, is that our government has been able to strengthen, the Rapid Response Squad (RRS).

We have about 2,500 men in the RRS. We also have about 600 men in the Task Force, apart from the fact that we have access to about three MOPOL formations in Lagos. Lagos also has over 15 Area Commanders, about 110 Divisional Police Officers (DPOs). What it means is that in that small space of 3,650 square kilometers, you have this whole entire gamut of security architecture. Therefore, we have three layers of interventions in Lagos. We have the regular police for day-to-day issues. When you have tactical interventions, men of the RRS are usually the ones that you see coming out first. When it has to do with a direct intervention from the Governor’s Office, you can also see the men of the Task Force.

In the last three and a half years, we have also been supporting all the security agencies in the state, not only the police. We have given them over 260 vehicles in the last three years. We have extended similar gestures to other security forces like the Nigerian Army, the Nigerian Navy and the Nigerian Air Force under Operation OPMESA.

We also support them with equipment because we know that security is not something that is cheap. Hence, it is not something that we are starting today. It is something we started since day one.

We are not waiting for anybody to ensure that we do what we need to do in Lagos to make sure that they are motivated, with the required equipment to work with, as well as logistics support and wherewithal and access to me.

That is what has helped us to speak to the issues and deal with them in the aspect of architecture. As I said, what we have done is to come out of the regular police architecture to other security agencies in Lagos like the NDLEA, civil defence corps, correctional facilities, Nigeria Immigration Service and the Neighborhood Watch that we also have.

The tripod is now activated to see something and say something. This is to ensure that everybody has the responsibility to ensure that whatever is noticed or observed in our respective neighbourhoods is escalated to the appropriate authorities.

Those are some of the things that we agreed to. We need to share information. It is not about one person presiding over all the information. We are also taking it to the citizens, especially via CDCs and our CDAs, so that we can have access to intelligence.

The EndSARS violence gave Lagos out on how porous the city could be. When we talk about intelligence, what other digital means are being deployed to secure the city?

For obvious reasons, I will not go into details about this, but we are working with the Department of State Service (DSS) who have the primary role for intelligence. They are the ones that comb the nooks and crannies. I get telephone calls and text messages almost on a daily basis that I share with them. We are deploying a smart city intervention in the state. We are about the only ones that are doing it aggressively and we are installing close to 2,000 CCTV cameras all around the city. We are turning some of them into traffic management.

We are building a new data centre for this kind of implementation. However, I cannot begin to give the full details for obvious reasons. We are going to be making this available to the DSS so that they can also review some of these things and have access, too. It is a walk in the park and it is something that the citizens need to be reassured about.

You did a ban on okada, and security is one of the reasons. Are you sticking to that or extending it further? Do you see any more danger in the usage of okada in Lagos?

The only land border I have is with Ogun State. The other one that I have is the Atlantic Ocean. We have a joint commission where we do things around fiscal planning approval, transportation approval, and security issues. However, to speak directly to the okada thing, we have seen tremendous improvement in the areas where it has been banned.

In fact, people have written to me to commend me. Not only are we seeing a drop in issues around security and traffic robbery. We do not see people being maimed, cutting of limbs in hospitals again. Therefore, we have seen tremendous improvement in that area.

Do you have the statistics to support that?

In terms of the rate of mortality in the last two months, at the peak of it, we were seeing about 550 okada-related accidents per month in January-February. Now, it has come down to 100 direct accidents that we have seen from our hospitals. The number has significantly gone down. One thing we have told the RRS is that we need to have a lot of pin-down positions, because it is easy to maneuver and do all sorts with okada. Therefore, they do a lot of pin down and pedestrian monitoring. They just need to park and walk around.

You have been criticised as perhaps the only governor in the whole of the South-West to downplay the role of the Amotekun security network, which some have said has worked very well in other parts of the region. The reason, according to the critics, is because of politics. Would you consider activating the security outfit?

