 Hello, this is the Greater Lagos Vision and I'm your host, Love Ikuku Oyeduku. Lagos State Governor Babaji Desaoulu has announced a 100% funding increase for the state's employment trust fund. According to the governor, the increase is part of measures to help grow small businesses across the state through soft loans. The governor made this declaration at the second edition of the Lagos Employment Summit, co-convinced by LSEETF and the Ministry of Economic Planning and Budget. Saoulu also noted that the state government had committed over 10 billion Naira in grants in the past three years to strengthen the activities of LSEETF, supported 4,000 micro-small and medium enterprises MSMES. This is the Greater Lagos Vision. I'm your host, Love Ikuku Oyeduku. Welcome once again. This episode features transport sector reform, Saoulu kicks off e-mailing large drive service with 1,000 sports utility vehicles for fresh face. As part of efforts to reduce frequent cases of collapse building and liabilities associated with it, the Lagos State government is set to introduce a mandatory insurance digital solution platform for all property owners in line with the Federal Government's Insurance Act. The house being cases of collapsed buildings across Nigeria and Lagos is not an exception. This results in loss of lives and billions of Naira in investments. The 21-story building in Ikui Lagos, which collapsed on November 2, 2021, was under construction before it caved in. The state government has now taken the bull by the hand to prevent such occurrence. In the last 44 years, there have been over 500, 480 building collapses to be precise, and this is the information that we have, this is the data that we have. Imagine so much more that we didn't even catch them. And this just highlights and goes to strengthen the importance of insurance. To reduce the burdens and losses incurred by victims of collapsed buildings, the state government enters into a collaboration with insurance companies to ensure safety and in the event of liabilities, pay compositions to the persons concerned. We are taking the purchase of occupiers' liability to another level. We want to, first of all, sensitize everyone that this insurance is not about IGR, it's not about what comes to the insurance industry, it's about the safety of all. You know, sometimes we say, God forbid, it will not happen, but many times we have seen it happening. And when it happens, some financial responsibilities come with it. In Loree Oz, the other digital solution platform will provide H3 and transparent activity. Lagos State Governor Baba Jidesawon Loh has reiterated his administration's commitment towards supporting innovative ideas and investment in technology to achieve global solutions. Governor Sawon Loh who stated these are the opening ceremony of the Microsoft facility at Ikoi said it was inspiring to see efforts made by the company in putting up the smart building despite the challenges posed by COVID-19 pandemic. It's incredible to see what an imprint of Microsoft here in Lagos and in Nigeria. I mean, given the level of investment, it's not only encouraging, it's actually very audacious. And most indeed, see that it's going round, it's indeed a smart building and you put a lot of research. I don't expect anything less with a global name like Microsoft, but it's really around how we now, like you said, develop local skills and local talents and local people. We understand what needs to be done to ensure that your investment is safe and secure, but more importantly, the kind of partnership that you require to see grow. As a government directly, we see ourselves working with Microsoft even on the business side, but more importantly, in terms of infrastructure and developing the space so that, you know, growing a lot of people, you know, and the citizens can't utilize the full benefits of what resources are put in here. Lagos State Governor Baba Jidesawulu has sworn in three new permanent secretaries, bringing the total numbers of 50 in its public service in less than three years. The governor charged them to justify the confidence reports on them by adding more value to the service. Almost 70 to 75% of the current crops of permanent secretaries were appointed in administration, and that tells two things. One, the fact that we want to identify, continue to identify, you know, and recognize the brightness of our whole lot in the service of Lagos State, and that's what we're doing. Secondly, it's also to give people that are deserving this position. We know how enviable it is to rise up to the position of permanent secretaries, but if you are deserving of it, we will not deny you or deny you of that. As part of measures to ensure and guarantee the comfort and maximum safety of communities, the Lagos State government has launched a new e-healing taxes scheme. The scheme will complement a multi-modal transport network being developed in Lagos in accordance with the strategic smart supply of the state. That's according to the governor. A partnership agreement for a new e-healing transport scheme was signed in 2021 by Lagos State governor Babajidisawulu N-Chinese CIG Motors Company Limited. The results of that agreement is now manifest with the launch of the new e-healing tax scheme. It is known as Lagos Ride with 