Fashola's Camera And The Mockery of The Intelligentsia

 I have never been an admirer of Babatunde Raji Fashola. When he succeeded Lai Mohammed as the Chief of Staff to the erstwhile governor of Lagos State, Senator Bola Tinubu, little was known about him in public space and he had barely come out of obscurity until his principal anointed him as his successor. At that time, I had a preferred candidate and Fashola was not him.

Well, Fashola became governor in 2007. I hear he is very brilliant and highly educated. I am told he attended Birch Freeman High School and Igbobi College both in Lagos and graduated with an LL.B from the University of Benin. I also hear he is the first of his Law school class of 1988 to be honoured with the prestigious rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN. He is also such an orator that had enjoyed captivating the people with his smooth speeches. He served two terms as governor and transformed Lagos only in superficiality. He planted gardens and flowers all over Lagos and provided water to keep the gardens nurtured.

Many people applauded him and called him a good and wonderful man. Nonetheless, he did not win my admiration. I saw what he sold as achievements as depthless panoplies. Fashola was providing water for his flowers when human beings had no water in their houses. Fashola was arresting people for crossing highways using his KAI Brigade instead of preventing them by barricading the highways like his successor, the great Akinwunmi Ambode came to do. Fashola was more interested in the fines citizens would pay when arrested. When it was time for elections in 2011, he took away his KAI Brigade from the highways. Sheer hypocrisy! I don't admire hypocrisy.

Fashola gathered Okada riders and assured them that he had no plans to ban them in Lagos. He used them to campaign for his second term. It was a must for every okada rider to wear the green helmet branded with Fashola's campaign message for a second term. He won a second term and swiftly reneged on his assurances to the motorcycle riders. He banned them from working on Lagos roads. That is deceit. Not an admirable quality. If Okada had become a menace to citizens, ban them straight instead of deceiving people.

He unleashed an indefinable wickedness on citizens when he increased the Lagos State University's school fees from twenty five thousand naira to two hundred and fifty thousand naira shortly after he won re-election. It was crazy. Many students who had gained admission had to forgo it or seek elsewhere because they could not afford it. Such callousness. Then to sell this anomaly, he told students that each student would be given a brand new laptop amongst other things. The exorbitant fees were collected and his promise to this day has remained unfulfilled. It beats one's imagination why we are quick to crucify Hushpuppi.

Fashola for me is a man of wiles who, give it to him, is comfortably in the circle of Nigeria's intelligentsia. His wiles however question the use of both his intelligence and intellect. 

It is that wile that has mocked his intelligence before the entire world few days ago at the Lekki Tollgate where he had joined Southwest governors of APC stock to inspect the scene of the 20:10:20 Massacre five days after. Fashola, brilliant, smart and impressively articulate became the political fall guy who found a camera at the scene.

There is nothing wrong with finding a camera at the scene of the massacre but there is everything wrong when such a camera is found after the tollgate had been set ablaze, scavengers had been there, the governor had led a media tour there and then, LAWMA officials had carried out thorough clean up of the place. How did the camera get there and from where? Was it the same camera that was claimed to have been removed before the Massacre?

Fashola should not have allowed himself to be reduced to the discoverer because it was easy for people to see through the smokescreen. However, his self-believed, as popularly adulated, intelligence would not let him pull back. 

We have seen how the governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu has been struggling and wrestling with lies and half truth in the wake of the massacre and it became clear that due to what had happened afterwards, and the global outcry, the governor and his puppeteer are desperate to sell an innocence they do not possess. It is that desperation that has dragged Fashola who ordinarily could not be connected to what had happened, into this mix.

Now, because we have a government of extreme absurdities, it is not abnormal that we should expect the most ridiculous machinations. The protesters had claimed that the CCTV cameras were removed before the massacre, a claim the governor refuted. The deputy governor, a gentleman by my estimation churned out a ridiculous statement that what were removed were not cameras but car scanners. What it meant was that if the cameras were not removed, the governor can then provide Nigerians with footages of what happened on that Black Tuesday night when the angels of death, donned in camouflage khaki stiffened the feet of some Nigerian youths forever.

In the coming days, we may likely see footages supposedly of that night. It will be absurd in its extreme. We may not see soldiers shooting at protesters, we may just see soldiers dispersing supposed protesters with sticks or even begging them to go home.

This is just how absurd it will get. You will see soldiers and protesters in the footage. You may wonder how come since we all know what really happened. Everything is acted and recorded and it will come from Fashola's camera that only he was able to discover. Of course, what you will see are not the real protesters but a bunch of thugs assembled to act as the protesters. Such lugubrious absurdities! This is just an unfortunate mockery of the intelligentsia.