We are a place for good Business, Commerce -Lagos State

The Lagos State Government has called on the private Sector to join hands with it in taking the State to the next level as an Investment destination of choice in Nigeria.

The Special Adviser to the Lagos State Governor on Sustainable Development Goals and Investment, Sholape Hammond, made this call while speaking exclusively on Business Nigeria with Tolulope Ogunjobi.

Mrs Hammond said the State having put in place a will continue to be an investment destination of choice and will also always provide a platform for conversation between the private and public sectors through its annual Ehingbeti Economic Summit.

She added that Lagos as a State and City has continued to lead in Policies to stimulate Economic activities and encourage commerce which is the lifeblood of daily life.

She disclosed that visit by top tech entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg has shown that the Energy for commerce in the State continues to rise.

Read Excerpts below…

Interestingly. I’d like to start with what’s been happening over the years. Yes, it’s almost election time, but a lot has been done in the last three and a half years. Roads, rails and all of that. Take us through some of this. Okay, thank you. I’m glad you said a lot. I see all of this. Thank you very much. When people ask how we’re doing, I always say, you tell us how we’re doing. But I’m glad that at least we have a testament from A Lagosian. So we came into this administration with a THEMES agenda. Essentially, I’m sure everyone in Lagos has heard this now. Traffic and transport management, health and environment, education and technology, making Lagos the 21st century economy, which is where power, agriculture, housing, and all the things that make Lagos livable sit, tourism and entertainment, and of course, security and governance, which is really the bedrock of everything. And I’m happy to say, I think we’ve touched on every single aspect of those pillars effectively, in spite of several unexpected circumstances which will always happen. So we didn’t plan for COVID, nor planned for COVID, we didn’t plan for back to back recessions. But in spite of that, I think Lagos has been able to innovate on our feet, as it were, being that this is the center of innovation for Africa. And of course, traffic and transport. You had mentioned a lot has been done in terms of road infrastructure, in terms of rail infrastructure. And basically just starting from the beginning, looking at everything and saying, look, if you build 25 lane roads, the number of cars will expand and you will always have these traffic jams, especially because you have a small land mass and a lot of people to move around daily. It just road is not an efficient means of transport. Lagos is one third water, but we hardly ever use the water. And then, of course, rail has always been something that’s been in the plan for Lagos. But since we lost our rail lines to an extent in the past, we haven’t been able to get that happening. So i am happy to say that we’re moving on all of those fronts with regards to roads, apart from fixing the roads, trying to do interventions around the traffic gridlock points. And I remember coming in, we had identified 48 traffic gridlock points, and we worked on all of them, doing the buses. So, different schemes for the different buses, the large capacity buses and the quality bus corridors. And Lagos has a very detailed 20 year old master plan that’s being faithfully implemented.

And that’s where all these things fit. So we have the bus corridors, we have the big buses. We’ve now done the first and last mile buses to then help move people through those big capacity corridors. And then the taxi scheme, which we very excitedly launched, the taxis that will now start being made in Nigeria, in Lagos here. But we’ve done 1000 taxis to start with, which we brought in. So a lot on that side. But the rail, we’re all excited about red and Blue Line, which will be commissioned December and January of this year and next year, and hopefully we can run our campaigns on the rail, looking to move a million people every day on those rail lines. And then, of course, water transportation, which is also a very, very strong area. In fact, the international community is very excited about this area and the work that we’re doing with our private facilitators, but also catalyzing with some ferries. Lagos has bought more than 25 ferries. We’ve dredged more than ten routes. We have ten identified routes to start with, and built more than 21 jetties. And so water transportation is beginning to pick up speed. So that’s on the transport side alone. So if you leave this to me, as they say, I can put it on top. I’ve seen the master plan and the Ehingbeti thing. There is this synergy. Something comes together there. It seems like Lagos has been working on something all the while it goes through. And what really is anybody out to address so and is a place in Lagos, by the way, I didn’t know that until two years ago. It was supposed to be where commerce first started with cowry shells. And there’s an entire thing around that that for as long as they remains, Lagos will be prosperous. As long as we do commerce, Lagos remains prosperous. And really, for us, it’s fundamental to what we believe. The businesses in Lagos are really the lifeblood of Lagos. And it all started with the administration of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the early two thousands. And they looked and they said, look, we can’t handle this alone. We need to have a conversation with everybody and bring everyone to the table. And we were supported by development partners and private sector, and they agreed to do certain things.