It is a great initiative. It is a great idea and I was part of it. I even gave them the template in terms of the law. We have the Lagos State Neighborhood Watch. These almost 7,000 men have been trained and energised. They are working on a day-to-day basis in the state. It is not about the colour of the uniform. It is about efficiency and effective security. We believe that they are working closely with the Nigeria Police Force.

I get important information on a weekly basis on almost all nooks and crannies. They escalate these things to the police, and that is one of the things that have helped us to be able to directly intervene and meet some of the things that you probably also would not have been aware of because I get the report on a daily basis.

The other South-West governors are my brothers and we conceived it (Amotekun) together. We thought of it as a boundary intervention. The issue there is, something happens in Ekiti and you run to Ondo. We said okay, let us set up something to police the borders. We are not throwing away the police. In fact, I am borderless with Ogun. We are closer to Kara and Mowe than Abeokuta. We do the interventions actually. The last time we had a broken down truck, it was handled by our own LASEMA. Just this morning, at 4.35, in Sango Ota, there was a 40-feet truck that slipped off. It was LASEMA that sorted that.

How do you detect if there is an infiltrator that is coming into Lagos. For example, there was a time there was a truckload of possible infiltrators?

One of the things that we did at the last security meeting was that we pushed a physical stop and search into Ogun State because there is no place on the expressway where they can do anything.

How much of registration of residents and citizens of Lagos do you have? How can you digitally identify people?

Three weeks ago, we launched the LASRRA card. This is like the highest digital citizens card in the country. We launched it three weeks ago.

How much of that do you have on your database?

We have about six million Lagosians out of over 20 million registered in the database.

How long do you think it will take to capture all citizens of Lagos?

It is something that the people also need to embrace. That is why communication is key.

Could it come to a point that you will have to enforce that?

We will enforce it to the extent that you may not be able to get some government services.

You are spending a lot of money on rail services in Lagos. The question is, how secure will those be now as a proactive measure, considering the terrorist attack on an Abuja-Kaduna train in March?

What we are doing is different from the Abuja- Kaduna rail. Why? This is an intra city rail network. It is not intercity; it is not a 300-kilometer rail. What we need to do is to ensure that in each of your train stations, you have sufficient CCTV cameras and keep records properly.

How is your payment system? Is your payment system something that you can track at the back end?

As customers, you are not going to pay cash. On the counter, you must have a prepaid card and the rest of it. These are some of the things that, in our view, will deter would-be criminals because they will not be passengers as that will deter them. Secondly, the entire rail tracks are going to be fenced up. We are insulating them from possible attacks. They are going to be walled off.

Vehicles are not going to be cutting those rail tracks. We have done bridges in Mushin, Ikeja, Yaba and Apapa Road and that is the kind of thing that is also going to happen on Red Rail. The Blue Line from Mile 2 to Orile to National Trade Fair has been walled off completely. We are going to do the same on the Red Line.

It is understood that you got some of the coaches from Wisconsin in the United States.

No, we got the red line from Milwaukee. Interestingly, those trains were meant to be from Milwaukee to Chicago. It is a short haul but something happened and we were able to pick it. The other sets, for the Blue Line, are coming from China. Both of them are ready.

When is the Red Line supposed to be flagged off?

The Blue Line will be up by December, while the Red Line will be on by the first quarter of next year. But the entire infrastructure will be ready by the end of the year.

Where does the Blue Line start and where does it terminate?

The first phase starts from Mile 2 and terminates at Marina. Marina is the iconic station for the Blue Line. The phase two of it will now push back from Mile 2 all the way to Okokomaiko.

The beauty of the phase two is that it is at the ground level. There is no overhead. Therefore, it is going to be faster and quicker and the corridor is there to lay the tracks and finish it.

For the Red Line, it starts from Agbado, which is outside Lagos, to Iju, Agege, Oshodi, Mushin, Yaba and Ebute Metta. The phase two of that one will get to Marina sometime in the future.

