Dapo Abiodun, the governor of
Ogun state, says his state will develop its infrastructure so that it can
accommodate intended migrants from Lagos.
Speaking at the recently
concluded conference of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), Abiodun said
Lagos is expanding into his state.
“I am contiguous to Lagos which
is the fifth-largest economy on the continent.
“So Lagos is expanding into Ogun
and that is why all the industries are in Ogun state and that is why you can
see that a lot of people are either living or working in Ogun or are living in
Ogun and working in Lagos.
“It is important for us to build
a sustainable state, not just even a city and that entails ensuring that we
look at that migration from Lagos and begin to plan for it and those that are
migrating from Lagos will require things like good education, good health, good
road infrastructure, physical planning, an environment that is clean, power,
water and those are the things that we have focused on in Ogun, so that we are
not caught unawares.
“We are prepared to be also a
megacity because very soon you will begin to find out that you will not be able
to distinguish between Lagos and Ogun and particularly the infrastructural
requirement.
“Ogun state people must be able
to move effortlessly within Ogun state and they must be able to move between
Ogun and Lagos state, to respond to this challenging migration. Lagos is about
15 million people on 3,500square kilometres. We have about 5 million people on
about 16,000square kilometres. So we can accommodate them but we must be
careful.”
Speaking further, the governor
said work had to be done to ensure that people in the rural area do not all
migrate to the city.
This work, he said, would be done
through public-private partnership (PPP).
“Ogun state’s vision is to
provide a focused and productive governance while creating an enabling
environment for a public-private sector partnership. So what we have done is as
soon as I came into office, I issued an executive order to set up a PPP office.
“Now the PPP bill has been
passed, so we are now able to objectively and creatively accept PPP proposals,
invite for proposals from people and ensure that we have a collaboration
between what the private sector knows how to do best, provide funding while we
also facilitate.”
Abiodun said most of the
infrastructure work to be carried out through PPP.
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