It is for the contempt of the past that President Tinubu made China the centre of gravity a week ago. While some media outlets and commentators washed up ink and airtime fulminating over Agbaero and his arrest without asking why, the president and his entourage focused on the future.
Ajaokuta Steel, neglected by a generation, is whirring back to life. Solid mineral tie-ups, infrastructure development, power generation, and deals amounting to billions of dollars. These were sweet pies that some commentators wanted to ignore as poison. Some had criticized two governors for accompanying the president. While all the critics saw was jamboree, what they accomplished was progress. They were smart, as smart as the smart cities they are working on.
They are Governor Uba Sani of Kaduna State, and the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu. From what seemed a gloomy beginning for the Kaduna chief executive, the new helmsman of the north’s pivotal state sees a rosy horizon. Debt or no debt, he is not going to grieve over what’s lost, or bemoan a prelate class’s silence over a contract with his predecessor. Not for him the sentiment of the Shakesperean play, Love’s labour is Lost. He went to China for the state, and he penned a suite of sweet deals. Just like Sanwo-Olu, their desire is to turn the main cities into what town planners call conurbations.
Before the China visit, Governor Sani has been working on safer schools by consolidating schools to make them lean and mean, and easy to access and secure. He has revived the Panteka Market, as the number one tools hub for the north. He has unveiled the lithium making factory, a surefire source of jobs and tonic for the nation’s economy.
He penned an MOU with Huawei Technologies, Chinese premier tech company. It covers the following: state-level unified command centre, enhanced security, intelligent traffic system, e-government and office automation, smart education, smart healthcare, ICT talent, renewable energy and public transportation. This is quite a huge pot and its ambition is shown by the breadth of the areas covered. This is the power of a smart city. A smart city has a smart transport system that must segue into a smart healthcare system that must work in tandem with smart schools, and all must source their nimbleness from a smart government office. The result is a smart people. As Lincoln said, the greatness of a country consists in the quality of its citizens.
These deals are going to build on the Kaduna Technology City now being upgraded to a Smart City. It also has a first in a state: a digital Innovation and Entrepreneurial Centre that uses existing ICT Hub empowerment and ICT business clinics.
Says Governor Sani: “I signed into law a bill to make provisions for the development of tech-enabled start-ups in Kaduna State…The key objective…is to position Kaduna State’s start-ups ecosystem as the leading digital technology centre…” it is in this light he has ramped up the “Bridging the Last Mile Initiative 2024-2027.”
For the BOS of Lagos, he announced his deal with éclat. “Lagos, yet another Metro line? Absolutely. The Green Line Metro is here.” It was an eclat for a clap. He signed an MOU with China for yet another colour-coded city on the move. We have had the blue and red. It’s now green light for the Lekki corridor. For a governor noted for big-ticket projects, the Green train is not a surprise. This is part of what Lagos has been becoming, a smart city as model. The Green line is a 68-kilometre wonder that will connect the Lekki Free Zone to Marina. In a sense, it is ancient and modern. The Lekki Free Zone is, perhaps, the fastest growing zone in all of Africa. It is a catchment of new estates, new businesses, educational institutions, high-tech innovations, entrepreneurial gusto and the siting of new landmarks. It is from its belly that the new express from Lagos to Calabar will sprout. Traffic logjams have been a perennial headache of Lekki, and it is because people outpaced development. The train will be a disruptive solution. It will, as the governor has noted, link areas like Victoria Island, Ajah, Ikoyi.
“This rail line is projected to carry over 500,000 passengers daily at launch, rising to over a million as demand grows,” he said.
With blue, red and green on course, the government will be dusting its masterplan for the other colour-coded trains, including yellow, purple and orange. A smart city is an interconnected city. It is its capacity for every part to talk to one another in a nimble automation that distinguishes 21st century city and the ones in the past.
For the modern world, cities are the bellwether of civilization. In the past, cities equated our sprawling villages today. Athens, Rome, Babylon, et all. But their inhabitants reveled in their geniuses. Horse-drawn carriages were high-tech. Roads without tars or cars, or wood-fueled fireplaces amounted to the acme in innovation. Candles were dainty but not because they shed light. Electricity was still in prophetic infancy. Faraday was not imagined; his foetus was not even fantasised. Their shrines were too dark for their gods to conjure light. Lions dueled humans in the Roman coliseum as counterpart to the UEFA League or World Cup. To travel then makes today’s planes and cars the machinations of witchcraft. Yesterday’s conceit is today’s contempt. In his sprawling novel Lonesome Dove, a tome about the wild, wild west in the United States, Larry McMurtry writes an epic about rural America before big, beautiful cities rose out of the underbelly of cowboys and Indians as the vast region from Texas to Montana was a trap for rapes, kidnapping, murders and whoring. There is hope yet for us.
The smart city we envision is not the big, bright Babylon lamented in scriptures in the line, “fallen, fallen Babylon the great!” It is not the one of duplicity in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, or the one of the lecher in Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana, or political vanity and cultural extravagance in Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi, or of greed in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, or of religious chicanery in Olga Tokarczuk’s The Book of Jacob, or Dicken’s London of filth and cunning.
We seek a smart city of beauty and rule of law and imaginative citizens and profits cohabiting with human generosity. That is what Governor Sani has started. It is what Sanwo-Olu is delivering. It is what President Tinubu wanted for his country by taking the two gentlemen with him. It was no jamboree. It was real.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Sam Omatseye
Quelle/Source: The Nation, 16.09.2024
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