1,000 sport utility vehicles for the first phase. The scheme is expected to compete with other e-healing platforms. The driver or operator has a right to own the vehicle after payment is fully made within three to four years. Governor Sawulu said the initiative is to further ensure a seamless transportation system for the commuting populace in the state. Under this arrangement, all beneficiaries will be provided with a brand new car, which over time will become the driver's property after the completion of the payments of the vehicles that have been heavily subsidized. The governor described today as historic. He said it's a step to further drive the development of the transportation master plan to put Lagos on the plan of a safer, comfortable, modern and forward-looking tax scheme. We are starting and we're putting our money down to show to the private sector that we can do it and we all can do it collaboratively. These are no workers of Lagos State. These are Lagosians. These are Nigerians that will be taking over this. So our arms are open to other private sector investors to join us to ensure that we can increase this fleet to 3,000, to 5,000, to 10,000. Commission of transportation, Fredic Oladende highlighted some of the safety features of the scheme. The safety and security of lives and properties are equally as paramount as the pleasure the drivers of the riders will enjoy on the Lagos' ride taxi schemes. Here's the installation of security embedded dashboard camera in each car for real-time activities and monitoring with panic buttons connected to the control command center that can be used by either parties inside the car in case of assault or emergency. Plus, TV News spoke with some of the beneficiaries. It was something that we saw that will be of benefit to drivers, especially to alleviate the challenges and the burdens that drivers have in terms of owning their cars. The modern ride service is one of the state governments to show economic intervention programs. The government promised to get it professionally managed in line with global best practices. Sort your waste and get reduction in waste bill. That's a message from the managing director, CEO of Lagos Waste Management Authority, Loma, Mr. Ibrahim Odumboni, to Lagosians. Odumboni said residents comply with get reduction in waste bills and increase for those who don't. He added that Loma was engaging recycling as a veritable tool to tackle the challenge of plastic pollution as a state generated about 13,000 metric tons of waste daily, with plastic materials constituting 17%. Joining me shortly is the managing director, CEO of Lagos Waste Management Authority, Loma, Mr. Ibrahim Odumboni. For more insight into how Loma is complemented by the government's agenda and a dream of a smart mega city. That's after this break. Please stay with us. In terms of waste management, there are various chains in the various steps in the value chain of waste management that we need to ensure that a lot of things are taken about from point of generation, sorting your waste from source, containerization, collection, disposal and treatment and also maybe waste to energy and waste to wealth. We need to ensure that that chain all connects very well. And part of the way we want to connect is to encourage distribution from source so that the end value will be there for everyone to see. Also, if we continue to sort our waste from source, we can tackle things like pollution, plastic pollution and waste pollution in a couple of areas across the states. So if we look at Lagos as about 25 million plus people living there, knowing fully well that each and every one of us will generate about 176 single bottles a year. And with that in mind, we have about 4 billion bottles generated annually. So if those 4 billion has been generated annually and not captured or taken aback to produce new ones, does that really mean that over the next 10 years we're going to do 40 billion bottles? What about the previous 40 billion bottles that we have? So we can continue that vein of that vein. We need to change the way we live. We need to modernize. We are now an emerging economy in Lagos and I know that we are a pace setter for other states in Nigeria. So talking to our people to ensure that they separate their entire waste from source is going to be a massive push towards achieving a smarter city and the teams agenda. So for us, we cannot continue to depend on the landfill structure where everything goes to landfill. We should be able to extract all the usable resources from our waste before we consider landfill as an option. And I know that there will be a point from our plan over the next 10 years to ensure that we achieve zero waste in Lagos as an emerging economy in Africa and as a pace setter for other states and other countries around us as well. And for our household, the reason why we initiated that on the 1st of April, all residential estates and companies or private organizations should start is because before we rule it out to everyone across the state we believe those organized environments where it's controllable and achievements are measurable as well. And we've also seen that a lot of these are our communities since the introduction of the Blue Box scheme which gave back to Lagos Recycle, was initiated on the 5th