Governor Raji Fashola is today acclaimed by many as Nigeria’s best performing governor. Among intellectuals in particular, especially those with residential, professional, or emotional stakes in Lagos, he is celebrated as an exemplary leader demonstrating the possibilities
of progressive and visionary governance.

His political fame and the sense of hope that his accomplishments inspire have made their way into the vibrant, increasingly influential Nigerian internet community. He is seen as a bright spot in a political topography devoid of leadership and clarity of political vision, a model deserving of widespread replication.

Fashola deserves all the credit he is getting. I was in Lagos last May and saw, first-hand, the material evidence of his transformative leadership. His defeat of the infamous Oshodi logjam is still a source of personal wonder to me.

Fashola’s governance philosophy and his ability to grow his ideas from paper to infrastructure and service-delivery outcomes make him a champion in this segment of our on-going democratic transition. But he is not an undisputed champion and should not be baptized as such.

From what I saw in Dutse and its surrounding countryside and heard from many Jigawa state folks during a recent research trip to the state, Fashola faces a formidable contender in Jigawa’s Sule Lamido. I first visited Jigawa in 1996 when I was an undergraduate at Bayero
University, Kano. I again visited the state in 2007 in the wake of the April 2007 election to begin a pilot phase of a new academic research project. I observed a state that had been turned into a depressing wasteland by corruption and incompetence, a state stunted by neglect sixteen years after its creation.

As a Nigerian with no personal stake in Jigawa but with a profound personal interest in the on-ground, human toll of corruption and maladministration, I was moved to document my observations in an article I published on popular Nigerian internet site, Nigeriavillagesquare.com. Titled, The Ground Zero of Corruption, the article was an unsparing indictment of then Governor Saminu Turaki (of N10 Billion Third Term sponsorship infamy).

I thought that such callous disregard for the moral and developmental burdens of public office and the poor stewardship that underpins it had to be given maximum textual and visual exposure as a way of shaming other public office holders. The pictures depicting Jigawa’s decay under Turaki stirred angst and revulsion in Nigerians and friends of Nigeria. Readers and commentators compared Jigawa’s plight to that of their own states or to states with which they were familiar. This was precisely the emotional reaction and citizen
outrage that I had hoped to inspire with the piece.

That was April 2007. This was December 2009. Same state. Different Governor. Two and half years later.

The state capital, Dutse, bore few signs of a state capital when I visited in 2007. Now it wears a new, bold look of regeneration. It is perhaps the most daring signpost of the transformation that has occurred in the last two and half years in Jigawa. Dutse now possesses dual-carriage township roads that branch out and intersect in all
directions. The aesthetic appeal of the roads is enhanced by their well-manicured shoulders.

Across the capital, new projects are sprouting up or getting completed. From the state polytechnic, which is being virtually rebuilt, to the ultramodern staff development center, to at least three completed 500-unit housing estates, to the massive new state secretariat, to the high court complex, to the Eagle Square replicaunder construction, to ubiquitous urbanization projects, Dutse is a city reborn.

Then there is the crowing glory of this remarkable transformation: the Rasheed Shekoni Specialist Hospital, which brought tears my eyes in 2007 (see my 2007 photos in The Ground Zero of Corruption). It had been abandoned for 9 years and had become a habitat for rodents, birds, and insects. Leaky roofs, puddles of water in the premises, overgrown compounds, and abandoned imported containers of building materials constituted an unflattering ensemble of waste and miasma.

Today, the hospital is completed, fully equipped as a specialist medical institution capable of carrying out most specialist diagnostic, therapeutic, and surgical procedures (see current photos). One consultant, Dr. Abdulrazak Taiwo, who was recruited from Lagos state, told me in a private conversation that the hospital may be the best equipped in Nigeria! It faces a challenge of attracting qualified medical personal to run its many specialized units, but it is an impressive medical facility on par with the highest-rated medical facilities in the world. I should know. I patronize a university hospital that is ranked number 6 in the world.

