In an interview on the Mic On Podcast, Nigerian academic and columnist Professor Farooq Kperogi stated that he never expected President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to govern differently from what Nigerians have experienced so far.
Kperogi, speaking with host Seun Okinbaloye, referenced his first-hand experience during a visit to Lagos in 2005 as the foundation of his views. He explained that while media reports at the time praised then-Governor Tinubu for transforming Lagos, his own observations on the ground told a different story. This disparity, he said, shaped his skepticism toward the widely circulated narrative of Tinubu’s achievements.
According to the professor, what was presented as a transformation was mostly cosmetic and limited to elite enclaves, while the broader infrastructure of Lagos remained neglected. Kperogi argued that successive Lagos governors have benefited from favorable national press coverage that often paints them in a positive light, regardless of on-the-ground realities.
This, he noted, became a pattern he observed and understood as part of a larger propaganda machinery rather than evidence of exceptional governance. For Kperogi, Tinubu’s presidential style so far is consistent with the image he formed nearly two decades ago, which is why he was not surprised by the current state of affairs.
To be frank. No, I didn’t expect anything different. I recalled visiting Lagos in 2005 from the United States on holiday and I read a lot about how he has transformed Lagos so I looked forward to a transformed Lagos, a radically different Lagos to an infrastructurally rich Lagos but when I got there, the Lagos I saw wasn’t different from the Lagos I had known and so I called my friends ‘where’s all these propaganda from? People said he was transforming Lagos and that’s all I read in a newspaper and i didn’t see any difference and they say well maybe you’re in the part of Lagos he hadn’t touched yet. ”
“I said can you take me to that part of Lagos he had touched and it turned out that part of Lagos that had changed were the parts where the elites live. So frankly, right from the time he was governor when this noise was made about how he was transforming Lagos. I frankly didn’t see it and I recognized it for what it was. It was propaganda and I came up with a theory that almost every Lagos Governor is always in the good graces of the National press and they are almost always presented as doing exceptionally well. So he wasn’t alone. It’s typical of Lagos Governor to be praised and So I had no expectations, frankly that Tinubu is going to be any different from what he is now.
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