of September 2019. We've seen a couple of estates that are doing one form or the other of recycling, but now we're formalizing it. We're encouraging them to ensure that the waste are not coming out. We also encourage them to use a tubing system where there's a general waste and there's a recyclable waste. And we want to ensure that all our recyclables are also used to generate jobs, a lot of jobs have been generated from recycling over the last 24 months, over 6,000 jobs are encountered. And we believe that there will be effects on our lagoons and shorelines and our drainages. There will be a time where you won't be able to see any single boat in our drainages, in our canal and water will flow easily. And all the marine habitats we have the freedom to develop without having to be also accommodating plastics or floating waste. Paying for waste management is sacrosan. It's not free because the people that are running are the people that are going for you, catering for your domestic waste all across. Loma as an agency and lago state, we cater for the public spaces. And we regulate all the private businesses or private residential properties that they service. But these businesses are there as a business that we are building to grow. We don't want any of them to be a going concern. So if people are resisting to pay to them, it basically, you're denying them the opportunity to give a transact. And I want to also state that we have a enforcement and monitoring team that ensure that when we have cases like that, what do people call woolly woolly? Our health officers are there to support the CDS, the CDCs, to be able to tackle or mitigate against any discourse and manage the situation when we have any tenement or any household that's having the issue of waste management. And in situations whereby it's gone beyond management, then we have a legal system that backs that. So the lago state also backs over 28 magistrates. There's no room for ignorance. There's no room for excuses. We've not gone all the way. We've created a law academy to be able to educate people and create awareness. All our public primary schools in Lagos, through the support we submit, and Mr. Governor and Mr. Rajdeesan, we will be able to educate them on waste management. And they are going to be our ambassadors, our advocates for the parents that they are under to be able to ensure that we turn change from bottom up. Why we continue to use publicity, media outreach, conversation to let our adults understand and also remind them of their responsibility. But all in all, there's no excuse for ignorance in waste management. We do a lot of things across stream and it's always out there and that's why we are lighted for all stakeholders, all interest parties to be able to understand where we are and where we stand at this point in time. We've been very innovative and we've been very proactive about the way we approach waste management in Lagos over the last two years by showcasing ourselves and ensuring that in a lot of ways we're communicating to people with what we're doing. So we have our social media handles, our website, our app and also we collaborate with other agencies to ensure that our message are passed across. There is no day that you will not hear about Loma either in the news or you see us or with our PSPs or with our sweepers down the road. But the key thing that I must stress out there is waste management goes beyond collection and dumping of waste. The only part of it that we need to all work on which is me, you and all our listeners out there is the attitude and change. You can deploy the entire trucks in the old world to Lagos to manage waste. But if we don't change our attitude, if we don't start doing the right thing the first time, if we don't start doing what we know that is proper, if we don't start following what the law says, if we don't start looking after ourselves, if we don't start changing our attitude to what the cleaner environment is, we all know this, we all know the benefit of the environment, we all know the benefit of what the clean environment brings to in terms of health, we all know all these things about why are we still doing the wrong thing. So that's why we continue to advocate. You see Loma, we've started going across all the LCDA this year. We've been to 18 LCDAs after the LCD and LGA after the 57 and we continue to ensure that all that is completed before the first week of June. And what do we do there? We go there, we synthesize them across the chain of waste management from collection, generation, separation, containerization, recycling, treatment, and also the loads of achievements that we made. One of the major ones is you look at COVID-19. Without Loma, where do you think we'll be with COVID-19? Lagos as a very popular, populated state. What do you think we'll be with COVID-19? With the small land mass, also nearby water, everybody conjugating as one. What impact, what role do you think Loma played? So for people out there, a lot of people out there understand that we played a vital role to support our government. We're just ensuring that COVID-19 was mitigated with the risk of COVID-19. We started with integrating all our medical waste during the period of COVID-19 to date. So we take all the medical waste all across the state and ensure