History, when it takes its seat, often reclines first in small corners before it expands to inhabit the entire stage. Lagos, that restless city by the lagoon, has long been Nigeria’s crucible of contradictions: chaos and creativity, poverty and plenty, dysfunction and dynamism, all colliding in a theatre that refuses to collapse. It was within this cauldron that Bola Ahmed Tinubu, two decades past, tested the fibres of governance and discovered a template a template now poised for national transplantation.
Lagos was no easy pupil. She was a city of ungovernable traffic, untamed revenue, and unyielding scepticism. Yet under Tinubu’s hand, the chaos became clay. He carved institutions where none existed, restructured revenue collection from leaky buckets to pipelines of accountability, invested in roads and mass transit, re-imagined waste management, and created the bedrock of Lagos’ financial independence. The city ceased to crawl on all fours and began, however haltingly, to stand erect, a metropolis with renewed confidence in its future.
It was a lesson in audacity: that leadership is not the art of appeasement but of confrontation, confronting entrenched systems, outdated practices, and timid thinking. When federal allocations were withheld, Lagos invented survival. When the courts and politics threatened paralysis, Lagos birthed innovation. This is the spirit Tinubu now seeks to lift from the lagoon and cast across the length and breadth of the federation.
The Lagos template is not mere mimicry; it is a philosophy: revenue as the bloodline of reform, institutions as the bones, and people as the heart. It is the insistence that government must outgrow the cup-in-hand mentality and become architect of its own prosperity. Imagine, then, a Nigeria where states, like Lagos, command their destinies by harnessing internal revenues, strengthening judicial independence, investing in education, and cultivating a culture of accountability. Such a federation would not merely survive, it would flourish.
But Lagos was also a parable of resilience. Every reform attracted resistance, every innovation birthed suspicion. Yet the city endured, and its people adjusted, until what was once strange became standard. This is the national lesson: reform is rarely embraced at birth, but its fruits silence the doubters in due season. As Lagosites learned to see the dividends of a disciplined system, so too must Nigerians brace for the turbulence of national transformation.
The challenge of scale, however, is real. Lagos, though massive, is but one state; Nigeria, by contrast, is a sprawling mosaic of 36 fiefdoms, each with its own stubborn habits, each resisting central choreography. Scaling the Lagos model demands adaptation, negotiation, and courage. Yet is that not the very grammar of federalism harmonizing difference into a single national song?
The Lagos template also speaks in symbols. It tells the Nigerian youth that their city, once dismissed as ungovernable, could be tamed by deliberate leadership. It tells the world that Nigeria, often portrayed as chaos incarnate, can, through structure and persistence, be re-scripted into a story of order and growth. Lagos, in this narrative, becomes not just geography but prophecy.
Let the doubters pause and recall: the BRT buses that crawl across the city today were once laughed into scorn. The electronic tax system, now commonplace, was once dismissed as impossible. Lagos taught us that what begins as ridicule may end as reform, that patience and persistence can convert scepticism into acceptance. Nigeria now stands where Lagos once stood: at the threshold of transformation that demands both sacrifice and imagination.
The task before Tinubu is not to clone Lagos, but to transpose its spirit to spread across the federation the gospel of fiscal independence, the creed of institutional strength, and the ethic of bold innovation. If Lagos could survive its own contradictions and rise to become Africa’s commercial nerve centre, then Nigeria, on a grander scale, can confront its demons and emerge as the colossus of the continent.
From Lagos to the nation, the journey is not of geography but of governance. The lagoon city was rehearsal; the federation is now the stage. And as history watches, one truth resounds: a template tested in adversity can, if faithfully scaled, become the foundation upon which a nation recasts its destiny.
–Adejumo Abayomi
