A leader for all seasons, By Azu Ishiekwene

Trying to fit the mold can sometimes be a problem. I have always considered him a teacher and mentor. And later, only later, as friends. For more than three decades he has been more than adequate in each of these roles.

My path with Dr. Yemi Osinbajo, like him, first crossed at the University of Lagos when he was a lecturer in the Faculty of Law and I was a student in the Department of Mass Communication in the same university. Just a busy man trying to indulge his fantasy of being a pocket lawyer, I met him out of curiosity.

One of my students and good friends who passed away many years ago, Sunday Okoli, called Harry, gave me the impression that the Faculty of Law had the four biggest talismans in the university – Jelili Omotola, Oyelowo Oyewo, Amos Utuama and Osinbajo.

One day, I wandered into one of Osinbajo’s classes in what can only be described as ambulatory offences. I was amazed at the charm, the ease of delivery and how the students connected with them. I thought to myself laughing, with a lecturer like this, maybe I should study law? I never went back to the classroom but that encounter stayed with me.

I followed him through the many happy stories Harry told him but our paths never crossed again until years later when he was appointed Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice in Lagos by Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

In 1999, Lagos was a mess. A big mess.

Although the city still remains vibrant and bustling as the country’s commercial capital, years of neglect and centralized government have robbed it of its vital energy, threatening to bury it in crime and filth.

To make matters worse for the new government at the time, a nasty turf war between the PDP-controlled central government and the six AD states in the South-West (including Lagos), meant that a serious effort to clean it up was clearly needed. significant resources from the center, will tug war.

President Olusegun Obasanjo, smart from the humiliation of the 1999 election which was rejected by the home base, South-West, is not in the mood to do Lagos or other countries in the region any favors.

The mission to clean, rebuild and renew the city (among several other election promises made by Tinubu) will require difficult, even violent, political engagement; not less than that will also involve soft skills, especially wise and powerful use of the law, to remove landmines and claw back the vast subnational area provided by the unitarist state, rendering the federated units only appendages from the center.

In pursuit of this last part, Osinbajo, a member of Tinubu’s prominent cabinet at the time, had to deploy his legal genius in public service for the first time outside the classroom.

Nigerian human rights activist and senior advocate, Femi Falana, once said that although political activism will continue to be a key tool in restructuring Nigeria, the progress made through legal activism has been underestimated.

Before Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike made VAT a court issue, challenging the right of the federal government to collect taxes from the state, Lagos was there to maximize the revenue and relative autonomy of the constituent states by testing the law. .

Osinbajo led Lagos in a series of litigations to claw back swathes lost to Federal intervention in areas such as the creation of local government, physical planning, title registration, registration and production of vehicle number plates and casino licenses. In terms of physical planning and special title registration, the court ruled that the federal government does not own land. The Land Use Act vests the ownership and control of land in the state government.

In a judgment in 2019 in a case previously initiated by Lagos State when Osinbajo was AG, the state also secured a judgment upholding the right to charge and collect consumption tax from hotels, restaurants and event centers in the state.

The ruling was based on the principle that the power to levy consumption tax rests in the Residual Register. This court also gave the FIRS the right to collect the tax.

This battle over the interpretation of Constitutional law is not cut and dry. The dispute that arose over the control rights of inland waterways between the federal and state governments, for example, fought in court for more than 10 years, before a truce was made between the National Inland Waterways Authority and Lagos State.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable legal battles of the Osinbajo era in Lagos was in a case Lagos State Attorney General v. Attorney General of the Federation 2004, feisty and protracted legal tango in which Lagos seeks to recover local government funds seized by Obasanjo after a futile attempt to crush and capture Tinubu’s government in the election heist that claimed five out of six states in the South-West region for the PDP.

The recovery effort, in Osinbajo’s words, “made Lagos start thinking like a ruler.” This sets the tone for raising the country’s Internal Revenue (IGR) from about N600 million per month in 1999 to N45 billion by 2021.

It also set the tone for Osinbajo’s performance on the bigger stage.

Have you seen him lately? His hair has been graying quite a bit since he became Vice President eight years ago. Which is rather surprising considering former President Goodluck Jonathan, he was a former Vice President, once said that Vee Pee’s job was to read newspapers.

Or to quote the first US Vice President, John Adams, who described his office in a letter to his wife as, “the least important contrivance” that man has created.

But that is precisely the source of Osinbajo’s festering gray hair. In the last eight years, the job of the vice president of Nigeria has been nothing. He has been the President when he took some of the most important decisions.

His office has been at the heart of Nigeria’s first efforts to develop a social safety net program. When COVID-19 hits the depredation, the database of the safety net program is available.

Osinbajo has become the Buhari government’s face-of-the-youth, rallying them, speaking with and for them in all things – from crypto to ICT and innovation. Of course, in a country where about 65% of the population is 40 years old, these efforts are more than “inconsequential contrivances.”

I am not convinced that his knowledge of the law and his expertise in jurisprudence are for this government. One thing that the government likes, is Ease of Doing Business. It is largely to credit that Nigeria has improved from ranking 169 (out of 190 countries) in 2016 to 131, two years ago.

Sometimes I wonder what he will do after he leaves the office. Of course, he has a thriving legal practice, which is why he was released as Buhari’s running mate one morning in December 2014 after appearing in a case at the Supreme Court, Abuja. If he returns to the Chamber in Lagos, it may be the place where he is detained.

At 66, he remains a calm, thoughtful and engaging debater. He has inspired and challenged millions of people, especially the young and the young across ethnic and party lines, to believe. With a wonderful sense of humor, a strong wife and a heart of faith, the best years of service to God and country are still ahead.

He is not only a teacher, mentor and friend. He is, above all, a leader for all time.

Azu Ishiekwene is the Editor-in-Chief of LEADERSHIP.