Hamzat’s references

Kadiri Obafemi Hamzat, the deputy governor and the APC’s candidate, opened the Lagos governorship debate on Sunday night by declining to treat it as a debate. He took it, he said, as a job interview, and the first question any employer asks of an applicant for serious responsibility is what he has done to prepare for it. The line was plain, almost domestic, yet it moved the contest from the ground of what a candidate feels about Lagos to the ground of what he has done for it. The Nigeria Debate Consortium, a coalition of Channels Television, TVC News, The PUNCH, The Cable and Vanguard, had gathered the four principal candidates at The Hub by IALA in Lekki, and for most of the evening the room tested that distinction without ever naming it.

Max Weber named it in his 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation”. The politician of conviction answers for the purity of his intentions; the politician of responsibility answers for the foreseeable consequences of what he does. Weber called politics a strong and slow boring of hard boards, which describes administration far better than it describes oratory. A debate is an oratorical form and therefore leans towards conviction. Hamzat’s achievement was to haul it towards responsibility.

His rivals brought ideas worth hearing, too. Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour of the ADC spoke of two decades of bad governance and promised 100,000 housing units, funded in part by taxing luxury. Funso Doherty of the NDC promised education that is truly free and blamed vested agbero interests for the gridlock. Engr. Deji Doherty of the PDP promised to cancel taxes on teachers and doctors and warned about the cost of servicing the state’s debt. The reports I have read record these promises and say little about their costing. A promise made from opposition is a pure product of conviction, because nobody has to build it. Set Rhodes-Vivour’s 100,000 units in four years against the 18,000 Hamzat says the state delivered in eight. The opposition will say that 18,000 units in eight years shows how far Lagos has fallen behind its need, and it is entitled to say so. The comparison still measures something: a record can be audited, and a promise cannot, until land, finance and construction have tested it. An incumbent is the only candidate whose homework can be marked, and that is a case for hiring him, not against. The Yoruba put the rest plainly: “ afenu wa oko kii’jaamu” and “enu dun rofo”. Criticism is easy from the stands, and it acquires a price only when its author is put where the heat falls on the one who must deliver.

Hamzat answered with a ledger, and it was a confident one. His blueprint, “Jacob’s Promise,” rests on seven pillars and 100 pledges, many of them carrying numbers. He proposed to expand the BRT fleet from about 1,000 buses to 4,000 running on compressed natural gas, with a target of a million passengers a day, to add 77 electric ferries, and to complete and expand the Blue and Red rail lines. He promised a mortgage arrangement requiring an initial payment of 10 to 25 per cent, and stricter enforcement of the law limiting advance rent to one year. None of this is poetry. These are the countable measures by which citizens judge whether a government has kept faith, and he put them forward with the assurance of a man who expects to be measured. A candidate who names his figures in public shows that he trusts his own arithmetic. A candidate who offers a ledger welcomes the audit.

A ledger of pledges is only half a reference. The other half is on the record. Hamzat entered public service in 2005 as Commissioner for Science and Technology, and from 2011 to 2015 he was Commissioner for Works and Infrastructure, during which the Lekki-Ikoyi Link Bridge, Nigeria’s first cable-stayed bridge, opened in 2013. As deputy governor since 2019 he has served in a government whose Blue Line began commercial operations in September 2023 and whose Red Line was commissioned in February 2024. His rivals may dispute the weight of that record, but they cannot say he arrived with nothing to show.

Hard questions came his way, and he met them. Rhodes-Vivour asked why Lagos’s high internally generated revenue is not felt by its residents, a fair question that any serious government should welcome. Flooding is the charge every Lagos administration must answer, and Hamzat defended the state’s drainage network, which he called “fantastic.” The defence is strongest when set beside the figures, and figures are the answer a responsible government gives. On 7 November, after inspecting Odo Iya Alaro, Surulere and the Osborne Foreshore, Environment Commissioner Tokunbo Wahab said flood mitigation had recorded between 75 and 80 per cent success and the target was 90 to 95. That is the government’s own metric, stated publicly for anyone to test, and a government that sets its target beside its success shows that it expects to be measured. Rhodes-Vivour’s most pointed line on waste, as Vanguard reported it, was that Lagos has a waste-pick-and-dump system and not waste management. It concedes, however, that the refuse is being picked up, a duty too often left undone in the state next door.

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Ogun’s own environment shows what is at stake when that duty fails. Refuse outlasts every collection exercise there; drains have been converted into dustbins, and the Panseke median, directly in front of the market, is a standing exhibit. Three weeks ago, driving to Ibadan for a friend’s wedding, I watched a truck discharge faecal waste near the Sagamu Interchange. An offence visible to any passing motorist should not require a viral video before the relevant authorities act, and I have seen no report of anyone being prosecuted for it. When an offence needs no investigation and still goes unpunished, the statute book has ceased to be the problem. What is missing is an official who is paid, equipped and willing to enforce it. Ogun’s waste-management authority, OGWAMA, and the Ministry of Environment have too often seemed to be elsewhere, and complaints about drains, dumps and roads travel up the chain of government and meet silence, until a hashtag or a viral video makes the silence expensive.

Lagos supplies the contrast. There, Tokunbo Wahab has built a reputation for treating a short video of an environmental violation as a work order. In 2025, a man filmed dumping refuse on the Alapere link bridge was reportedly remanded in custody. In Lagos, a viral video can trigger enforcement; in Ogun, it too often triggers silence. Wahab’s methods have their critics, as those of any official who enforces the law will. But the complaint against Lagos concerns the manner of enforcement; the complaint against Ogun concerns its absence. Excessive enforcement can be challenged in court. An absence of enforcement leaves the citizen with little protection.

The most telling testimony came from across the aisle. Deji Doherty, the PDP candidate, who has questioned the state’s debt and campaigns under the slogan “Awaken Lagos,” has nonetheless commended Wahab’s work ethic in keeping the city clean. Praise from a rival is the only kind that costs something to give, and when it is paid to a commissioner in the government he hopes to unseat, it is less a compliment than a stipulation. On the one assignment every Lagosian can inspect from his front door, the incumbent’s man is doing the job. In Lagos, policy appears alive because the enforcer is visible. In Ogun, too much policy remains a document waiting for an official.

Albert Camus gave this idea its quietest statement in The Plague. Dr Rieux answers, when pressed, that fighting the pestilence is a matter of common decency, and that in his case decency consists in doing his job. The answer has no heroism in it, which is why it endures. The job Hamzat described on Sunday night is Rieux’s: to keep the drains clear, the buses running, the rent honest and the rubbish collected, on ordinary days, without applause. Promises are written in the future tense, and only the past tense can be audited. Voters rarely hire the best speaker. They hire the applicant whose references they can walk out and check.

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