that they are all insulated. We move them from traditional treatment of medical waste. We also ensure that we have a dedicated team that trained and specialist in this. And by doing so, we will reduce all the risk across. We've also used that to develop and automate our system in terms of management of waste. We've looked at the need for us to regionalize our operation. So we divide our operation into five different districts and then we manage from there. So if you think of me now, what's going on in a quail, or a pedigree with a click of a finger, I can tell you exactly what's there because I have Loma operatives there. So we've done a lot across, we've reformed some of our legacy programs, like the sweeping program is all being reformed. Our engineering team is now functioning as a solely made in Nigeria engineering team. We make our beans ourselves. We design our trucks ourselves. We assemble our truck ourselves. We fix our truck ourselves. We're making things ourselves, rather than buying and maintaining. So a lot of changes are across for us. I think one of the reflections that we have in waste management is we have a lot of, it goes as a very big advantage over every other state in Nigeria in terms of waste management, in terms of the fact that the human capital and the sector around it are very knowledgeable and passionate about it. Starting from the governor, he understands it very well and he provides a lot of mentorship and leadership and coaching for us on waste management. So he's given. We have a governor that waste management is giving to. Then I have a law of management team or senior executive team in Loma and junior staff in here. We are all very scientific about everything we do and sustainability is very key to us. So a lot of things I've known, a lot of things I've learned, a lot of things I'm learning. There's no end time to learning in waste management. And all these people that have been in this practical over the years are now having the benefit of having someone from the economic side of things, from the technical side, coming in to inject a lot of sustainability into what we're doing. I really appreciate the opportunities it gives. But for legutions, it just basically demonstrates what the future holds for us. Waste management is never going to be the same. Every year, year in year out, there will be changes that we are making for a better living for legals. For legals as a whole. I'm very confident that by the end of this year we have an MOU in place for our first energy facility in Legals. Why must we teach that in Legals? The energy facility that we're going to have in Legals will try and find the best sustainable at a very affordable cost and also strategically placed for the states. We're also going to look at what fits. We are not going to use one-size-fits-all, but we are going to choose the best propellant, the most active propellant, and the more realistic propellant to be able to deliver that to us. We've reached a time whereby 100% of what we have in waste can be put to use. And in putting that to use, it is very important that we understand what our future goals are. Our future goal for waste management is to have an energy plant in Legals which is our immediate goal in this year. And then to ensure that over the next three or four years we start to help to solve some of the energy problems that we have in entirety across the states. And by ten years time, we should be able to have replicated what we've done across a certain part of Nigeria and look at movable energy. If you look at the team's agenda, one of the key agencies that I was mentioning, the team's agenda, if you really digest it, is LOMA. LOMA was mentioned as an agency on the team's agenda when looking at the health and environment. And it shows the importance of what we do here to every part of the agenda. And I believe that with the structure the team agenda creates and the interlink that LOMA has with other agendas we are on course to ensure that a successful delivery is given to all the ultimate goals of the agenda. And I can well assure you that we are giving the opportunity to innovate, develop, evolve, be dynamic and challenge the norm in LOMA. And that's why we are here where we are now. On a daily basis, we challenge the norm. We go to look at status quo. What do we need to change there? What do we need to improve? If it's not broken, sometimes we leave it. But if it needs to be fixed, we go all out and find out the root cause. And how can we make sure that the changes that we are making is sustainable? And I can tell you out there part of the smart city agenda and the team's agenda is to ensure that we are not just doing it and just not coming from some of this head or some of this thought or some of this ideology. We are not professionalising what we are doing. So I'm happy to tell you that even all my management team and my junior management team will be proceeding on a sustainability and circular economic training for them to be satisfied as waste manager for the state. And what that does is increase sustainability for LOMA for the future and also build on from what our government's agenda is in legal states. That's all we have for you in this episode of the Britannicus Vision on PlaceTV Africa. I'm Lovie Kuku Uyiduku. Bye for now.