So the issue of Local Government Areas in Lagos State has cropped up again.
According to the constitution, there are 20 LGAs in Lagos State. During his 8 years in office, former governor Bola Tinubu ostensibly created 37 LGAs by carving 17 new LGAs out of the existing 20.
You may recall Tinubu and then-President Olusegun Obasanjo had what amounted to a running battle for supremacy in Lagos and the broader "South-west" (long story, Afenifere/AD opposing Obasanjo in 1999, then turning around to support him in 2003, then getting double-crossed by him and more or less wiped out politically, leaving Tinubu as the last-man-standing against PDP domination).
Time passed, current Governor Babatunde Fashola took over Lagos. He is part of Tinubu's political machine, and Lagos (city and state) have benefitted somewhat from the continuity in policy-making. It would be nice if there was a viable opposition in the State Assembly, to keep an eye on finances, on the rising debt profile, and to give the government a reason to put a social face on the upheavals necessary to fix the mega-city (right now, they can bulldoze your home, school or business and not have to worry about losing an election if they don't compensate you properly, or give adequate support to alternatives).
At the federal level, President Umaru Yar'Adua took over. His predecessor was probably hoping to pull the strings from behind the stage, but Yar'Adua has since declared his independence. But as positive as it was to ditch a number of problematic policies and projects that defined the Obasanjo regime, Yar'Adua has not done anything that could be said to define the Yar'Adua administration.
In all this time, nothing was said really about the "new" LGAs in Lagos. The issue was still open, as neither the federal government, nor Tinubu (and Fashola, his hand-picked successor) had conceded the point.
It looks like the issue might pick up again, but only by a little bit. Without meaning offence to anyone, I perceive Yar'Adua and Fashola to be much more urbane, cultured, gentlemanly and civilized than their respective predecessors. I am not surprised that they quickly moved to tone down the rhetoric (as opposed to Obasanjo and Tinubu, who were wrestling in the marketplace).
What really annoys me is BOTH SIDES ARE WRONG.
We should not be arguing about whether Lagos should have 20 or 37 LGAs.
We should be debating how best to reduce the number of third-tier government zones from 774 LGAs to 84 districts. In other words, we should neither be maintaining the status quo, nor expanding it ... we should be REDUCING it.
In the future, restructured Nigeria, the mega-city would most likely form a single district as part of a state embracing what is today called the "South-west" (which would be one of 7 states).
Some might claim that this district government could conceivably govern the city via 37 sub-divisions (for lack of a beter term) organized as departments within the district government, but even then it makes no sense to slice-and-dice the city into atomic bits and pieces designed to create opportunities for patronage politics, to reward supporters with political offices and bureaucracies that do not need to exist.
Frankly, even 20 sub-divisions would be too many. The city is a densely packed, highly interconnected web of hyper-urban settlements that need to be administered in a coordinated way. The lowest tier of organized budgeting and planning cannot be atomic in size.
Something between five (if we want to be fiscally sound) and eight (if we have to pander to politics) sub-divisions would work out a lot better than 37 or 20.
This issue might seem irrelevant to you, but it is symptomatic of a broader problem in Nigerian socio-politics, which is that we are perennially and incessantly arguing with (and even fighting) each other over THE WRONG THINGS. We get really worked up, really outraged, and really upset if we lose. Meanwhile, win, lose or draw, we have yet to scratch the surface of what we really should have been DOING, as in actually DOING it, not even the preliminary phase of DEBATING how to do it.
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