Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State on Tuesday publicly presented the state’s Development Plan 2012-2025, stating that quite a number of the items that
form the bedrock of the development pan are already in progress.
The governor, who publicly presented the document at the Banquet Hall of the Lagos House, Ikeja, before an august gathering that included the All Progressives
Congress (APC) governorship candidate in Lagos State, Akinwunmi Ambode, added that infrastructure is being built to redress the infrastructure deficit that the state has suffered.
He explained that the investment pillars upon which the Development Plan is being implemented is the people for whom it is also all about, stressing that everybody
has a part to play in its realisation.
He added that the development plan document is about the vision for the future and how it would affect the Lagos mega city which he explained only describes the
reality that Lagos has a very large population which could be a burden or an asset.
According to the governor, the population size has been turned into an asset with the support of the people.
“That is why for a state like Lagos irrespective of what happens to the price of oil, this state would survive because it has been built not on extractive resources but on the very strong immigrants that make up the human resource of this state”.
“Different people from all over the world have a place here so long as they have content and quality to provide. Our developmental partners feel at home, our international community feels at home with this place because they bring value to our table.”
Noting that the mega city status came with clear challenges, Fashola said that the identified challenges were those areas in which the administration set clear targets
and worked assiduously to address.
“So for me Lagos being a mega city yes, but we asked ourselves then what kind of mega city can we hope to survive without infrastructure, without water supply, without power supply and what kind of quality of life would those people live with the degraded kind of environment and what kind of megacity would we have been
talking about if the criminals should rob the banks everyday without response from the law enforcement agencies”, he explained.
He explained that what the administration did was to set very modest targets that would ensure that Lagos led Africa first by being Africa’s model city, adding that today by many measures in terms of crime management and security, Lagos has already achieved that comparably in Africa.
