#EndSARS: Rebuilding Lagos will take a long time - Sanwo-Olu

Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State has stated that rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed in the state during the EndSARS protest in October 2020, will take a while.

He made the statement on Thursday, January 7, after a closed-door meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Aso Rock.

According to him, the government had started rebuilding the state with the tasks he described as ‘low hanging’, such as providing support to small and medium scale businesses caught up in violence during the period, as it would take a longer time to rebuild major infrastructure.

The governor, however, encouraged that his administration will work hard to restore the state.

“It’s also some of the things I discussed with Mr President. It’s work in progress. To take something down it takes one day, to rebuild it takes 10 years. It’s a journey, not a destination. And so it’s going to take a while. We are carefully taking a proper study to know what we need to do, taking our time to get it right, but we’ve started something.

“Businesses that were affected, some businesses that were affected: somebody having their shops looted or burnt or something. We’ve been able to directly begin to support such businesses, especially on a micro, small level, using the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund.

“They have started intervening and supporting some of these small businesses, giving them grants, giving them soft loans and making sure that they can come back together very quickly.

“The bigger, larger items around infrastructure, around transportation, they will take a fairly longer time. We’re talking about a period that is still under three months. So, it’s still a working document that we are doing right now and we also have to be very creative in how we raise the finance.

“We didn’t have money anywhere, you know it was towards the end of a financial year and we’re just starting another year. So, it’s to be able to make budgetary provisions for these things and be able to raise required funding, both support from the private sector and also from the public sector, before we can begin to reconstruct some of those huge infrastructures.

“But we have them all focused and we’ll be tackling them. But the low hanging, as I said, are the small businesses that we’ve started supporting so that people can get back to life very quickly,” he said.