Hon.Lukmon Olumoh, a Lagos State House Assembly member representing Ajeromi Ifelodun constituency II, who chairs the House Standing committee on Public-Private Partnership has hinted that the Lagos State University will soon have hostels on campus.
The lawmaker also spoke at length on the need to brand Ajegunle’s positive vibes which he notes outweighs negative tendencies. Olumoh touched on other salient issues, in a no holds barred interview session with Olanrewaju Adesanya. Excerpt:
Ajegunle in the public perception breeds lots of negative vibes, many note the place as a habitat for low lives, leaving one with the query that can any good come out of AJ?
Am I not great? So if Ajegunle can produce two Honourable members at the state Assembly, have one in the Reps, are we not great? There are some constituencies where they import people to come and represent them.
What is the percentage of people like you in Ajegunle?
It has to have a relative meaning,relative in the sense that you at the age categories, what is my age compared to the youths coming up currently? You say most of them are in Sports and Entertainment is Davido from Ajegunle? Is he not a child of the wealthy and he chose music, Otedola’s daughter is a D.J despite all the qualifications that she has so entertainment to me is part of our culture,it’s a way of life so if you decided to take advantage of this to make a leaving then Ajegunle’s youth should be celebrated that they are dynamic. Some of them are educated, at least Secondary school level and the only way to take them out of crime,when it takes you four,five years to get admission after evening getting the right score in JAMB,if you entertainment or sports there is nothing wrong in it. It does not mean that you will end up a failure, so Ajegunle and our youths should be celebrated and let me tell you we are well read oh!. I can tell for free go and do your empirical findings we have the largest number of functional primary schools in the whole of Lagos state, go and find out the number of schools we have in the two local governments of Ajeromi Ifelodun area.
That tells you that we catch them young and that is the essence of the Universal Basic Education, get every child to school.
The conditions of the schools are in focus now, here how functional are they?
No , if you are talking about the condition of the schools, it’s another thing but I am talking about getting the children to school,if there are no classes where are you going to put them? I am telling you that we have about the largest schools in Lagos state go and find out if I am lying. There and then you can appreciate what we are doing in Ajegunle. That is public,then Private Schools we have numbers of them so people in Ajegunle are desirous of education.
But the general impression about Ajegunle is still about issue of slums,thuggery,touts and all of that,how do you disabuse the mind of the populace,what strategy as a representative of the people of Ajegunle are you going to put in place to correct the narrative that an average Nigerian has about Ajegunle?
I’m going to tell you something and I want you to take it for a fact, if you decided to market yourself very well, beautiful,if you demarket yourself its another thing. When you talk about youth restiveness;thuggery,hooliganism,cultism. It is not peculiar to Ajegunle, it is a nationwide problem and if you are going to put it on percentage I don’t think Ajegunle would have .0001 in the right perspective or context,so I tell people don’t demarket Ajegunle. Ajegunle is not what you see,what happens in Ajegunle,happens in Mushin,Ketu, Oshodi,Agege and everywhere so you cannot just pick Ajegunle out and say Ajegunle and it’s youths are no do good,they have slums,slum is everywhere,we are all trying to bring ourselves out of the situation we’ve found ourselves which is an issue for the country. This country has gone through a lot since independence and our democratic experience is something we also have to look at critically, in fact successive Lagos State government have done so much to take the state out of poverty line in Ajegunle, I just told you now go and find out the number of primary schools that we have, that is the indices that you have to look at critically if people are doing well; education is one of the best indices that we should look at,then you look at other things but apart from that I tell you that we are not as bad as they paint us and I tell people from within that if you don’t market yourselves properly,you’ll have problems, people outside demarket you and you also celebrate them demarketing you, we have big markets, the kind of monies that turns round in Ajegunle, some states in Nigeria does not have that kind of GDP that Ajegunle has,localize it in an economic terms and see what we are talking about. Ajegunle is a fantastic place, I am not saying we don’t have crimes and other forms of criminality, I am not saying we don’t have youth restiveness; I am not saying there is no cultism but Ajegunle should not be singled out as a bad place, I can tell you that for everybody that comes to Lagos State from anywhere, you have your relations in Ajegunle even you interviewer . If I ask you critically you will have a relation there. If you come to Lagos at first and you don’t know anybody the first place you go settle is AJ, Ajegunle receives because we are complete Nigeria, we are the melting port, we have all the tribes in Ajegunle.