People talk about Kenya people talk about Nairobi. So, yeah, I am trying to talk about one in Ethiopia. Go and ask, it is a sovereign that is doing it, not Addis Ababa. We have been very creative in our financing. There is a lot of budgetary planning but we are very creative about it. Let me also tell you about the loan: Single digit, eight-year plan. You cannot get it anywhere.

Where did you get it from, Nigeria?

We got it from local banks. I am very impressed with them. We are all stakeholders and they are with us on the journey.

Let us talk about the Apapa gridlock. Would you say you have had a successful intervention in the situation there?

I am looking straight into the camera and I can boldly say that I have fixed Apapa gridlock. NPA has written letters to commend us. All of the major businesses in Apapa have equally written. I get daily video recordings of what is happening in Apapa.

What used to take two, three hours now takes them 15-20 minutes. But what is the remainder of the problem? The Federal Government is doing the route from Sunrise at MTN from the Mile 2 end and going towards Apapa. That is a portion that has not been completed. I think it is a stretch not more than a kilometer. That stretch needs to be completed for you to have a complete cleanup.

However, we still have trailers on some of these routes and you have to realise the ethos system that the NPA has set up, which is actually working. But there has been a lot of sabotage amongst them. That is number one. Number two is that they do not have enough trailer parks that can take these trucks off the road. We are building one for them by Orile. We have signed a concession with someone, which is to relieve about 2,500 off the road.

One of the things we say is that if you have an effective call-up system, what you should do is that if your truck has not been called, you don’t have any business coming into the Apapa area. That is the only thing that has not been fully implemented.

Secondly, inside the terminals, Apapa and Tin Can ports, when they ask trailers to come, like 300, they need to have enough space in their facility to take those trailers inside their facility, and not leave them on the road.

These are the conversations that we are trying to clean up with them. Once you give an instruction, say, ‘at nine o’clock, I want 200 trailers to move’. You must ensure that you have enough space in your terminal to take all the 200 off the road and put them in your facility so that once they drop their containers, they can leave. Those are the little glitches that we need to finalise with them. But in terms of the real blockades where citizens or residents or businesses cannot access Apapa, we have done a good job.

There is a bit of remnant towards Iponri and Orile. There are still trucks there.

They are there because Sifax is also there. They are a container terminal.  They are supposed to get into their facility. Part of the problem is that a lot of them do not have enough parking inside their facility so they end up taking the tailback on the road.

We also need to fix the road approaching Ijora Bridge by the Federal Comptroller. We are just waiting for them to do it. If they do not fix it, we are going to raise funds to fix it. That part also slows them down. Those are the two challenges. All of them need to ensure that they have enough parking to take their trailers out of the road.

Lagos is becoming impossible with gridlock these days and one question will be maybe because of construction in some areas. But if you look at the Lekki axis, it is horrendous. What is happening in that area? Do you have a solution to this gridlock?

Everybody wants a bridge but nobody wants it to be in front of his house. You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. The Lekki corridor is the highest developed real estate sector in the whole of Africa in the last 10 years. It has ballooned at a rate that is unimaginable. But what are we doing? We are not a government about excuses. We need to fix it and we are fixing it. What have we done? From the stretch of the first roundabout to Ajah, we have cleaned up the entire phase. We removed all the roundabouts, which usually tail back to roundabouts that do have traffic signals which people obey.

The place where traffic now starts from is Chevron, towards Ajah, and I take responsibility because what we are trying to do is to get them off the road. We are building a 9.6 kilometer regional route that comes from VGC. That is good to go all the way to Ajiran. It has a bridge that covers water as well and drops them at Freedom Road.

That is the reason for the discomfort in the last five or six months. And the good news is that you know the piers are out, that means the hands of the bridge. It has to have an over-cliff when it comes on the Lekki Expressway. It is 40-50 meters down.

Has Lagos recovered from the aftermath of EndSARS?

There are two sides to it. I would say that we have recovered psychological from it, but we are still working out the infrastructural recovery. Infrastructure is not something that will you fix in one day.