The spectacle of Dutse got me curious about the broader developmental agenda of Lamido’s governorship. Outside Dutse, in remote villages and local government areas, the story was the same: roads, many of them, newly built or newly refurbished. Educational institutions, primary, secondary, and tertiary, wore new coats of paint, had new office and
classroom buildings built or being built. Hospitals and clinics, many newly built or refurbished, dotted rural outposts. There was developmental activity everywhere.

I was told that all girls in Jigawa now enjoy a right to free
education up to tertiary level and that all students in the state
enjoy a right to free textbooks and supplies. If this is true then the
present administration is investing as much in long term empowerment
projects as it is in immediate-impact ones like the controversial but
widely praised N7000 survival allowance paid to disabled indigenes of
the state. As an educationist concerned about the slipping
competitiveness of Nigerian students in a fast-globalizing
intellectual world, the sight of rural schools with first rate
laboratories, computer labs, and dedicated V-Sat internet facilities
was a source of pure joy!

I was also impressed with the ubiquity of water projects. My research
took me to remote villages in Jahun, Birnin Kudu, Gwaram, and Gumel
local governments and I was captivated by the quantity and quality of
water, education, rural electrification, and road projects. Together,
these projects underscore the transformation that is going on in this
remote state—and its radical, impatient departure from the waste and
stagnancy of two and half years ago.

This is rural transformation at its most heartening. What is
remarkable about what is going on in Jigawa is that it is set against
a recent history of criminal maladministration and dereliction of
governance, one that I witnessed and documented.

Throughout my stay in Jigawa, I heard unsolicited, enthusiastic, and
bipartisan praise for the governor’s accomplishments, and for the
improvements his administration has brought to rural communities in
the state across a broad spectrum of social need. Some of it seemed
over the top but it was genuine. I understand why a people starved of
purposeful leadership by the last administration in the state may get
a little emotional and a bit hyperbolic in their rendering of the
transformative and all-embracing changes going on around them.

However, since enormous challenges remain, especially for a state that
is making a transition from a rural, insular backwater to an
accessible, attractive gateway, I wondered about the dangers of
highfalutin and personalized praise for the Governor—two years into
his tenure! You don’t want to jinx it—or make him slow down. But
Jigawa people like to talk about their “God-sent” (their word)
governor and I couldn’t let my concerns dampen their excitement.

I also wondered and asked several Jigawa folks why, given his
accomplishments, their governor does not get as much press as Lagos’
Fashola. They had no definitive answer. Neither do I. But it is a
question worth contemplating. Lamido has recorded these strides with a
significantly lower monthly allocation from the federal treasury than
Lagos. The state ranks in the bottom 5 in the size of federal
allocation; Lagos ranks in the top 5 (discounting derivation payments
to oil-producing states).

Jigawa’s on-going transformation is also more impressive because it
entails a from-the-scratch morphing of an essentially rural,
infrastructure-challenged state into one that now possesses a solid
social infrastructure base—water, rural electricity, schools, roads,
urban housing, and hospitals. By contrast, Fashola’s transformative
vision entails a rebuilding of Lagos’ crumbling infrastructure, and
rarely the provision of a new one. Fashola did not and still does not
have to wrestle with the expensive obstacle of rural poverty and a
baseline of infrastructural absence. Fashola’s Lagos is an urban
renewal project; Lamido had nothing to renew in Jigawa. He is building
the base for future renewals.

The two year transformation of Jigawa can better be appreciated from a
position of comparison. Unfortunately, many observers lack the
framework for such comparison, not knowing what the state looked like
two and half years ago. They are understandably more familiar with
pre-Fashola Lagos than they are with pre-Lamido Jigawa. Those of us
who stumbled onto the decay of pre-Lamido Jigawa see in the state a
compelling model for the possibility of progressive governance.

