SIR: For quite sometime now, Mr. Steve Osuji, a journalist, who was, in July, last year, suspended for a year, for professional misconduct by the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE), has been dancing naked in public, in his usual character, he has been using his column on social media platforms, ‘Expresso Umbbrage’ to pour invectives on Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu and his administration in Lagos State.

Osuji has embarked on disingenuous criticisms, to mislead Lagosians in particular and Nigerians in general into believing that Sanwo-Olu has done almost nothing as a governor for the past six years. He has been using all kinds of demeaning adjectives to describe the governor and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu who endorsed the former to govern the Centre of Excellence.

All Osuji’s write-ups about Lagos State reek of deep-seated bitterness, unjustifiable hatred and uncontrolled resentment. His criticisms lack the objectivity expected of every journalist. His articles about Sanwo-Olu are deliberately mischievously presented for the  public to see him as a lame duck who just wakes up in the morning, rides to his office at Alausa, sits down all day doing nothing and goes back home in the evening. What a shallow way of thinking! 

The latest of Osuji’s vituperation, served some gullible members of the public, was contained in his column on social media with the headline: “Ikoyi Cemetery: Yet another metaphor for abysmal Lagos.” While he first used Ikoyi Cemetery to mask his real intention in the article, he soon revealed it by pouring venom on the state government, for the unkempt cemetery.

Haba! When did it become the responsibility of the state government to keep and maintain a cemetery? Every Nigerian knows that opening and maintaining a cemetery anywhere in the country is the sole responsibility of the local councils.

In his thinking, Osuji wrote in the column: “Not only are the grassroots governments denied revenue streams, but federal government direct allocations are  just not allowed to trickle to the last mile.”

He probably was in slumber when the government of Lagos State insisted that it should not have been joined in the suit in which the Supreme Court ordered the Federal Government to send councils’ monthly allocations directly to their accounts because Lagos under Sanwo-Olu has never denied the councils their allocations.

And he further wrote: “Since 2019, the current Lagos State government seems to have lapsed into a state of suspended animation. Hardly anything major has happened.’’ 

“Apart from completing Lagos light rail project which had been on for decades, and the ongoing Lekki-Epe Expressway, no other remarkable work can be recorded to Governor Sanwo-Olu’s name…

“But history shall record the Sanwo-Olu era as eight years of vacuous emptiness.” Really?
Worried by this barrage of endless criticisms, and as a journalist and a concerned Lagos resident, I had to take the pains to confirm, under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, from relevant government agencies, if all what Osuji wrote was actually true, despite the fact that many of the government projects are quite visible to discerning Lagosians. And I can unequivocally confirm that the harsh criticisms were products of his imagination laced with bitterness.

For Osuji’s information and education, the Sanwo-Olu administration has done well in education by establishing nine new schools across the state so far with a combined population of 4,588 pupils, comprising 2,310 girls and 2,278 boys. The school buildings, which are to complement the existing ones, are enviable architectural masterpieces. It also hired over 2,000 teachers, renovated and rehabilitated several schools across the state, distributed 18,912 mobile devices to SS2 students across the six education districts, paid the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) fees of all public school students and added two more new universities to the only existing one six years ago, among several achievements, which could not be listed for space constraints.

In the health sector where Osuji says he did not see any achievement, the administration has recruited 2,200 health professionals so far, embarked on massive rehabilitation and renovation of many health facilities across the Centre of Excellence, such as the Ebute-Metta, Harvey Road and Ketu-Ejinrin health centres, as well as Somolu, Isolo and other general hospitals in the state.

Besides, while four Mother and Child Centres (MCCs) have been inaugurated in Epe, Ajah, Badagry and Igando, 1,417 residents have benefitted from all kinds of free surgeries across the state. It should also be noted that if the administration had not brilliantly handled and managed the last COVID-19 crisis, the pandemic would have wiped out millions of Lagosians. And to make its preparedness for such an epidemic permanent, it now has an oxygen plant in Yaba. These are just a few of the numerous feats in the health sector.
Steve Omolale sent this piece from Lagos.