The Long Game: What Will Tinubu Leave Behind? (2)

When Adeola Akinremi arrived at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in 2018, he did not expect Bola Tinubu to appear in one of his classes. Yet Tinubu’s transformation of Lagos became the subject of a case study in an Energy and Environment course. Harvard, Princeton, Cornell and other leading institutions had examined the same story.

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thinking for change

The case was titled “Remaking a Neglected Megacity: A Civic Transformation in Lagos State, 1999-2012.” For Akinremi, its significance lay in the way it treated a Nigerian politician. Tinubu appeared not as a newspaper character or campaign slogan, but as a case in governance. The central question was what happens when a leader thinks beyond the next election.

Akinremi found a similar long-term perspective in an interview Tinubu gave Princeton University in 2009, two years after leaving the Lagos State Government House. Tinubu described his philosophy as “thinking for change.” Before roads, tax reforms, transportation changes, digitization and government restructuring, he said, came a process of understanding the problem, breaking it down, assembling a team, reforming the system and ensuring that the reform could survive its author.

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complex situation

Tinubu described the Lagos he inherited in 1999 as facing decaying infrastructure, chaotic traffic, mountains of refuse, outdated accounting, an oversized bureaucracy, weak revenue collection and a government dependent on overdrafts. He said the state was close to bankruptcy. Akinremi, who grew up in Lagos, says he recognized that reality but emphasizes that Tinubu presented it not as an excuse. Instead, he spoke of taking a “complex situation” and dividing it “into manageable components.” The article presents that method as central to the question of what Tinubu may ultimately leave behind.

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into manageable components