Sanwoolu needs to tell the international community that he can only enforce social distancing if they support him to complete the Lagos Rail Mass Transit project

By Ayo Akinfe

[1] Today, Lagos is back to its bustling self. There was supposed to be a partial lifting of the lockdown but alas, our people cannot relate to the phrase "partial." They have to earn a living so are going about their activities as if they have never heard of coronavirus before

[2] Across Lagos today, there is no social distancing, few people have facemasks and the risk of the virus spreading is frightening. You just need to see the queues at bus stops to appreciate the fact that social distancing cannot work in a city like Lagos with its limited transport infrastructure

[3] If you look at the demographics of Nigeria, about half of the country's population is crammed into urban centres. This means that cities like Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, Abuja, Benin, Enugu, Kaduna, Jos, Port Harcourt, Maiduguri, etc bear a huge burden. They all have large populations but none of them has the necessary transport infrastructure to support social distancing

[4] In 1918, San Francisco suffered a second peak of Spanish Flu cases and deaths after ending social distancing too soon, just a month after it was introduced. Back in 1918, city authorities in San Francisco lifted the lockdown after four weeks and as a result, by the beginning of November, the city had seen 20,000 fresh cases in what was known as the second wave

[5] Lagos is facing a similar threat now, as are our other large cities, especially Kano and Ibadan, as people need to get around. The limited transport infrastructure means that they simply will have to be crammed together in public buses. All it takes is for one infected person to be on a bus and it will spread like wildfire

[6] In 2009, the Lagos State government began work on the Lagos Metroline, a 35km urban railway project designed to ease traffic congestion in the state. Had that project been completed by now, maybe, just maybe, social distancing would have been possible across the metropolis

[7] Worldwide, the maximum amount of time it takes to complete a 35km urban light railway project is four years. In London, Margaret Thatcher completed the Docklands Light Railway in two years, so by the time Babatunde Fashola left office as Lagos State governor in 2015, the Lagos Metroline project he initiated in 2009, should have long been completed. However, we have to live with the reality that this project remains incomplete. In Port Harcourt too, Rotimi Amaechi's Monorail project is comatose today

[8] It has been projected that Africa will have 10m coronavirus cases over the next six months, according to provisional modelling by the World Health Organisation (WHO). From what I can see, they base this assessment on our inability to introduce effective social distancing as we have seen in Italy and China, which has reversed the trend of more cases

[9] With a population of 200m, Nigeria will obviously become the epicentre if we ever have this massive surge across Africa. This actually puts us in a strong position as we can tell the rest of the world that the only way we can combat the virus is if we have urban railway networks in our big cities so people can move about observing social distancing guidelines

[10] I would like to see Governor Babajide Sanwoolu lead this campaign. All he has to tell the international community is he needs to complete both the red and blue lines of the Lagos Metroline in 2020 if they want to avert an unprecedented pandemic. It will cost the world a lot less to assist us completing this project that to fight coronavirus when it runs riot among 200m people