Former Lagos State governor, now Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, has said he does not know what became of the video camera he found at the Lekki Tollgate in Lagos in the aftermath of last year’s #EndSARS protest.
When asked about what happened to the video camera he found at the tollgate, which was the epicentre of the protest during an interview on Arise TV as monitored by SaharaReporters, Fashola said, “You should not be asking me. You have the tapes showing that I handed it over to the government of Lagos so you have all the recordings. I think your people were there. So don’t ask me what happened to the camera. I don’t know.”
A viral video of Fashola’s visit to the scene of the protest last year showed how the minister spotted a video camera and drew the attention of others to it.
Many Nigerians had lambasted Fashola and the Buhari Muhammadu government, questioning how a video camera could still be lying at the scene days after the protest venue had been supposedly cleaned up.
Speaking on the Buhari government’s position that states should stop repairing federal roads in their domain, and if it was a warning or a threat, the works and housing minister noted, “It wasn’t a warning, it wasn’t a threat, I was executing the mandate of the Federal Executive Council as shared by the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. “What is the context, the context is that between 1999 and 2015 federal roads had been essentially unattended to.”
He further said, “So governors felt the need to intervene on the understanding that they would be reimbursed. You said and you are right at the beginning of this interview that there are 200,000 kilometres of roads across Nigeria. Federal Government is responsible for only 35,000 km so the remaining roads out of 200,000km, 165,000km belong to the state and local governments. There is a saying that you must remove the log in your eye first before you come and remove the speck in my own.
“Have the states done all their roads? One. Do they have the resources to do federal roads? I’m telling you of 200 billion (naira) roads. Many of them have started presenting their budgets now, N500 billion, N300 billion, if you look at the breakdown now, the bulk of it at the very best case, you find 50-50 recurrent to capital so those who are even struggling to present N500 billion budget, let us say it is halfway, N250 billion, can you put it on Lagos-Ibadan (Road?). It is not enough to build Lagos-Ibadan so why are you struggling with a road you really can’t finance?”