One of the sector that is badly hit by COVID-19 is the entertainment industry due to social distancing, there was no shows, parties and this is an area where AJ people excel, what suggestions have you for them to recalibrate their strategy to be able to ensure that recurrence of this kind of pandemic does not affect their livelihoods?
Well necessity is the mother of inventions and the world is a global village,we are moving the way things are moving, the effect of COVID period on entertainment is global,Ajegunle happened to share part of it and the way people are going digital, following technology is also evident in Ajegunle so whatever they are doing in the world we are not being left out, we have an Icon in the entertainment industry known worldwide in the person of Daddy Showkey, he sells our image, Saheed Osupa the popular Fuji musician is from Ajegunle if you don’t know, he can claim affinity to Ibadan but he was born,brought up in Ajegunle. He is homeboy we have a lot of them like that Father U-Turn and more they are from Ajegunle, so these people are modeling other people, they are serving as our ambassador, they are also carrying the youths that are interested in entertainment business along. So I am not saying that we are having it hundred percent okay but we are adjusting with the way things are adjusting globally, so it’s only entertainment that we do in Ajegunle, we do other things but we are not doing badly.
What have you done to tackle the ecological challenges confronting your constituency headlong, to ensure a better environment for your constituents?
Firstly I want to appreciate Mr Speaker, Hon. Mudashiru Obasa, he has a listening ear and he gives you opportunity only if you can take it. When I first came into the house the first thing I spoke about on the floor was the issue of floods in my constituency and beautiful as it were then our resolution was communicated to Mr Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who is also a very good person and he listened, some few weeks or months down the line, the contracts for clearing of all the canals, you are aware that there was an adhoc committee of the house that looks into all the canals in Lagos State and they came up with our reports of which my constituency was a major and the Governor awarded the contracts for the canals to be cleared, that was one of the first achievements, I had in this house. So I can tell you that system five has been cleared, signal barrack canal has been cleared, Baale Okoya canal has been cleared, Ayinke was not cleared because we had done some jobs there earlier. So within my constituency it is virtually all the canals that have been cleared. The issue of flooding in my constituency has reduced, I am not saying if it rains it won’t come but it has reduced significantly. Yes the rains would come with volumes of water but it will not be the kind of experience that when a little rainfall everywhere is flooded, no the case and situation is better now. So in terms of flooding we have done greatly in my constituency, I’ve intervened on road constructions, lot of roads have been fixed within my constituency through my intervention the recent being the award and reconstruction of Nba Cardosso road, a major road within my constituency it houses about 28 magistrate courts, it house the General Hospital in Ajeromi Ifelodun, it house mosques and big churches, there are lots of business interests on that road and it is the only road that can take you out of Ajegunle if they want to take Mobile road to link other parts, so work is ongoing there. We have fire station that is coming up as we don’t have one single one in the entire Apapa and Ajeromi Ifelodun aside the one in Marine beach.
We don’t have one single fire station if anything happens we are in soup and we have always been, because we don’t use to sleep when houses burn in the area but graciously this Mr Governor has approved the construction of one for us through my intervention. We have Cocoa trader, a programme I critically evaluated before I started, being a finance expert we have the micro finance and the likes that give people money at five, ten thousand naira per month and by the time they failed to pay the five thousand naira back they go and lock them up, I will end up paying the money and also process their bail, though bail is free but you won’t come out free if you are able to get out. So I thought of it that I can actually do what all these financial houses are doing in a better way and it would be managed by people, I started today the number has grown over one hundred taking free loans without interest. It is tagged Cocoa traders,they are in clusters we invested seed monies into them,they take loans of what their capacity can take and they pay on weekly basis.
