In Nigeria, columnist assesses Tinubu’s reform legacy in Lagos
In Nigeria, public policy adviser Adeola Akinremi reflects in a column on whether President Bola Tinubu will be able to apply at the federal level the governance approach he used as governor of Lagos State. In the author’s view, the main criterion for a politician should be institutions and systems capable of functioning after he leaves office.
As Premium Times Nigeria reports, Akinremi studied at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, where he examined a case study on the transformation of Lagos in 1999–2012. According to the columnist, the experience of reforms in Lagos was also examined by students at Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell universities.
Assessment of reforms in Lagos
The author refers to Tinubu’s 2009 interview with Princeton University, which he gave two years after leaving the Lagos State government. In it, Tinubu described the condition of the state when he took office as governor in 1999: neglected infrastructure, traffic congestion, large volumes of waste, an outdated accounting system, an inflated bureaucracy, and weak revenue administration.
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According to Akinremi’s account, Tinubu called his approach “thinking for change”: first understand the problem, break it down into components, assemble a team, reform the system, and ensure the sustainability of the changes. Tinubu also said that a biometric payroll system made it possible to eliminate thousands of fictitious employees.
Questions for the federal government
The column notes that Tinubu linked reforms to the computerization of public administration, the abandonment of cash payments in tax collection, and more transparent revenue accounting. According to him, Lagos’s monthly revenues, which stood at about 600 million naira at the beginning of his governorship, later grew to billions of naira.
Akinremi emphasizes that Nigeria is far more complex than an individual state because of its different scale, constitutional system, political coalition, and economic constraints. In his view, Tinubu’s presidency should be assessed not only by individual results, but also by whether he leaves behind competent personnel, effective institutions, and a political culture in which professionalism is not replaced by personal loyalty.
