Governor of Lagos State, Akinwunmi Ambode, and former governor of Cross River State, Donald Duke, on Thursday, warned about the danger of abandoning Lagos State to shoulder the developmental challenges imposed by incessant migration from all parts of the country, alone.
Warning that the continued expansion of the 24 million population within a territorial land mass of 923, 773 square kilometres is leading to huge infrastructural deficit that federal allocations and internally generated revenue have not addressed, they urged other state governments to create productive economies, to stem the drift to Lagos.
Duke was the guest speaker at the Leadership 2017 Annual Conference and Awards Ceremony, organized by the Leadership Newspapers, at the International Conference Centre, Abuja, where Lagos governor, Ambode, represented by the Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Kehinde Bamigbetan, received the Governor of the Year Award.
Duke noted that Lagosโ N1.4trillion budget for 2018 was too meagre to fund crucial infrastructure.
โThe leadership at the State and Federal level must recognize that a State that contributes more than 50 percent of the Gross Domestic Product and majority of industrial activity needs urgent support,โ he said.
While accepting the award on behalf of Governor Ambode, Bamigbetan reiterated Dukeโs views, stressing the governorโs โdetermination to put his expertise and experience at the service of the people to ensure continuous infrastructure and human development.โ
Earlier, while declaring the Conference open, Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo advocated that states must operate like countries, by drawing inspiration from the Western Region which executed landmark projects and programmes in the First Republic.
He said the giant strides of Lagos State since the administration of former governor, Bola Tinubu, which planned the re-development of Lagos on aggressive internally generated revenue (IGR), has demonstrated the importance of taxation to the provision of infrastructure. Sam Nda-Isaiah, Chairman of Leadership Newspapers, urged governors to act like Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of companies, who must make profit for their firms to stay solvent.
โThe days when states would go cap in hand, every month, to the Federal Government, will soon be over because the Federal Government itself will be too busy struggling to solve its own federal problems.
The good news is that every state in Nigeria can survive as a rich entity, with a little imagination from its leaders,โ he said. Nda-Isaiah noted that, the states might need to suffer hard times in order to come to terms with reality.
โLagos State found out the hard way that it could earn much more than its monthly allocations from Abuja when the then President Olusegun Obasanjo illegally impounded the monthly allocations of its local governments for selfish reasons.
โThat was when the governor, then Bola Tinubu, knew the real definition of IGR. Since then, the State has not looked back,โโ he said. He advised other states to develop proprietary methods of boosting their IGR, noting that Lagos chose corporate taxes because that was where its advantages lied.โโ
