African countries bogged down by leadership challenges – Fashola

The Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, has advocated rapid infrastructure development in Africa as solution to her development challenges.
Fashola said infrastructure deficiency has locked in the vast opportunities inherent in the continent for economic growth.
Governor Fashola, who was hosted at a special interactive session anchored by the Chairman, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Jim O’Neil, with the theme: “Delivering Nigeria’s Growth Promise,” at the Goldman Sachs Growth Market Summit in New York, United States of America, said there are much more opportunities in-locked in Africa that are yet unreachable because the infrastructures that could enable people, goods and services to move more easily are yet insufficient.
“I know that there are much more opportunities in-locked in Africa that are yet unreachable because the infrastructures that can facilitate easy movement of people, goods and services are still in short supply,” the governor said, adding that most African countries are also bogged down by leadership challenges.
The governor said the African continent, with its vast natural resources, including mineral and human resources, has the potential to develop more rapidly than most other economies of the world if sufficient infrastructure such as roads and good transportation were put in place to enable easy movement of people, goods and services among the countries of the continent and beyond.
He also blamed the slow pace of development on political instability, saying most African countries have suffered underdevelopment due to the level at which their governments function or rapidity of change of government.
He said such does not allow sufficient time for any appreciable development.
“Many citizens of the countries in Africa that are in some kind of difficulties today are here in the US and you will see that it is as a result of either the level of functionality in government or the rapidity of turnover of government without the sufficiency of time to get things done,” the Governor said.
Stressing further the importance of democracy and political stability in the development of any nation, Fashola said while Nigeria suffered unstable polity due to rapid change of government, development was largely stalled while people continued to procreate and take decisions which the government of the day was unable to respond to.
According to the governor: “If you imagine, perhaps, six years in the country, between 1993 and 1999, when the country was under dictatorial military rule, development did actually stop for six years. But people kept procreating and people kept making decisions, economic decisions and government did not respond to this.”
Governor Fashola, who explained that those times created deficiencies in infrastructure as the nation’s population continued to increase without corresponding infrastructure development, added: “Those were the deficiencies that the restoration of democracy has allowed us to begin to address; addressing infrastructure deficit in a way that it reduces the daily frustrations of citizens
“There is increasing restoration of order in the state and there is a lot of hope that things can turn around because the citizens are seeing things day by day, metre by metre, inch by inch being constructed.
“More people now pay taxes. There are still a lot of people to be brought into the tax net that we want to bring in. But there is a lot we have done over the years through persuasion and visible demonstration of what is being done with the resources that they entrust us with.”
Still on internally generated revenue as the tool for the rapid development in the State in the last 13 years, Governor Fashola declared, “We have moved from barely one million taxpayers a few years ago to three million taxpayers in Lagos and that is why we are the only state in the country financing our budget of about $3.2 billion annually with about 70 per cent of the resources which we generate ourselves while external funds by way of national allocations account for only 30 percent. So we are really reducing our dependence on national allocations.”