One of those things, for example, is a landmark land use charge, which is actually a composite of five taxes. And then you’d have five different people coming to knock on Door and business owners know what this means five different people bothering you from different levels through local government, through state government. It was chaos. And they had a conversation and agreed to unify that into one tax that’s collected and then disseminated.

And we’re actually trying to do that now with some of the things around transportation as well, just simplify the level of regulation. I mean, I’ve been in government for three and a half years, but I’ve been in private sector all my life. And we know we don’t want to see government, and we know it as well. So if you can reduce the amount of interface it’s created and a lot of other initiatives. So the bus reform policy, the first set of buses, Lagbus came from that. This Transport Master Plan conversation, Lekki Ikoyi Bridge, which I like to refer to as Lagos Gym because I’m one of the joggers on that bridge. And so many other innovations from Lagos all started from Ehingbeti. So Ehingbeti really is where public and private sector comes together to have a conversation and agree on the way forward. Not what government should do, but what all of us should do. And so far there’s been a 95% rate of implementation. That’s very exciting for us. So what better platform is there to have a conversation around the plan for the next 30 years of Lagos than where all of us agree and have a high level of implementation? The only platform is embedded. Beautiful stuff.
Okay, so again, it sounds a little bit big, but it’s really not big for a city like Lagos. As I mentioned, the Master Plan we’re implementing for transport today is more than 20 years old, and we’re being able to obviously you’re following it with as much ability as you can, so it’s probably slower to begin with. It may have been slower at certain points when there’s a recession as well, but we’ve been able to ramp up a lot in the last couple of years. So it’s good to have a longer term plan because really, investors will tell you they don’t care so much if the environment is up or if the environment is down. What investors want is certainty. We want to know where we’re going, if we know we’re going through a recession, the businesses that thrive in recession time and the ways that you respond, if we know we’re going through a prosperous time. There’s things that you do, but you have to know. So what we’re doing is putting a plan for all of us to know. And it’s something that also helps make government more accountable. Everybody knows this plan. Everybody has been part of this plan. It’s been socialized with students, it’s been socialized with people in the informal sector, in the markets, with Africans with the highest levels of business, with international people everybody knows. So you dare not default from this plan once we have all signed on to it. And that’s part of why we’re doing it. And then if you bear in mind, the last plan really was 13 years. So if we step up a little bit to 30, it’s not that far off. And then if you’re looking at longer term investments, longer term money, the African Union plan is 2063. What is a 50 year plan? So if Lagos is doing a 30 year plan, I think it’s very aligned. But what are the big pillars of this plan? We try to keep it relatively simple, four main pillars. So it’s around a thriving economy, as we say, that is the heart of Lagos. That’s what brings everybody here is the commercial opportunity. So you’ve got to have this thriving economy. And it’s looking at the real sectors that we want to support. It’s looking at things like food and beverage manufacturing. It’s looking at things like shipping. Lagos is an aquarian cities, one of the few aquarian cities in the world. We don’t have the shipping line. We’re looking at the African continent of free Trade agreement. We’ve got to get into the logistics of things. It’s a massive export hub. Everything comes here to be sent out or to be sent into the rest