Babatunde Fashola, governor of Lagos, has transformed the city - and helped
halt the spread of Ebola in Nigeria
He famously claims to be "just doing his job". But in a land where
politicians are known for doing anything but, that alone has been enough to
make Babatunde Fashola, boss of the vast Nigerian city of Lagos, a very
popular man.
Confounding the image of Nigerian leaders as corrupt and incompetent, the
51-year-old governor has won near-celebrity status for transforming west
Africa's biggest city, cleaing up its crime-ridden slums and declaring war
on corrupt police and civil servants.
Next month, he will come to London to meet business leaders and Mayor Boris
Johnson's officials, wooing investors with talk of how he has spent the last
seven years building new transport hubs and gleaming business parks.
Yet arguably his biggest achievement in office took place just last week, and
was done without a bulldozer in sight. That was when
his
country was officially declared free of Ebola, which first spread to
Nigeria
three months ago when Patrick Sawyer, an infected Liberian diplomat, flew
into Lagos airport.
Health officials had long feared that the outbreak, which has already claimed
nearly 5,000 lives elsewhere in west Africa, would reach catastrophic
proportions were it to spread through Lagos. One of the largest cities in
the world, it is home to an estimated 17 million people, many of them living
in sprawling shanty towns that would have become vast reservoirs for
infection. To make matters worse, when the outbreak first happened, medics
were on strike.
nstead, Mr Fashola turned a looming disaster into a public health and PR
triumph. Breaking off from a trip overseas, he took personal charge of the
operation to track down and quarantine nearly 1,000 people feared to have
been infected since Mr Sawyer's arrival.
Last week, what would have been a formidably complex operation in any country
came to a successful end, when the World Health Organisation announced that
since Nigeria had had no new cases for six weeks, it was now officially rid
of the virus.
"This is a spectacular success story," said Rui Gama Vaz, a WHO
spokesman, who prompted an applause when he broke the news at a press
conference in Nigeria on Tuesday. "It shows that Ebola can be contained."
A school official takes a pupil's temperature in front of the school
premises in Lagos
The WHO announcement was a rare glimmer of hope in the fight against Ebola,
and even rarer vote of confidence in a branch of the Nigerian government,
which was heavily criticised over its response to the abduction of more than
200 schoolgirls by the Boko Haram insurgent group in April. As a columninst
in Nigeria's Leadership newspaper put it last week: "For once, we did
not underachieve."
For Mr Fashola's many supporters, it is also yet more proof that the
51-year-old ex-lawyer is a future president in the making, a much-needed
technocrat in a country dominated far too long by ageing "Big Men"
and ex-generals.
"He is the best governor we have ever had," said Odun Babalola, a
Lagos-based pension fund portfolio manager. "He's made a lot of
progress in schools, railways, and infrastructure, and unlike a lot of
politicians, who are corrupt, he's a good administrator."
True, the successful tackling of the Ebola outbreak was not Mr Fashola's doing
alone. For a start, the doctor's strike that was under way when Mr Sawyer
collapsed at Lagos airport turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Rather
than being taken to one of Lagos's vast public hospitals, where he might
have languished for hours and infected numerous fellow patients and staff,
he was instead admitted to a private clinic. There he was seen by a
sharp-eyed consultant, Stella Adadevoh, who spotted that his symptoms were
not malaria as had been first thought.
She then alerted the Nigerian health ministry, and along with other doctors
physically restrained Sawyer when he became aggressive and tried to leave
the hospital to fly to another Nigerian city. Her quick thinking help stop
the virus being spread more widely, but also cost her her life: she caught
Ebola herself while treating Mr Sawyer, and has now been recommended for a
national award.
Patrick Sawyer (AP)
But even by the time Mr Sawyer had been isolated, the virus was already on the
loose. Knowing that he had passed through one of the busiest airports in
west Africa, health officials had to try to track down every single person
who had potentially been infected by him, including the other passengers on
his flight. The list started at 281 people and grew to nearly 1,000. as
eight others whom he turned out to have passed the virus to subsequently
died.
That was where Mr Fashola stepped in. He broke off from a pilgrimage to Mecca,
flew home and then helped set up an Ebola Emergency Operations Centre, which
spearheaded the mammoth task of monitoring all those potentially infected. A
team of 2,000 officials were trained for the task, who ended up knocking on
26,000 doors. At one point the governor was being briefed up to ten times a
day by disease control experts. He made a point of visiting the country's
Ebola treatment centre, a way of communicating to the Nigerian public that
they should not panic needlessly.
"Command and control is very important in fighting disease outbreaks, and
he provided effective leadership," said Dr Ike Anya, a London-based
Nigerian public health expert. "He also said exactly the right things,
urging for the need to keep calm. Regardless of whether you support his
politics, he has been very effective as a governor and I would be happy to
see him stand for leadership."
Born into a prominent Muslim family but married to a Christian, Mr Fashola
trained as a lawyer and went into politics after being appointed chief of
staff by the previous Lagos governor, Asiwaju Tinubu, a powerful politician
often described as Mr Fashola's "Godfather". But while he has long
enjoyed the backing of a political "Big Man", is his role as a
rare defender of Nigeria's "Little Men" that has won him most
support.
Once, while driving through Lagos in his convoy, he famously stopped an army
colonel who was driving illegally in one of the governor's newly-built bus
lanes, berating him in front of television cameras.
