BLOOMBERG
December 18, 2012
Acaller to Traffic Radio in Lagos, a city that has long been a byword for chaos, pollution and crime, complained that an illegal building blocking a drain is worsening floods in his neighborhood.
“The governor will send a team to take it down,” Billy Ganiyu, a taxi driver, said as he listened to the Nigerian state-run station while stuck in a traffic jam. “He hates that sort of thing.”
That residents of Lagos, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest city, believe the authorities will act on their complaints shows the progress Governor Babatunde Fashola, 49, has made. Re-elected last year with 81 percent of the vote, Fashola is courting residents and investors by building roads, an urban railway, bridges and hospitals, and cutting red tape.
In a city ranked by the Economist Intelligence Unit as the third-worst place to live after Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, it’s working. The success may set Fashola up to bid for the nation’s presidency.
Porsche SE (PAH3), the luxury car-maker, Intercontinental Hotels Group Plc (IHG), Sheraton Holding Corp. and Radisson Hotels International Inc. and supermarket groups, Shoprite Holdings Ltd. (SHP) and Massmart Holdings Ltd. (MSM), have either set up or expanded in Lagos since Fashola took office in 2007. Were it a country, the state economy, which Lagos-based Economic Associates values at $31 billion, would rank along Ethiopia’s as the sub-Saharan Africa’s sixth-biggest, according to International Monetary Fund figures
High Expectations:
Fashola’s government is planning a free-trade zone that will have an international airport, and Philippine operator International Container Terminal Services Inc. (ICT) will run a port there by 2016.
Two years into his second and final four-year term, Fashola is selling bonds to raise funds for infrastructure. Lagos, a city of 22 million people, relies on Nigeria’s oil wealth to finance a third of its budget. That compares with 80 percent for the federal government in Abuja, the capital.
Expectations have grown so high that “if there’s a blip, the impression is you’re slacking,” Fashola, dressed in an open-necked blue shirt, said in an interview at his residence. “Cleaner streets, ability to repair roads in a much more sustainable way, keeping the streets lit up at night when four or five years ago almost all of Lagos was in darkness at night,” he said, listing some of his achievements.
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