IT is time to speak on behalf of a good man. Speak to support the candidacy of a man whose integrity no one should have reason to doubt or whose qualifications for the post he seeks any should dare question.
Lagos is not for me; not as city or resort, not any less or more so than New York or London or Ottawa or Paris. I prize nature in all of its nakedness, its unwrappedness …so much so … I think little of concrete jungles or urban chaos or festinate gaits.
But lagosians love their Lagos and do deserve a governor’s governor. Ambode is a man whose beginnings I can attest to and whose current status should be well within anyone ‘s gaze. Nobody could have attended Federal Government College Warri (FGC) and escaped its formative impact on adulthood. Exceptions can only be anecdotal.
Ambode entered Federal Government College Warri about two years after I left. Post-colonial Nigeria decided to create “model schools”, whose focus was to catch its youths very young, pace them through a developmental programme that is as heavy on scholasticism as it is on character formation and sense of national unity the eventual goal being to nurture future leaders who could take the baton from departing colonial masters.
Getting in was one thing, surviving the rigours of school quite another. If my O’Level school was adjudged very regulated, FGC was several times more.
Every aspect of life was micro- managed by its international cast of teachers and administrators, under a set of rules that you break at your own peril.
FGC taught me discipline was more than simple scholastics. It is about doing the right thing at the right time in the right place.
You were to be up as early as five in the morning, tidy up your dormitory, go for a shower, be dressed, and stand as vertical as you can by your bedside waiting for inspection by the prefects and the principal.
You will be scored based on neatness and decor and your house will be celebrated or denigrated at the morning assembly in proportion to the inspection scores.
No house wanted to score less than another and so competition for the most neatly dressed and best comported was as stiflingly stiff as inter-house sports or debates or cultural contests.
And in all of these, you were not allowed to speak any local Nigerian language! It was always to be English. Speaking a vernacular was a punishable crime.
Something in my adult years, I regret I did not contest given its patronizing flavour. If I found my transition into Federal Government College hard enough, my subsequent appointment as school prefect and Head of Independence House was so much more exacting because of its prefectorial exigencies and competing demands on academic schedules.
Ambode did not meet me at school, but oral and written records revealed not only how a uniquely brilliant student he was, he was similarly selected into prefectship and house headship roles, performing at levels akin to record breaking, displaying talented and formidable leadership qualities, an unusually luminous star inside a star-studded system.
No one could have endured or enjoyed the formative impact of a Federal Government College Education in Warri in those days, more so reaching into its leadership meritocracies as Ambode did, and come out at its other end, anything less than a rounded promising gentleman or woman.
A diamond entered into the school at one end, to exit the other, twice its intrinsic value. How else could you explain his incandescent path after Warri? Look at an undimmable luminosity!!! Within a few years of indefatigable service to the government of Lagos State, barely at 37, he had risen to the top of the totem pole in a Lagos State as competitive as any international hub, becoming Permanent Secretary and Accountant General in nearly half the time it would normally take a multitude in even less contested, less high profile entities.
Yet, in all of his primary curricular activities, he consistently found time to play participatory and highly respected leadership roles within the global community of FGC alumni. Such combinatorial brilliance and excellence is not the province of the meretricious, the clumsy headed or the sightless.
His vision and deft at every level of human aggregation and his eclectic skills at forging unity between parts, between means and ends, between what is and what is yet to be are perhaps his biggest and sellable forte that should earn him a more than passing consideration for the office of governor in a state as diverse in substance and shadows as Lagos.
I missed the luck of running into him about two or three years ago in a Texas reunion, my programme hijacked by unforeseen last-minute hitch. But the global FEGOCOLIAN fraternity/sorority is united in its common respect for and expectation from this trailblazer.
I watched one of his debates with his sole opponent forwarded to me via YouTube by a friend. In that debate, both Ambode and his opponent came across very good: they seemed to share a character refinement uncommon amongst political adversaries backed up with a knowledge base expected of aspirants at that level.
But Ambode seems to have walked every inch of the civil service trajectory, well informed about intricate machinery of governance not from the periphery, but from deep inside its engine, the warp and woof of its body parts.
Such a man, is therefore, distinctively positioned if elected to hit the ground running, never having to dwell too long inside a learning curve groping for nuts and bolts in the unforgiving grind of moving parts.
Lagos cannot be easy to run, its physiology lies at the intersection of several local, regional and international organ parts, critical control buttons hidden from any one relatively strange to the system or never before with an actual seat inside its hallowed nooks.
•Fadipe is Director And Consultant Surgeon Clinical Professor Of Surgery And Anatomy, Justin Fadipe Centre, West Indies. A look at Ambode’s track will reveal a path impressively co-terminous with both the geo-spatial and functional coordinates of Lagos State apparati.
The reciprocity of the fit between his architectural formations, initiated at the seven- year gestation in Warri, consummated by post-gestational ‘factory floor’ nurture within the labyrinthine maze of Lagos state bureaucracy and the structural/operational complexities of that state render him an obvious choice.
If I speak so glowingly about Ambode, it is no indication of dislike for the opponent, or of presumption of intimate knowledge of Lagos State politics, or even knowledge of all the parts to the current equation. No.
It is that within any equations of the status quo. Ambode is one element in the arithmetic parade with a determinant quotient, capable of minimizing or eliminating variables, variability or incalculability and defogging the calculus.
Courtesy of transparent early school achievements and even more transparent somewhat precocious post-school attainments, prime and crucial to reaching a plausible and speedy answer to Lagos State’s conundrums.
No matter what plenty can be said of the other side, that I may not know, this side, the Ambode phenomenon, is an assuredly sellable congruity that fits very snugly into the stated ambitions of Lagos state •Fadipe is Director And Consultant Surgeon Clinical Professor Of Surgery And Anatomy, Justin Fadipe Centre, West Indies.
