AZU ISHIEKWENE FROM PREMIUM TIMES
Trying to fit him into a mold can be sometimes problematic. I have always thought of him as a teacher and mentor. And later, only much later, as a friend. For over three decades he has been more than enough in each of these roles.
My path with Dr Yemi Osinbajo, as he then was, first crossed at the University of Lagos when he was a lecturer at the Faculty of Law and I was a student at the Department of Mass Communication at the same university. Just a busybody trying to indulge my fantasy of becoming a pocket lawyer, I met him out of curiosity.
One of his students and good friend of mine who passed on many years ago, Sunday Okoli, fondly called Harry, gave the impression that the Law Faculty had four of the university’s biggest talisman – Jelili Omotola, Oyelowo Oyewo, Amos Utuama and Osinbajo.
One day, I strayed into one of Osinbajo’s classes in what can only be described as ambulatory trespass. I was struck by his charm, ease of delivery and how his students connected with him. I thought to myself as I snuck out, with a lecturer like this, perhaps I should have studied law? I never returned to his class but that encounter stayed with me.
I followed him through the many pleasant stories Harry told of him but our paths never crossed again until many 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 retained its vibrancy and boisterousness as the country’s commercial capital, years of neglect and centralised government had robbed it of vital energy, threatening to bury it in crime and filth.
To make matters worse for a 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 any serious attempt at clean-up which obviously required significant resources from the centre, would be a tug of war.
President Olusegun Obasanjo, smarting from the humiliation of the 1999 election in which he was roundly rejected by his home base, the South-West, was not in any mood to do Lagos or any other states in the region any favours.
The mission to clean up, rebuild and renew the city (among several other election promises made by Tinubu) would require tough, even brutal, political engagement; no less than it would also involve soft skills, especially prudent and robust use of the law, to clear landmines and claw back vast subnational territory long appropriated by the unitarist state, rendering the federating units mere appendages of the centre.
It was in the pursuit of this latter part that Osinbajo, a member of Tinubu’s outstanding cabinet at the time, had to deploy his legal genius in public service for the first time outside the classroom.
Leading human rights activist and senior advocate of Nigeria, Femi Falana, once told me that even though political activism will continue to be a major tool to restructure Nigeria, the progress made through legal activism has been largely understated.
Before Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike made VAT a court issue, challenging the right of the federal government to collect the taxes from the state, Lagos had been there in its quest to expand its income and the 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 meddling in areas such as creation of local governments, physical planning, title registration, registration and production of vehicle number plates and casino licensing. In the area of physical planning and title registration specifically, the court ruled that the federal government has no land. The Land Use Act vests ownership and control of land in state governments.
In a ruling in 2019 in a case earlier originated by Lagos State when Osinbajo was AG, the state also secured a judgement that upheld its right to charge and collect consumption tax from hotels, restaurants and event centres within the state.
