Today, we celebrate a statesman whose leadership blends vision with verifiable impact, humility with high standards, and public service with measurable outcomes for citizens. Your Excellency, as a proud TEXEM alumnus, you exemplify the ideal we champion: a values-driven leader who converts strategy into service and aspiration into inclusive, sustainable growth. On this special day, we honour not only your character but also a record of achievements that continues to strengthen Lagos and inspire a new generation of leaders across Nigeria and beyond.
Across the years, you have consistently demonstrated that technology is not a luxury in public administration—it is the backbone of efficiency, transparency, and trust. Your early stewardship of Lagos’s digital transformation was catalytic: under your watch as Commissioner for Science and Technology, Lagos became the first government institution in Africa to implement eleven Oracle ERP modules across the public service, integrating data, tightening controls, and curbing waste. This was not a headline; it was a foundation—one that modernised workflows, improved accountability, and set Lagos on a durable path to smart governance.
Your commitment to a future-ready economy is equally clear in the way Lagos has positioned itself as West Africa’s digital capital. In a single year, the state attracted more than one billion dollars in data-centre investment—capital that anchors platforms locally, boosts reliability for businesses, creates skilled jobs, and accelerates the growth of the tech ecosystem. By championing the enabling environment for such investments and spotlighting talent acceleration, you have helped Lagos move from potential to proof, from ambition to assets on the ground.
Security and order are prerequisites for prosperity, and you have treated them as such—insisting that the men and women who uphold the law be trained, professional, and community-centred. Your leadership at the Passing-Out Parade of over five thousand newly trained officers at the Lagos State Law Enforcement Training Institute underscored a higher standard for public safety: competence married to emotional intelligence; authority balanced by restraint; and service grounded in the trust of the communities being protected. This is how cities grow safer and more cohesive—by investing in people as seriously as we invest in infrastructure.
You have also championed the deep work of renewing the public service from within. The Lagos Public Service Accelerator Programme is more than a training course—it is a mindset project that equips emerging leaders with the tools, agility, and ethics to solve complex problems in real time. By placing innovation, leadership, and accountability at the centre of public-sector capability building, you are helping to ensure that Lagos’s progress is resilient, citizen-centred, and transferable across administrations.
And because investment follows clarity, you have given investors and citizens alike a window into Lagos’s pipeline through the state’s Investment Deal Book—framing bankable opportunities, signalling institutional maturity, and inviting partnership on a scale worthy of Africa’s most dynamic megacity. This is the quiet architecture of confidence: aligning stakeholders around credible projects and a shared vision for a 21st-century economy that creates jobs, expands opportunity, and compounds public value.
These milestones—digital transformation, anchor investments, professionalised law enforcement, accelerated talent in the public service, and transparent deal-flow for growth—tell a single story: leadership that listens, learns, and delivers. They exemplify a philosophy you model every day: that humility is disciplined strength; that data-driven decision-making is a moral duty when lives and livelihoods are at stake; and that true nation-building is the art of converting potential into shared prosperity while safeguarding dignity and trust.
Your Excellency, Lagos is an emblem of African possibility precisely because leaders like you translate vision into velocity without losing sight of people. You engage communities at eye level, convene the private sector with purpose, and empower civil servants to become intrapreneurs. You have shown that respect and results are not competing currencies—when wisely invested, they compound together, yielding stability, innovation, and hope.
For the TEXEM family and all rising leaders, your journey is a living curriculum. It teaches that insight must become infrastructure; that policy must meet people where they are; that the best plans are those robust enough to be measured and humble enough to be adapted. It reminds us that inclusive growth is not a slogan but a discipline—one that demands long-term thinking about skills, safety, sustainability, and social cohesion. Your example rebukes cynicism and invites courage: to recruit smarter, to collaborate wider, to credit others more often, and to choose what is right over what is easy.
As we mark your birthday, we also issue a call to those who aspire to lead—across boardrooms, ministries, and communities—to study both the milestones and the mindset behind them. Lagos’s transformation did not happen by accident; it is fuelled by conviction, competence, and consistent execution. Let this year be a renewed invitation to serve beyond self, to build coalitions across difference, and to create systems that outlast any single tenure.
In the words of Dr Alim Abubakre, Founder of TEXEM, UK:
“His Excellency embodies the quiet power of humble, high-impact leadership—principled, prudent, and purpose-driven. He listens deeply, executes decisively, and measures success by lives uplifted. May his example challenge all of us to emulate his sterling commitment to service, to nation-building, and to stimulating sustainable, inclusive growth.”
From all of us at TEXEM, we celebrate you, Your Excellency—an alumnus who personifies our highest ideals: think deeply, act decisively, serve selflessly. May this new year bring greater grace, renewed vitality, and ever-widening circles of impact as you continue to shape a Lagos that is prosperous, inclusive, and resilient—for today’s citizens and tomorrow’s generations.