of the country. So we have to take transport logistics much more seriously, as we’re doing with the rail, as we’re looking at to do with the ports that we’re going to be commissioning sooner than the new port that’s coming with the airport that’s coming, shipping. So we have to look at all of that holistically retail. Lagos will forever remain commercial energy. We’re opening up that space now with all the activity that’s going on with the federal government, but also the work that we’re doing with our electricity market reform, of course, looking at the technology sector, fintechs, they’re going to dominate. We’re already at the heart of that now in Africa, not just in Nigeria. And then the creative sector, which really is a hidden weapon in these parts. We’re looking at those under, thriving economy. And then we have to look at modern infrastructure. You’ve got to have the right infrastructure in place to have people come through. We look at trying to build a human centric city. So Lagos is great and in spite, I mean, I know one area we probably get dinged a lot on is traffic. And it’s still very much work in progress. There are people in that 30 year plan. The aim is to make Lagos a city where you can get to anywhere. If you go from where you live to where you work within 30 minutes, that really is the target. Because we know it’s important for quality of life, but it’s every other thing around quality of life as well. It’s education. This is part of why people are coming here. Lagosians. And lagos. We spend a higher amount of our disposable income and education. We have a more serious concentration of talent, as we can see, an incredible talent across every sector, whether it’s core business, finance, technology, creative talent is here. Health care is important, safety and security. I mean, ever since Mark Zuckerberg came and jogged on that bridge, and I’m so excited I missed jogging on that day. But happy you did it anyway. Lagos is far more secure and a lot of investment has gone into that which people don’t see. Investments. Investment, really? Because that’s part of your portfolio. If we call it that. How well are we doing? I know Nigeria is always on top whenever these figures come from the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission. Every time I see that what is happening at the moment? Despite COVID-19 effects Russian Ukraine crisis. How are we doing? So we’re still doing relatively well in terms of the overall performance, as you’ve seen. Of course, Africa as a whole fell from 2019 when we were somewhere in the region of about $20 billion coming to the country. Odd, it felt less than half of that in 2020. Understandable the rest of the world are spending money on themselves and trying to sort of survive. COVID 2021 rose a little bit more and 2022 has been not as muted as we were afraid of because everybody’s been afraid of this election year. But by and large, they have continued to do incredibly well. And the government has for me, over the years, because of the type of investments we’ve made, we’ve been able to be front and center of even bringing some of that investment. So the port is dragging in investments, the free zones are bringing in investment. It’s businesses and us, enabling businesses and hopefully not hindering businesses, but also us then catalyzing businesses. And we’re looking to do more of that, which you will see in the plan. It’s really about coming together, working together, for example, looking at where all the technology companies are and saying, look, can we create special economic zones for you so that all these lovely investment dollars you’re raising abroad can’t bring in because of the peculiarities you have right now can come into the country? Can we do standard factories, which are fantastic lucky Free Zone is doing building standard factories so that MSMEs can also come in there and work and get the benefits of being an export processing zone. Because for me, they are going to be the secret source of winning this entire African Central Free Trade Agreement thing for Nigeria.

