The Most Uninteresting Man in Lagos

Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s ascent to the Lagos State House in Marina was arguably the most coordinated campaign drive in Nigeria since 1999. After his predecessor, Akinwunmi Ambode, fell out with former governor of Lagos and political godfather, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in rather inexplicable circumstances, Sanwo-Olu was selected from the fringes to contest for, and eventually serve as governor. An erstwhile chief executive officer of the Lagos State Property Development Commission, Sanwo-Olu harnessed his academic experience at the Lagos and London Business Schools to thrive in the murky business of executive governance. Prior to running for governor, he cut his political teeth in 2003 when he was appointed as a special adviser on corporate matters to the then deputy governor of Lagos State, Femi Pedro. He was made the acting commissioner for economic planning and budget in Lagos in 2007, after which he was appointed as the commissioner for commerce and industry in Lagos by then-governor, Tinubu. However, it was the deft manner in which Sanwo-Olu campaigned for the governor’s office that truly showed his political mettle. Lagosians reflected on his campaign for turning him from a complete stranger into an ‘omnipresent daily acquaintance’. People swore that they saw Sanwo-Olu’s faces in their bathrooms in the lead-up to the 2019 Lagos governorship election. 

In under four years after his meteoric rise to the number one office in Lagos, Sanwo-Olu seems to have lost the factors that made him politically exciting—from the topsy-turvy nature of his emergence as APC’s Lagos gubernatorial candidate in 2018, to the all-pervasive campaign that followed. The Nigerian digital media sphere is replete with snarky disdain for him. Not only is there is an irreverent account on Instagram with the handle @ogunpunishsanwoolu, the search entry ‘God punish Sanwoolu’ on Twitter, reveals a barrage of spiritually related invectives directed at the sitting governor of Lagos, a uber-religious metropolis. A-list Lagos celebrities have spoken of being repulsed by the governor; and some other stars have told the governor his rallying cries are a ‘disrespectful joke’. 

It is not that Sanwo-Olu has not recorded considerable gains as Lagos’ governor, however his public profile has deteriorated in the 43 months that he has been governor of Lagos State. The highlight of Sanwo-Olu’s administration is considered to be his ‘methodical handling’ of the COVID-19 breakout  in Lagos, when he acted swiftly to institute the ‘Incident Command System For The Novel Coronavirus’ more than three weeks before Lagos recorded its first case of COVID-19. During this time, the governor drove the COVID-19 response capacity of the state by increasing the isolation centre bed capacity, drumming up vigilance for strict screening and improving contact tracing, case management and public order efforts. Lagos also rapidly enacted the Coronavirus Pandemic Emergency Law (2020) to legally stop the spread of COVID-19 in the state and the state’s public outreach through relief packages and media campaigns during this time were commendable. 

A lot of the general contempt for Sanwo-Olu can be traced to his fence-sitting during the #EndSARS protests of October 2020, and the attendant Lekki Toll Gate shootings. Other contributory factors to the governor’s rising unpopularity, especially among Lagos’ youthful population of savvy digital natives, include the mounting evidence of the scale of state capture being perpetuated in Lagos, concerns around the state’s  ‘weaker’ financial risk profile amidst a rising debt burden, the deepening Lagos culture of disregard for the rule of law by state, non-state and extra-state actors, the reverberating grim legacy of the Lekki Toll Gate shootings and, perhaps the worst of all, the growing fallibility of Bola Tinubu—Lagos State’s established political godfather and the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC)—who is up against mounting allegations of frailty and drug trafficking. 

As Sanwo-Olu contests for a second term as governor of Lagos State with a backdrop of starkly differing narratives and perceptions, to what extent can he maintain the political gravitas necessary to avoid a similar fate as his predecessor?