Lateef Jakande, the former Lagos State governor, died on Thursday at the age of 91.
But standing out even among the quintet of UPN governors was the short man in the Round House of Lagos, who turned around the fortunes of the coastal state. Mr Jakande’s image was built on his success at overhauling a bureaucracy that had moved away from the people in 13 years of military rule at the state and federal levels.Mr Jakande was born on July 23, 1929, to Rahman Adeniyi Jakande and his wife, Sinotu Aduke, nee Akodu, in the Epetedo area of Lagos Island.
Under the editorship of Mr Jakande, the Nigerian Tribune soon became a thorn in the side of the colonial administration as the clamour for self-rule and independence intensified in the British African colonies. On the first day of October 1979, Mr Jakande was sworn in as the first executive governor of Lagos State. He was reelected in 1983 but served only three months of his second term when on December 31, 1983, the military struck again and aborted the Second Republic. The soldiers would hold the rein for the next 16 years until 1999 when the Fourth Republic arrived.When Mr Jakande became governor, Lagos already had a large population on a small territory which stretched its limited infrastructure.
He withdrew his children from private schools and enrolled them at public schools at a time political opponents derided his free education programme as eroding the quality of education in the schools. He also established a teacher training college and a college of education, and concluded the arrangement for the establishment of the Lagos State University in Ojo.
He inaugurated a giant car crushing equipment which had the capacity to crush 45 vehicles per day. The effort was aimed at freeing Lagos streets from the menace of abandoned vehicles that littered and defaced the city. This brought people like Mr Jakande, Ebenezer Babatope, Wole Oyelese, Mobolaji Osomo and Olu Onagoruwa from the South-west into the government.