The upshot of last Saturday’s presidential election has set the stage for what is expected to be a fiercely contested governorship election in Lagos State, the commercial capital of Africa’s biggest economy.
The incumbent governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), who is seeking re-election, faces an uphill task against the opposition.
His major rivals are Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour of the Labour Party, whose presidential candidate, Peter Obi, defeated the APC’s Bola Tinubu in Lagos; Abdul-Azeez Adediran, popularly known as ‘Jandor’, of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP); and Funsho Doherty, the candidate of the Action Democratic Party.
Sanwo-Olu, Rhodes-Vivour, Adediran, and Doherty, among others, are vying to govern an economy that generates 10 percent of Nigeria’s total GDP of $423.3 billion, according to the World Economic Forum.
Below are their profiles.
Babajide Sanwo-Olu
He was born on June 25, 1965, into a Christian family and he hails from Lagos State.
Sanwo-Olu attended Government Demonstration School, Gbaja Surulere, before moving to Ijebu-Ife Grammar School, Ogun State to complete his secondary education.
Upon obtaining his first leaving school certificate, he proceeded to the University of Lagos (UNILAG), where he bagged his first degree in the Department of Surveying.
He obtained an MBA from UNILAG and also attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the London Business School and the Lagos Business School.
From 1994 to 1997, he worked as a treasurer in Lead Merchant Bank, and later proceeded to the United Bank of Africa, where he headed the foreign money market.
He also worked as a manager for First Inland Bank (now First City Monument Bank) and as the chairman of Baywatch Group Limited.
Sanwo-Olu began his political career in 2003, with an appointment as a special adviser on corporate matters to Femi Pedro, the then deputy governor of Lagos State.
He was later made the acting commissioner for economic planning and budget until 2007, when he was appointed as the commissioner for commerce and industry by then-governor Bola Tinubu.
After the general election of 2007, Sanwo-Olu was appointed commissioner for establishments, training and pensions by Governor Babatunde Fashola.
He was appointed as the managing director/CEO of the Lagos State Development and Property Corporation by Governor Akinwunmi Ambode in 2016.
Some of his notable public sector achievements include the supervision of the Bureau of Public Enterprises’ privatisation projects. He set up and was the pioneer board chairman of the Lagos Security Trust Fund. The LAGBUS System and the Control & Command Centre in Alausa Ikeja were subsequently established under his directives.
On September 16, 2018, Sanwo-Olu formally declared his intention to run for the office of the governor of Lagos State under the platform of the APC and was sworn in as the 15th governor of the state on May 29, 2019.
Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour
He was born into the Rhodes-Vivour family of Lagos on March 8, 1983 to Olawale and Nkechi Rhodes-Vivour. He is a great-great-grandson of William Allen Vivour, a great-grandson of Justice S.B Rhodes (the second indigenous judge appointed in Nigeria), a grandson to Justice A.R.W Rhodes-Vivour, and a nephew to Supreme Court Justice Bode Rhodes-Vivour.
He attended Chrisland primary and secondary schools up to JSS3, and then proceeded to Paris to attend Ecol Artive Berlin, where he completed his secondary education.
He has a bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the University of Nottingham and a master’s degree in the same field from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He partook in the National Youth Service Corps programme in 2008 after his first master’s degree and completed it in 2009. He later got a second master’s degree in Research and Public Policy from UNILAG.
He worked at the architecture office of Franklin Ellis Architects in the United Kingdom before proceeding to MIT.
When he returned to Nigeria, he worked for some of the country’s top architecture firms, including Patrick Waheed Consultants and Consultants Collaborative Partnership. He later established his own firm, Spatial Tectonics, and ventured into politics.
In 2007, he contested for the Ikeja Local Government Chairmanship position under the umbrella of KOWA Party. He was the PDP senatorial candidate for Lagos West in the 2019 general election. Rhodes-Vivour emerged as the Labour Party’s governorship candidate in August 2022 after decamping from the PDP.
He has leveraged architecture as a significant tool to solve societal and economic challenges from his time at MIT and his experience working with both the American and Chinese governments in relation to rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the Beijing Olympics respectively.
His professional focus has consistently been on innovative and alternative construction methods to create affordable housing in Nigeria.
He was the design lead for commercial and large-scale urban projects such as the Delta International Commercial City.
Abdul-Azeez Adediran
Popularly known as ‘Jandor’, he was born on November 25, 1977. He had both his primary and secondary education in Lagos. He went further to The Polytechnic Ibadan. He also proceeded to Modul University, Vienna; the Prestigious Howard University School of Business, Washington DC, USA; and Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom.
He is a member of several professional bodies, including the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations; the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria, the Nigeria Union of Journalists, and the Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria.
He is the chairman and group CEO of Core Media Group, a conglomerate consisting of several other companies including CoreTvNews, a 24-hour digital terrestrial television station; chairman of Datanet Project Services, an oil installation and procurement services company; chairman of The Floral Consult; owner of Core-Bet, a casino and sports betting firm; and chairman/lead visioner of Jandor Foundation, a privately run non-governmental organisation solely established to empower and liberate the less-privileged, especially in Lagos.
Read also: March 11: Eyes on Lagos, others as battlegrounds shift
He was the lead convener of the Lagos4Lagos movement, a faction of the APC in Lagos that eventually decamped to the PDP.
In 2022, he was declared as the governorship candidate for the 2023 election under the PDP.
He started out as a journalist covering business, entertainment, and politics, before finding a job in communications consultancy.
Funso Doherty
He was born in Lagos on June 16, 1968. He attended Corona School Victoria Island, Lagos, completing his primary education in 1979. He was admitted into King’s College Lagos, and he later proceeded to UNILAG, where he studied Accounting, graduating with Second Class Upper Division Honours in 1990.
After completing NYSC in 1991, he joined the Lagos office of Arthur Andersen & Co. (now KPMG). He joined Asset & Resource Management Company, then a part of the Guaranty Trust Bank Group, at inception in 1994, where he specialised in investment management, becoming one of the pioneers of the mutual fund industry in Nigeria.
In 1999, he was admitted to Harvard Business School and commenced the MBA programme. He later joined the Investment Management Division of Goldman, Sachs & Co and PNC Advisors. He returned to Nigeria in 2005, to serve as the pioneer managing director/CEO of ARM Pension Managers. He moved on in 2011, and was engaged in private investing. Between 2014 and 2017 he partnered with the African Capital Alliance Group, and served as managing director/CEO. He recently completed his tenure as managing director/CEO of PAL Pensions.
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