We evaluate effective governance differently, depending on our
ideological commitments and our own social-economic backgrounds. There
is nothing wrong with that. If visionary, strategic, big-idea
leadership is your definition of effective leadership, Fashola, is the
winner of what is clearly a two-way contest for best-performing
governor. But if rural transformation thrills you; if direct
improvement of the lives of the poor and vulnerable gets your juices
flowing; and if the transformation of time-trapped rural sectors into
co-travelers of modernity is your notion of leadership, then Lamido is
your man. If service delivery, physical problem solving, and
empathetic, instrumental allocation of public resources are dearer to
you than the more elitist, carefully choreographed dance of strategic
statecraft, you will love what Lamido has done in—and to—Jigawa.

One bias of governance is not superior to the other. Lagos’ priorities
as an essentially urban and cosmopolitan state are different from
Jigawa’s rural challenges and call perhaps for a grander, strategic,
longer-term approach instead of the massive infrastructural
intervention needed in a state like Jigawa. Each state has its
peculiar set of problems; both governors have met their states’
challenges impressively.

What’s more, both of them converge on one juncture of significance:
they are models that shatter one dangerously pervasive narrative of
our current political arrangement: the lack of fund alibi. We are told
by Nigeria’s many grumbling governors that after fulfilling
remunerative obligations to civil servants and retirees, there is
hardly any funds left for development. Jigawa and Lagos falsify those
claims spectacularly.

The arithmetic logic of Jigawa’s ability to fund so many projects
simultaneously while paying disabled members of society a survival
stipend—one of the fulcrums of Lamido’s pro-poor approach to
governance—is still a mystery to me. Fashola’s financial situation may
be more obvious, given Lagos’s massive capacity for generating
internal revenue and its big allocation from the Federation Account.
Nonetheless, Lagos also challenges the tired, corruption-fueled
narrative of fiscal decapitation that many governors find convenient
as an excuse for their failures.

Lamido is certainly no internet political celebrity like Fashola. I am
not even sure that the national press has paid much attention to his
rural transformation and Talakawa-focused style of governance, which
is bringing relief and succor to a long-suffering, modernity-craving,
neo-feudal sector of Nigeria. So, why the disparity in press coverage
at a time when the paucity of positive leadership demands that we
scour the nation in search of signs—any signs—of political hope for
Nigeria’s rural and urban poor?

I have some preliminary thoughts on why this is the case. First,
Fashola reaps some incidental capital and goodwill simply by being an
opposition governor, while Lamido, for all his accomplishments, is
after all, one of the most loyal—and proudest—members of the PDP, the
behemoth that is today a byword for all that is wrong with Nigeria. He
will get little break or credit because of his PDP identity.
Nigerians, including this writer, make an impulsive mental association
between the PDP and the deficit of leadership that plagues the
country, not to mention the fact that the PDP has also become the
narrative stand-in for incompetence and corruption. The connections
are more than justified given what PDP politicians have done to
Nigeria and its constituent units. Lamido is a collateral damage of
these mental associations. His stand-out accomplishments will always
be weighed down by and evaluated in the shadow of this PDP stigma.

The contagion of the PDP’s abysmal public image cannot do any
politician any good. However, in our desperation to find, acknowledge,
and celebrate result-oriented leadership in an epoch in which it is
notoriously rare, and in light of the palpable absence of leadership
at the national level, we have to look at all the governors in all
corners of Nigeria, regardless of party affiliation, and shine some
light on those of them who are good stewards of public trust and
public funds.

I am willing to suspend my concerns about Lamido’s PDP association so
that I can assess what the Governor has done in Jigawa in the two and
half years since I last visited it. It is difficult to make this
distinction. I thought myself incapable of making it. But I am trying
to will myself into a principled pragmatism in my evolving notion of
leadership in Nigeria. I am trying to allow, within limits, of course,
for the imperfections and electoral necessities of curious political
alliances.

I have also become less puritanical in my evaluation of leadership in
Nigeria, settling somewhat regrettably into a crude commitment to the
problem-solving, infrastructure-providing imperatives of governance. I
am now willing to sometimes forgive the trespassing of some of the
abstract political ideals that I value as long as the trespass is
offset by the kind of heart-warming accomplishments that Lamido has
recorded. My working class orientation, which stresses existential
priorities over abstract ideals, is clearly reasserting itself here.
This is the spirit in which I am willing to celebrate and recommend
Lamido’s accomplishments, along with Fashola’s, and to advance both
models as two manifestations of the same political possibility, which
should hearten Nigerians of conscience.