They didn’t see it as owo oselu (politics money) like people would call it and take it away, we are doing it very well and they are repaying, so with that to a very large extent we’ve been able to solve the problem of poverty among our people. We have Cocoa sellers for students in the tertiary institutions, I also thought of that because I know the local government chairmen are intervening in primary schools, they give them benches, exercise books, food, socks and the likes, Secondary students the state government is taking care of them right, who is taking care of our tertiary institutions students? None. The bursaries they are supposed to take, some people would throughout their days in the University they won’t see it, so I came up with the idea saying hey guys are you in higher institutions, I can give you bursaries on yearly basis.
Is it for the brilliant ones or the indigents only?
They go through a screening process and I think we have about 50 or more of them as our scholars that we are supporting. Aside from that we have some that we paid the tuition in higher institutions knowing that education is the bedrock of any society that can take you out of poverty, so we are doing a lot in that aspect. We have done so many interventions during the COVID period I did palliatives seven good times during the thick of the COVID. Food interventions the records are there, go check the Facebook Lukmon Olumoh campaign foundation, it is not mere word of mouth to dazzle you.
So that we have been able to do just a little beyond one year in office we have been able to help our people.
What would be your message to the people as regards ecological problems, induced by their indiscriminate waste disposal, via which plastics and pet bottles find their ways into the canals constituting more environmental hazard, clearing canals is it capital or recurrent?
Yes we will continue to educate them,my experience during this clearing of the drainage and canals most of them have occupied where they were supposed to dispose their waste,built shanties some of these things were demolished, the ministry of environment officers they have a swell time going through this process because we were with them all through, so we are educating them and they all know that if you dumped refuse in the canals it will come back to your house. When the problem starts you will be the first person to suffer it, they won’t touch me because my house is a little bit far away from the canal. We have been educating about the dangers of the act but some listen while some of them would not listen. In fact there was a man that came and said I want to police Okoya canal, because in the last eleven years nobody has come to work on this, now that this gentleman has been able to influence the clearing of this canal, I will not allow any waste, it is on tape.
What are the challenges in the new committee you chair in the house and how have you been able to work around them?
Well it is a committee of the house and the sole responsibility belongs to Mr Speaker he is just gracious enough to say Lukmon go and chair that committee and when I took up that responsibility I found that there was no precedent of such standing committee in the House. It has always been part of one committee or the other so I have to go through it, study a lot and define how to go about it. Since we started we have been doing a yeo man’s job at least we are bringing all the agreements in the state under PPP to have it under one umbrella so we will be able to speak to it and say Lagos state is worth maybe 1 billion,1 trillion dollars in PPP, that is the focus and that is the way we’ve been working and we have done one or two things since we came, we have done the optic fibre Infrastructure, we call it Dig 1 Lagos policy, that will bring all the mobile telephones network under one umbrella and you can see all around the state that there is a lot of work going on with the PPP project of the state and we have so many, LASU hostels have communicated to us we are working on that, LASU does not have hostels, so the PPP committeeis working on agreement targeted at ensuring the provision hostel is consummated in no time so that investors can mobilize and so many other things. All PPP agreement must be brought to house, we will scrutinise it to ensure that Lagosians and the state in particular get the best from its partners and also our partners get the best from us, and so far so good.
How come your set of lawmakers who made it to the 9th Assembly seemed to have a better grasp of legislative business so fast, to an extent one could have felt you have been around before, given distinct contributions on the floor of the chamber?
You are a reflection of what you want, then leadership is also critical if I want to be good and I have a good leader to push me obviously I will become good, that is why I chose my words, Obasa is a fantastic leader. At the initial stage I did not start up as legislator, I had my teeth cut in the finance industry I do businesses so when I came they took us through training, we went for training in Abeokuta, we were taught the act of lawmaking, we were taught a lot of things that are expected of a legislator. We were made to see the constitution as our Bible, we were made to see all Lagos state laws as a Quran that we must look through because it will be embarrassing if you asking me questions now and I cannot quote a section, listened critically and we bought into the idea that it had for us and he will always advise us that you will have largesse and patronage but you must be focused on the first thing you came here for and one is to be a legislator, two to be a legislator and three to be a legislator. So if you are guided by those things you will come out well, we took to that line of thought as new members of the house and we charged ourselves that we must be responsible and as you have said, we are doing well and expect us to do more.