TheCable

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.