Behave yourself or Lagos will expose your bad behaviour!
This was how it started. Governor Babatunde Fashola, the governor of Lagos State, decides that a group, to which I was privileged to be among, should come and see how thieves and badly-behaved people are now going to be monitored and caught via his state-of-the-art CCTV cameras located in different parts of the state. When he comes into this modern, NASA-like 27-screen monitoring centre, he comes in with some members of his Executive Council, including Ben Akabueze. And this is where I digress!
I have ‘known’ Ben Akabueze, the Lagos State commissioner for Budget and Planning, for at least 15 years. Well, journalists like me have a way of ‘knowing’ different people for very long periods even if they may not get to accept that they know us personally. It’s the nature of the job; as people who like to poke our noses on anything and everything (not that song, you!) trying to smell the news, we arrogantly like to make everyone believe that it’s our business to be everywhere and try to find out everything and get into the lives of other people.
Yes, I knew Akabueze at NAL Merchant Bank, from the time when he was climbing up the senior management ladder to when he finally mounted the chief executive’s seat. I was a finance journalist and the Broad Street and Marina axis used to be our (finance journalists) own playground. My friend Bashir Ibrahim likes to find joy in accusing me of what he terms the disease of ‘knowing and not knowing people’. “There are many people in the North who follow you and want to meet you,” he often tells me. “But you like to keep a low profile and just do your job.” Sometimes, it is difficult to grab his point, until he makes an effort to explain. But this same point that Bashir makes comes home when, as it happens these days, I occasionally encounter Akabueze.
As it turns out, the man is a good follower of BusinessDay and this column. I am not going to be quick to say he is an indulgee, because I don’t want to ascribe to him a title he doesn’t want to be addressed with. And as every genuine indulgee knows, we know ourselves; and we know those who like us but may, sometimes, not admit it, even though they look forward to our weekend square table rib-crackers. We actually have a name for them (and again, this is not Fela’s “we geti name for dem” kind of thing). We call them ‘passing-by visitors who like this good thing’. Every time I have met him in the last year or so, the Honourable Commissioner always takes a good look at me and smiles. I guess he first says to himself, “So this man is short”, before saying openly, ‘You took that picture in a way that deceives people into thinking you are tall. So you are not tall at all.”
This week, on Monday to be specific, when he saw me at a very unique occasion, which this is actually all about, he could not help making that point again to me. And there I was thinking all 5’9 of me is tall! Now that Akabueze has exposed me for who I am for the umpteenth time – a short trim-body editor – it is dawning on me that I have to do something. I tried, though, last Monday, to size the commissioner up, to really find out by how many inches he might, indeed, be taller than I am. I could see from the distance that he might be a couple of inches taller but I could not draw a conclusive picture, given that being a top Lagos State government official, I couldn’t really pull up close to do a shoulder-to-shoulder comparative measurement. That in itself becomes my assignment. Since Akabueze has taken it upon himself to bring me down to size, literarily, I have now given myself the assignment of finding out by how many inches he is taller than me.
In the meantime, I will go knocking on the doors of shoemakers around the world. They must find us men our own platforms! The other time, I had spoken about the need for this to happen, shouting myself hoarse, that it is not only women that should have the advantage of standing toweringly and intimidatingly when they enter a room with the aid of platforms, but that men who seemed to have been undercut by nature should have the opportunity to do so too. We don’t have to be acting funny, or doing things out of the ordinary, like the entertainer Denrele, before we should be allowed to own and wear our specially-designed platforms. After all, Denrele is still borrowing his platforms from either his sisters or female friends – which shouldn’t be in this world of equal opportunity and shattering of glass ceilings wherever they may be occurring. For those concerned that allowing shoemakers to make platforms might be posing security risks across the world, I would like to say that they shouldn’t worry. From what I saw on Monday, the occasion at which I met Akabueze, Lagos State has prepared an answer for those who might want to pose any security risk with their platform shoes.
Now finally, let me get down to the serious matter of security. If you are in Lagos, in any part of Lagos – Agege Motor Road, Agboju market, international airport, deputy governor’s office area, some public car park – and you are a thief, armed or un-armed, or you belong to the group called “Men and Women Behaving Badly”, then you had better watch out. Your activities are being watched and your criminal or bad behaviour is being seen by security-conscious Lagos at a monitoring station where 27 screens are being fed by at least 1,200 cameras.
Just imagine if you are making your way into the Murtala Mohammed International Airport and your bad behaviour gets the better of you and you start slapping your fellow human being, just know that someone somewhere will see you. Or you are on Agege Motor Road and someone mistakenly hits your car. Instead of looking for the right solution, you come out of your car, and because you are bigger than the other driver (or you see yourself as a ‘big man’), you then proceed to commit the offence of dealing grievous body harm, you will be captured on CCTV and you will go to jail with diligent prosecution. And if instead of working, you think that it is better to deprive others who work hard by carrying firearms into their homes and dispossessing them of their valuables, then be sure that Lagos will catch you! When they do, it is in a jail house that you will end up. That’s why they say, with Fashola, Eko o oni ba je o!
By: PHILLIP ISAKPA