Lagos State governor, Babatunde Fashola (SAN), in this interview with newsmen, speaks on the controversy trailing the signing of the state's new traffic law, agitation for state police, the Kuramo beach ocean surge and the developmental strides of his administration. Soji Ajibola brings excerpts:WHAT necessitated the reviewing and signing of the new Lagos traffic law' The new law has become expedient because of the increase in the population of the people and vehicular traffic. Some of the offences being committed on the roads today were not being committed when the population of the state was less than 10 million.Today, we are about 21 million people. In the past, people were not driving against traffic; traffic was somewhat organised, but people at that time were complaining. That was when go-slow started. In Bangkok, Thailand, in 2008, a traffic police man's daily requirement for duty included an umbilical cord clamp for delivering pregnant women held up for several hours on traffic. Now if we continue the way we are going, we will get to the Bangkok experience. We do not want us to get there; that is why we passed this law. We acted because that is the road which we are sure we may be dangerously heading to. We did not just make the law. Two years ago, we called together all these men, we gathered them, some of you were there, and appealed to them. At that time some of our colleagues in other states had banned okada, but we did not ban them because we recognised the alternate use that compelled their existence.Are you saying the issue of traffic grid lock is not peculiar to Lagos' The same traffic that you see here in Lagos, if you remove the non-compliance, the drive against traffic and all that, it is the same traffic that you see in London in the morning and evening; it is the same traffic that you see in New York morning and evening. You see it in San Francisco in the morning and evening; it is called rush hour. The difference between us and those other countries is that we seem to have stopped our efforts to improve our traffic situation; even though we complain that we are held up in traffic everyday, we are the ones propagating it. Traffic congestion is a global phenomenon. The Mayor of New York is imposing a congestion tax while London has the same tax adding. But why should we have congestion tax here because there is no congestion' I don't take taxis in New York because it is better to walk than to drive. I know some of you think we have the worst traffic here but our own is not the worst. Now, those people have congestions in spite of an efficient rail system, an efficient water transportation system and so on. It speaks to superior transport managerial capacity here than there.Is government performing its roles in terms of creating awareness, roads signs and construction of motor parks and roads' You don't build roads overnight and, indeed, if we build 20-lane highways, if you don't value them, if you don't use them properly, they won't serve us well. That is why although the law took effect from 2 August, we have held on very deliberately to pursue awareness. In the last two weeks, we have installed over 15, 000 road signs across the state showing that we mean well. It is all up to us now. This is what defines our prosperity and our civilisation, transportation. It is what defines ultimately how we value ourselves. It determines everything that we do and hope to achieve. If we get it right, all of us will be better for it.What about the timing' This is the right time to test the efficacy of the law. I don't want to catch people; I want people to comply willingly. We have changed our attitude to tax collection simply because we want people to comply willingly and we are better for it today.There are complains against some sections of the law, especially the one forbidding drivers from eating while driving' If someone is killed by a vehicle due to the carelessness of the driver, there is no sanction too great against such a person. Accidents don't take hours before they happen; a second's loss of concentration on the road is enough to cause accident and the damage could be irreversible. If a husband is killed, the woman becomes a widow and that is irreversible. So also, if parents are killed, the children become orphans and that condition is irreversible. I do not know why people are opposed to a law that is made to protect their lives. I do not know. Do we want the Bangkok experience'Is it true that the Eko Atlantic City project is responsible for the ocean surge at Kuramo' The Eko Atlantic City Project is a reclamation of Lagos land that had been washed away over the years by the beach. The area that is housing the project was the place used to be known as the Bar Beach. It was the obstruction of nature through the building of two moles at the Apapa Port that made the sea to wash away the entire community. If you build a mole, you have interrupted that natural flow and that resulted in a situation that the beach started taking away more sand than it was depositing.The Europeans built an automated mechanised system to regulate the sand deposit but when they left, we abandoned it and then the erosion continued without control. The sand replenishment exercise that is going on at Atlantic City now is a restoration of what used to be there before. The state is not expanding but taking back what it has lost.I am happy that we had to remove a property that was blocking the Itirin canal then and it even became an issue during the last governorship election campaigns because it is the Itirin canal that lead to Kuramo and down to the Five Cowries Creeks. If you go to the Mobil house on the Lekki Epe expressway, what that road has done for us is to improve our coastal drainage system.Before now, there was only one, what the engineers refer to as box culvert, at the Mobil House which links Itirin canal into the Five Cowries Creek. We undertook a project to expand it to four. That expansion allowed free passage of water from the Atlantic to discharge into the lagoon.We are carrying out expansion of about 11 roads, including the Lekki /Epe expressway and believesthat by the time we complete all of the projects, places like Silverbird in Lekki that used to flood will easily drain from the Atlantic side because the lagoon is the final drainage. The Five Cowries Creek and the Lagos lagoon drain a substantial part of Lagos up to the Island and the Mainland up to Ikorodu. That is where all our water comes to in high tides. Then at the end of the raining season, the flood recedes.Do you support the agitation for state police'If a referendum is organised in Nigeria today about what choice the people will make about facing abuse from a state-created police or losing loved ones through insecurity, Nigerians would unanimously pitch their tent with the possibility of a police that will abuse the citizen than being exposed to dangers and untimely deaths. The claim that state police will be used for electioneering is gaining currency because no attempt has been made to properly organise elections, thus still needing the heavy presence of police men to monitor elections.Nigeria operates a constitution that creates federal and state government, federal and state legislature, federal and state courts to adjudicate on the laws made by the different levels of parliament. But sadly, there is no state police.Lagos has been rated as the third worst liveable city in the world, do you agree with the ratings'We are too important in the comity of nations to be ignored. Our market, our size, our exposure cannot be wished away. We are bigger than several African countries because our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), by 2010, was 80 billion dollars. I am very sure that the lot of every Lagosian has improved in the past four years.
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