For example, the major court, we are turning it into a 15-storey edifice that will take about 60 courts at once. That is the kind of imposing structure that we are bringing back to Igbosere High Court, and this will take time. But in terms of the psychology of it, I believe that my citizens and myself are out of it. We have learned our lessons. There was a collateral damage that you know we had nothing to do with.

Young people and the metropolitan residents of Lagos are talking tough about how the EndSARS movement will affect the new wave of political movement in the country. Are you shaken by that?

Time heals. In the last few years, people have become more discerning. We are not taking anybody for granted and we are not leaving anything to chance. Conversations are going on and what they want is not about what has happened; it is about what the government is doing to improve the lot of each one of us. It is about what opportunity this person has given to us as young people for us to be able to flourish, and get to the highest level of whatever profession we find ourselves. That is the conversation we are having.

That is what we are doing. Take my cabinet for instance, the Commissioner for Finance is 34, while the Commissioner for Agriculture is 38, and the Special Adviser on Innovation and Technology is 33.

Have you been able to quench the anger from the EndSARS protest?

It is work in progress. Everybody will have one thing or the other that they want. The generality of our citizens who are young people feel feel us. We have trained over 400,000 in digital skills alone in Lagos, because that is what they want. I have enabled many people with LASRIC, which is the Lagos State Research, where we are giving them grants on innovation on technology. We are not asking for money.

We are not leaving anything to chance. It is work in progress. We are ensuring that we are talking to all stakeholders. We are collaborating with them. Lagos came out of COVID-19 successfully. Nobody talks about that. We take it for granted. It was a very difficult time for the government. You know what? We saved this nation. I lost people. The deputy governor lost his brother. I lost a sitting senator. I lost an honourable House of Assembly member. However, we came out of it stronger and bolder.

Do you think Lagosians will vote you back into office?

They have seen the experience. At 3.00 a.m., whom would you call? A man that has experience, that has been there, whose his hands have been dirty with sleeves rolled up to keep the biggest city in the country, the city that has given the best opportunities on a continuous basis for three years, safe.

That is Babajide Olushola Sanwo-Olu.

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate, Olajide ‘Jandor’ Adediran, has picked a popular Nollywood actor, Funke Akindele, as his running mate and that has caused some waves in the state. Do you see that as a threat in any way?

As I said, if you have an emergency at 3.00 a.m., whom would you call? What are your chances? Do you call the man that understands what the issues are, appreciates the challenge you have at that 3.00 a.m. and even gives you a chance? Or would you call someone that does not even know where the dial is, or what the issues of governance are? This is Lagos. This is an informed audience. This is not a tea party. We are talking about real governance. We are talking about the lives of over 20 million Nigerians. We are talking about an economy that is bigger than the economies of Ghana and Kenya. Lagos, in itself, is a country. It is not a circus; it is a real thing. I do not want to disparage anyone. I have the greatest respect for all the candidates that have emerged and the candidates of the particular party you are talking about. But the governance of Lagos is not a trial-and-error stuff.

Are you willing to debate the issues of Lagos State as regards running this race?

The governance of Lagos is not trial and error. You need to hit the ground running. I know the name of all my 65-or-so permanent secretaries. I know their ministries. I know their pedigrees.

So, you are the man Lagosians should vote for?

I believe that we have earned a lot, not because we are talking it but because we have done it.

We understand that Lagos IGR is in the region of N50 billion per month.  The question is that, what do you have to show for it?

That is a very fair question. What we have to show for it is that on a monthly basis, I manage the emergency of the city. Today alone, four emergencies have been reported. I have recruited over 650 firemen. I have bought 64 new trucks and I will invite you for their commissioning.

I spent over a billion naira to take off the refuse in Lagos. We are creating a sanitary landfill site. That is what we are doing. We are building 16-18 kilometers of rigid pavement route that runs into tens of billions. We are building the biggest market in the country in Lagos. That is what we are doing.

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