So we’re beginning to catalyze some of that. And the only reason why that happens, because these conversations happen when we know what people are doing and people know what we are doing, it becomes a lot easier to come together and create and Co-create very interesting, but all of these beautiful ideas and all of that were some already in the pipeline or in the pipeline, as they would say, regularly. Revenue generation is something that everybody wants to talk about, looking at budgeting, looking at debt service and all of that. How prepared is Lagos for all of this? Well, so in terms of how prepared are we? We are doing our best. Lagos has built capacity over time and capacity in being efficient, capacity in identifying better ways of providing services so that then you can charge for those services. The fact is, we all have to pay taxes, as they say, only two certainties in life death and taxes. We have to pay taxes, but everyone wants their taxes to do something good for them. So typically in Lagos, what it is that you’re providing, you’re paying taxes for a service that is provided. So we, on our part, what we try and do is find better ways to help you deliver those services so that then it’s also easier for you to pay. So we’re automating our platforms. We’ve automated the platform for paying LIRS at LIRS. Fantastic work being done by LIRS.

Working on automating the platform for land use charge. Working on automating. We’ve actually, I think, pretty much completed the platform for land, which has been a big challenge for people. So the Egis, I think, will be launching before the end of the year. Also working on things around physical planning, permits, so that as much as possible we can automate a lot of these services. When we did a trillion, 1.7 trillion odd budget earlier this year, we did it a little bit with some trepidation, but we’re doing really well. On the last budget analysis, I think we’re at about 85%. We’re not very far off from and that’s in spite of what has happened with the global economy. So you can imagine. So we’ve tried to be a lot more disciplined. We plan, we think, and there’s been a lot of robust support, again, from the private sector. I think it just helps to talk to the whole of Lagos because there’s so much knowledge and so much capacity in this that is going to open up, of course, with all of the expectations and those that should attend, both local and, of course, international partners and all of that. So any sector specifics, you’re looking like you want them to invest in Lagos. I know tech is one of it. Agriculture, I don’t know. Maybe you tell us more about it. We want everybody to participate in an, by the way, we have more than 210 people who have actually signed up. And last year we had a total of about 100 people joining a day. If we have 210, and hopefully with this, maybe even 300 signing up every day, if we can hit 1000, that would be wonderful because this plan is for all of us. This conversation is for all of us.

But with regards to the sectors, for sure, as I talked about food and beverage, anything around manufacturing because we want to bring more manufacturing here. Food, security, agriculture, very, very critical. And it showed up really included when we saw you shut the gate for three weeks. And we were almost in trouble in terms of how do you feed all these people. So we are small, but then the Netherlands are small and they feed the world. So there’s no reason we cannot feed ourselves. And so, if you recall, Mr. Governor, flagged off the construction of the Foodhub, which is going to be a massive 120 hectare logistics market. It’s supposed to bring sanity. So then we see where everything is. We can create strategic reserves. We know we have good storage for cold and dry food. We know where everything is. We know that we can keep the pressure for 46 weeks or 46 months or whatever it is, depending on the type of food. But what that then also does is it opens up for investment because people then say, oh, there’s 150 heads of cattle come into Lagos every day. Okay? So I can force that or I can make a plan for that. 300 tons of banana coming. Oh, we can do this. When there’s transparency, there’s clarity, there’s order, investments can come. So, again, catalytic investment. But back to the sectors that you talked about. Energy is also very, very big. That sector is going to get liberalized with all the things we’re doing around our market. And of course, real estate. Real estate, real estate. There’s so many of us are more coming every day. You’ve got a house full of us. And we want modern real estate and we want commercial real estate. 23 hybrid restaurants opened up on the island of Lagos in the first half of this year. That is massive growth and it’s not stopping. I’m sure many more have opened even since then. More and more people come. So more and more people need to be housed, need to be fed, need to be entertained, and need places of work to do their business. And so those are really, really big opportunities in Lagos. But as I say, healthcare is massive as well. We want to reverse healthcare, tourism. We’ve signed a partnership with Lagoon to transform a former nursing home to a medi park with international capacity for people to take over. And it’s an entire game changer for the health industry. We’re building the largest children’s hospital. We’re building massive general hospitals. So there’s a lot that can be done. Pretty much anything in Legos can be business. Education is a business. Health is a business. Everything is a business. Because the numbers are here, the buying power relatively is here, the opportunities here. All right, interesting. So I just said, I mentioned, I said Lego leads and others follow. But let’s wrap up on this. What is your message now to negotiations? I expect a lot from government as we move into EBT. And moving on to what’s your message to negotiations? In general. So my message to negotiations is this. We’re excited about the people who have gotten on board this. We invite everyone to be part. Government doesn’t succeed when people don’t participate. We want our people to be part of planning. We want our people to be part of executing. We want our people to pay their taxes. We want our people to hold us accountable. We want our people to work with us every step of the way. Because to realize this opportunity, we need every single one of us. Lagos is opportunity calling. Be part of it.