In Nigerian politics, the most striking change is that today’s change strikes nobody. In a little above two decades of this present dispensation, only a very few have been unfazed by a tale of savage partisan strife of the players. But as a technocrat in politics, Tokunbo Phillip Wahab, a lawyer, could be seen as a breath of fresh air in politics and public service. Since his appointment in 2019, as the Special Adviser to Lagos State Governor on Education, the affable Wahab has continued to live up to his reputation as one of the pillars of the Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s administration. Of course, the governor had poached the hardworking legal practitioner —who will be 50 on May 17— to help drive the education arm of his THEMES agenda. And with visceral quality of his thinking, it has been a cocktail of accomplishments in the education sector of Lagos —this is surely due in part to his habit of anything worth doing at all is worth doing well. Wahab’s impact started to be felt with the introduction of Eko Excel but soared with the recent official recognition and collection of certificates for the two new Lagos State Universities at the National Universities Commission, NUC in Abuja.
With that done, as part of the capacity development, Wahab, an alumnus of Harvard Kennedy University, recently led the committee of the management and heads of all Lagos State tertiary institutions to a Higher Education-Business-Government Collaboration Conference at the University of London, United Kingdom. There has been series of applause trailing this step seen as an avenue to equip all the managers of the Lagos State tertiary institutions to produce materials that would be a benefit to the position of Lagos as the hub of industries and technology in this country and help fast track the state’s determination to transit into a knowledge economy.