Like many other fast-growing cities in the world, Lagos faces one composite challenge: limitless opportunities in the heart of crumbling infrastructure, which seems to stand against the state’s vast development prospects. Faced with how to cope with the burden of rapidly rising population, the country’s bustling commercial capital has become a conundrum of sorts, prompting growing demands for better and more efficient social services by over 20 million people resident in Lagos.
But all this may soon become a tale of the past in the state of aquatic splendour, said Akeem Popoola Fahm, Lagos State Commissioner for Science and Technology. Admitting that the monumental challenges confronting the state are real, Fahm said that the burning desire to achieve better living standards for the state’s teeming population was what prompted Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu to begin to think out of the box. In a press briefing to unfold some of what the state is doing to alleviate the sufferings of residents, the Commissioner said the governor, having risen to top management levels in the corporate world before ‘cross-carpeting’ into the public sector, knows too well that doing the same things in the same ways would only produce the usual results.
The Commissioner, who was accompanied to the press briefing by Tubosun Alake, Special Adviser to the Governor on innovation and technology, Segun Adeniji, Permanent Secretary, and other top officials in the Ministry of Science and Technology, reiterated that Lagos is aware that its current population foists a heavy pressure on infrastructure, which can hinder the state’s efforts to provide stable socio-economic development and delivery of quality livelihood for its citizens and teeming visitors. To get out of the woods, the officials said Lagos has since realised that leveraging on technology to make the state a smart city will help in solving most of the issues agitating the minds of Lagosians. Working under #ForAGreaterLagos, the top functionaries insisted that achieving a smart city status will engender a Lagos that delivers efficient public services and better the standards of living for all residents.
The heart of the matter
As a mark of its demonstration of seriousness towards attaining a smart city status, Lagos recently acquired some state-of-the-art technological equipment that can help it achieve its dream. As a testimony to its commitment towards a smart city, the state government has just acquired two Tiguar S-410 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A trailblazing feat, the newly-procured drones were inaugurated recently during a maiden flight, which took place on Saturday, 16th November, at Caleb University Sports complex, Imota, Lagos. With this technology, Mr. Fahm enthused that the UAVs will give Lagos more convenient resources system to deliver the digital mapping infrastructure that will serve as the backbone for the state’s planning activities. It was disclosed that, at least, six UAV operators have been trained and certified in Poland to fly and maintain the UAVs.
Short of having an on-call manned air fleet, UAVs would offer the unique ability for the state government to capture data within a convenient time frame whenever it is in need of accurate facts to guide planning. Due to the unique flight characteristics of UAVs, experts say the imagery they generate is sharper, which confers additional unique advantages of on whatever that is generated. Drones fly very low compared to manned aircraft – 409 feet is a typical altitude. This means the onboarding camera can capture high-ground resolution on the order of 2 to 5 centimetres, while turnaround time is a few hours instead of days, weeks, or months in the case of traditional delivery times. That is not all. Another advantage of procuring the UAVs is that the state will now be able to control the process rather than working with an outside vendor or being stuck with generic imagery that doesn’t meet the temporal requirements.
Fahm said the UAVs will be most useful in orthophoto mapping, environmental monitoring, infrastructural control, flood monitoring, search and rescue operations and many more disaster management activities. Once the digital mapping is available, it provides limitless benefits for the state in terms of delivering accurate data that helps purposeful planning, as there is virtually nothing involved in public affairs management that does not require this great planning tool, he stressed. This vital ingredient for governance is what the state has lacked over the years, which has limited its capacity to achieve the dream of a smart city where social services are delivered more efficiently so that can people live more meaningfully.
“It will help in processing land information. It will help to identify different structures whether buildings, schools, hospitals and so on available within the state and provide the necessary navigation so that people can go there and plan events around the areas. The information can be used for future planning because we will be able to identify areas available for agriculture, areas available for estate planning, areas available for hospitals and so on. It is going to be a great planning tool,” an elated Fahm said.
