The story of Lagos politics sometimes feels like a long, winding road, patched and repatched. Then, out of Apapa, comes a voice both practical and melodic: Mojisola Meranda, deputy speaker, mother of scholarships, custodian of boreholes, and unflinching steward of neighbourhood roads.
At the Rockview Hotel, her latest constituency meeting unfurled like a marketplace of hope. Five students clutching scholarships. 200 youngsters waving certificates from a coding boot camp. 100 traders counting crisp N100,000 bundles. 500 families carting food supplies. Governance turned tangible, even edible.
Meranda calls it “governance in action,” tying her work to President Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda and Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s THEMES blueprint. To her, these are not slogans. They are building blocks. Roads repaired on Adele and Sapele. Jobs found in TESCOM, LASTMA, and even on the Blue Line trains.
Her political journey has been anything but quiet. Twice deputy speaker, briefly speaker during the stormy impeachment of Mudashiru Obasa, then back again, she has mastered the art of survival in a chamber famous for intrigue. Yet in Apapa, she prefers to be seen not as a survivor but a builder.
Education remains her favoured refrain. From JAMB forms to classroom furniture, she has stacked her record with interventions. The coding boot camp, now a ritual of summer, feels almost like her signature. “This is how we shape youths into inventors, not idlers,” she told her audience with brisk certainty.
Still, she sprinkles the serious with tenderness. Health insurance for residents. Boreholes dug like lifelines. Palliatives delivered with ceremony. She speaks often of walking “shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart” with her people, and it does not sound rehearsed. It sounds like someone refusing to drift above them.
Politics, of course, rarely stays tidy. Questions linger: Can her ambitious projects keep pace with Lagos’s swelling demands? Will her story remain one of steady uplift, or tilt toward the turbulence of her Assembly career? For now, in Apapa, the melody is clear. A politician who trades in hope and holds the note.
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