Fashola: Making Of A Super Minister -By Kunle Somorin

After five months in the limbo, President Muhammadu Buhari, Wednesday, put together his 36-member cabinet. It was a great relief to a nation that has been in doldrums. The flurry of activities at the presidency in the first 48 hours of the week pointed to a system that has been roused from seeming slumber.

To underscore the dawn of the era of change, the president not only dropped the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Ibrahim Lamorde, he brought in a patriotic but establishment man, Ibrahim Magu, the super cop who has been with the commission since Nuhu Ribadu. The electoral umpire, INEC, reeved up with a new leadership full of promise.

Buhari surprisingly bulldozed the bureaucracy by sending 17 of the permanent secretaries, he had lionised as the engine room of his change project, into early retirement. Expectedly, PMB scrapped some ministries and merged the others. It is from the fusing of ministries that former Lagos State governor, Babatunde Raji Fashola had an expression. He unofficially became the minister of infrastructures. He was assigned to superintend three erstwhile ministries: housing, works and power.

That BRF has capacity to deliver is not in doubt. He has survived the drudgery of primordial politics that could have denied him a mention in this change cabinet to emerge the most powerful figure in the cabinet. For Fashola, it is not an enviable task that PMB has thrust on him. Indeed, this is a call to higher service that will task his political savvy, intellect and integrity.

He might have staved off the mudslinging of land appropriations, inflated concession deals and website scandals, but he should be wary of what he does at the new ministry. He should watch even his shadow as enemies within may still be stalking him to mark him for political demolition. The assignment is daunting and whatever he does or fails to do may be the yardstick for measuring the success or otherwise of the Buhari administration.

Far from his streak of successes in Lagos, people want to see how quickly he will settle down to fix the roads across all corridors of the country. Starting from his backyard of Lagos-Ibadan express road in Mowe, the Enugu Port- Harcourt motorway and the death traps in all our major highways, BRF has no hiding place. Many would want him to bring his Midas Touch on the ill-fated 2nd Onitsha bridge and the plethora of rehabilitation works on most Trunk A roads.

It is now that Nigerians will want to access if the huge investment on the power sector will have any meaning. If Fashola cannot actualise the lofty dreams in the power sector reforms, we can as well kiss goodbye to stable electricity and industrialisation in the life of this administration. The graft in the sector will call for investigation and how RBF applies himself to alternative power sources will speak volumes about his much touted acumen as a can-do leader.

RBF’s candour in ensuring that the 17m housing deficit by the country is bridged cannot be over-emphasised. He must hit the ground running to get whip the Federal Housing Authority and all mortgage institutions and options are explored to reduce the number of vagabonds on the streets and those who live in squalid conditions of 17 persons to a room in urban areas.

More importantly, the uninhabited houses should give him a cause for concern. RBF must replicate his governance skills in Lagos at the national level. He has been fortuitously foisted on us as the poster boy of the PMB administration by this appointment. If he fails to perform, he would have disappointed PMB. To his numerous admirers, he would be regarded as a man trained, fed and empowered by a starving village to bring back surplus in a season of anomie. If he took the food, training and support and failed to bring about the desired change, he will be a regarded as a traitor.