The real benefits of EGIS project
Buffeted with issues surrounding property acquisitions and complaints about ease of doing business in Lagos, the state initiated and launched the Lagos Enterprise GIS (eGIS) platform in 2015. At the time, what the government set out to achieve was to empower itself with the technological wherewithal to be able to provide a full digital mapping platform of the entire state. Armed with digital mapping data, Fahm enthused that the state would be able to develop programmes such as land management, flood, erosion controls and rainfall patterns in more efficient ways.
But the scope of the ambitious project has since been expanded to cover migration of the present spatial data infrastructure (SDI) to the Cloud platform, implementation of google geo-technology platform, deployment of the continuously operating reference stations (CORs) across the divisions of the state, acquisition of unmanned aerial vehicles for data capture and mapping, building of bespoke applications to cover health, pharmaceuticals, agricultural sector and real-time kinematics for structural and civil engineers, surveyors in private practice, and navigators; deployment of e-survey solutions, implementation of the integrated land administration and automation system using Thomson Reuters Aumentum Solution.
Because all the data generated is viewable from any part of the world either using desktop, tablet or smart devices, the overall benefit of the project is that it will improve the ease of doing business and boost the confidence of investors locally and internationally. It will also provide for proper monitoring of government infrastructure, ensure accurate land surveys and related services, optimise revenue collected from land transactions and decrease transaction costs and increase incentives for private sector investment. Ultimately, Fahm said, it would bring about improved planning for social services to the populace in the area of education, health, infrastructural development and security; just as it will usher in increased public confidence and people will be more disposed to buying properties due to lower transaction costs. Above all, it would also enable the state government tackle all land conflicts easily as it will bring about the standardisation of business processes involved in land transactions and make way for an improved and bankable Certificate of Occupancy (C of O).
What Lagos will look like as a smart city?
By the time the dream becomes a reality, Fahm averred that Lagos will begin to run a 24-hour economy where companies can operate in a secure environment, thereby creating more jobs and increasing the state’s gross domestic product. Because ICT serves as its backbone, which provides the template upon which everything revolves, a smart city is one in which public facilities and other infrastructure that enable social services delivery to achieve the best possible operational efficiency – since conception, planning, and implementation of policies are anchored on verifiable data. In other words, it is not just a city that is ICT- driven; it one that makes useful information and data readily available for everyone, thus improving both the quality of government services and citizens’ welfare.
According to Fahm, Lagos as a smart city will be much more than just technological networks because it will use new technologies for the benefit of its citizens and the city will become more efficient in the process, especially in the deliverables that make life more abundant for residents. He also assured that by incorporating smart technologies into transport infrastructure, healthcare services, education, water systems, power supplies and government services, it will close the gap between the people and their government. He cited examples of smart cities such as Barcelona, Singapore, Amsterdam and London, among others, where technological innovations have progressively improved the commuting and mobility of citizens, increased their quality of life, improved the environment as well as the economy.
Because Governor Sanwo-Olu has realized that if Lagos becomes a smart city, the interplay of human capital, social capital and ICT infrastructure will lessen both the burden of governance and pains of living in the city. This, Fahm stated, will address public issues, achieve a sustainable development and increase the quality of life of citizens within the shortest possible time, since global advancements in technology and their application to impact speedily in almost all challenges facing public affairs management and deliverables in a mega city like Lagos will bring about e-government, safe city, mobility/WiFi/digital citizens, open data, smart farming/agriculture, smart buildings, smart grid/energy/utilities.
Lagos smart city dream, not a one-man orchestra
Believing that Lagos, which generates about 90 per cent of Nigeria’s trade flows and is rated the fifth largest economy in Africa, can do far better than it is currently doing in view of its humongous potentials, the Lagos State House of Assembly (LAHA) has also fully thrown its weight behind the smart city initiative – seeing it as a great possibility. During the 2020 budget presentation, the speaker, Hon Mudashiru Ajayi Obasa, challenged the executive arm of government to come up with bold and innovative ideas that can take Lagosians out of the woods and precipitate tremendous changes and improvement in the standards of living of residents. While promising that LAHA is fully prepared to lend its support, Obasa suggested other means of mass transportation in the state, especially rail, at the presentation of the 2020 budget by Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu recently.