Second, there is a correlation between the visibility of Lagos, the
relative invisibility of Jigawa, and the differential exposure that
the transformations in both states are getting. The remoteness of
Jigawa means that most people who evaluate leadership performance in
Nigeria have never and will never visit it. This point should require
no elaboration except to add that exposure is also a crude game of
numbers: Lagos, with its much higher population has more people who
have stakes in its fortunes and are directly impacted by its decline
or revival. Simply put: there are more people to tell and celebrate
its story of renewal under Fashola than there are for Jigawa, so
somehow the story will get told to the world while Jigawa’s story of
transformative change may be restricted to the few people with direct
stakes in the state’s fortunes. It makes a small difference that the
folks who have an intellectual interest in leadership performance or
are more likely to report on it are Lagosians by residence or
professional or emotional connection.

Third, most of Nigeria’s progressive pundits, who have adopted Fashola
as the torchbearer of progressive, purposeful governance in the print
and internet mediums, have a personal or professional investment in
Lagos. Lagos is Nigeria’s media hub, so naturally, Fashola’s story
will get told more frequently and more elaborately. The typical Lagos
media person and other evaluators of leadership performance do not
have ties to a remote Northwestern state called Jigawa and so may not
be naturally inclined to comment on its transformation unless they had
been familiar with its prior developmental status and are sufficiently
stunned—and stung—by its transformation into commenting. This is my
situation, but I am in small company.

Finally, there is and has always been an urban bias in the assessment
of developmental effort in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. This
followed from the urban bias in the developmental agenda of most
postcolonial African governments, including Nigeria’s. Successive
governments sought to appease a restive urban population and urban
dwelling elites—allies and critics alike—with urban social
infrastructure to the exclusion of the rural sector, where 80 percent
of Africans/Nigerians reside. Urban dwellers and urban-dwelling
commentators on development subsequently cultivated and nurtured an
unyielding propensity to privilege the development of urban
infrastructure and service delivery ahead of the kind of rural
transformation that is going on in Lamido’s Jigawa. Obscure rural
development is not appreciated to the same degree that more visible
urban projects are. The forces of urban bias are therefore aligned in
favor of Fashola and against Lamido.

There may be other factors why Lamido has yet to get the press that
his achievements entitle him to, but they are not strong enough
reasons to deprive our leadership-starved people of the inspirational
comfort of Lamido’s Jigawa story. If we had many Lamidos and Fasholas,
we could be justified in screening them for maximum symbolic impact
and import. Unfortunately we have no Lamidos or Fasholas to spare or
to disregard. So, let us tell these rare stories of performing
governors wherever we can find them.

Hopefully we can shame their colleagues into action or inspire the
people of other states to demand more action from their governors and
to reject the tired excuses that Lamido and Fashola have discredited
through their achievements.

So, who is Nigeria’s best-performing governor? Well, why choose when
you can credibly declare it a two-way tie. Let’s call it a two-way tie
between Lamido and Fashola.

But I would rather we had a four, five, or six-way tie. The two
governors are really not competing on the same terrain. One is in the
business of urban renewal; the other is the architect of an on-going
rural transformation. Both are unqualified successes in their
respective domains.

The bottom line is this: in this tragic dearth of leadership at the
national level, we must look to the margins to locate and celebrate
every effective, disciplined, compassionate, and result-producing
leader. They are not many but wherever we find them, their activities
should be advertised to bring some psychological cheer to justifiably
cynical Nigerians, to inspire or shame other leaders—and to provoke
outrage in the indigenes of states with lethargic governors. This is
our national duty.

Dr. Moses Ochonu is a Professor of African History at Vanderbilt
University, Tennessee in the USA.