Having a population of over 20 million dependent on-road transportation, which is the most common for movement of people and goods in Lagos, needs to be reviewed if social and economic prosperity is to be realised in a state that records the most visits from across the country averaging 5, 000 daily, with not less than 600 people staying put and taking residence in spite of the state’s disadvantaged position in landmass. He pointedly asked Governor Sanwo-Olu to change the narrative in the area of transportation, which is at the heart of any economic development, but a major headache in Lagos. Also, the lawmakers admonished the executive to take advantage of the state’s aquatic endowment by embracing water transportation, saying a functional and modern transportation system is one of the major indices of a smart city.
“It is worthy of note that Lagos State as it is today needs radical, aggressive and logistic revamping. It requires an urgent and holistic revamping. It requires an urgent, economic and infrastructural turnaround. Mr. Governor must be bold to lay a solid foundation to be built on by successive administrations. It is high time we came up with innovative ideas and strategies to bring change to the state with the aim of taking it to the next level. It is common knowledge that doing things the same way will yield the same result. But when we desire new things, a marvellous and egalitarian society, we have to look inward and change the approach.
“To move Lagos forward, there is the need to focus more attention on the rail to connect the entire Lagos. A rail from Ogun State boundary down to Lekki, Epe; a rail from Ikorodu to the same area should be urgently considered. Those under construction must be speedily completed. No amount of road patching, rehabilitations and constructions will really solve our transportation problem judging by the influx of people into Lagos on a daily basis. With money or not, we have to start doing something,” Obasa said.
Without mincing words, it is clear the new administration in Lagos has its work cut out for it. Besides having Governor Sanwo-Olu at the driver seat in this ambitious smart city project, there is more than an able hand in the Deputy Governor, Dr. Obafemi Hamzat, whose wealth of experience in the ICT world and public affairs management will also come in handy in the journey towards making Lagos a smart city. Interestingly, Hamzat was the state’s Commissioner for Science and Technology from August 2005 till June 2011, before becoming the Commissioner for Works and Infrastructure from 2011 till May 2015.
An alumnus of the University of Ibadan, Oyo State, where he bagged his first and second degrees in Agricultural Engineering in 1986 and 1988, respectively, before crowning it with a PhD in System Process Engineering at Cranefield University, England, Dr. Hamzat’s tenure as Commissioner for Science and Technology was widely applauded for initiating and enforcing the application of modern technology usage in the state’s ministries, which changed the face of data and record-keeping and eliminated the scourge of ghost workers that had plagued the state for years.
To complement the team is Fahm, himself a seasoned ICT expert with a track record of distinction in how to deploy technological innovations to solve social problems. Apart from his wealth of experience cutting across different fields in IT while working in the United States, the 61-year old Lagosian holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Industrial Technology from Ohio University, Athens Ohio, as well as Master in Business Administration in Computer Information and Systems Science from the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), Washington DC. His illustrious career, which began as a university computer lab technician, took him to Accenture Federal Services, a management and IT consulting firm as a Cloud Computing Architect. During Fahm’s tenure at Accenture, he managed the operational modernisation for the US Department of Homeland Security, US Air Force, Department of Health and Human Services (Obama Care) and the Social Security Administration.
And as Tunde Braimoh, chairman Lagos State House of Assembly Committee on Information, Strategy and Security, said recently, with the redefined synergy and unity of purpose between the Lagos lawmakers and the executive, Lagosians are definitely in for a better deal in the march towards making the city a more functional place, with all the accoutrements of comfort, security and prosperity that are often taken for granted in a smart city.
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