Adebola Rasheed Shabi, a member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), is the lawmaker representing Lagos Mainland Constituency 2 in the 10th Lagos State House of Assembly.
An environmentalist and chemical engineer with a career spanning over two decades, he has served publicly in various capacities at the local and state levels.
He was the first chairman of the Yaba Local Council Development Area (LCDA), a former general manager of the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency (LASEPA) and former special adviser to the Governor on the Cleaner Lagos Initiative under the Akinwunmi Ambode administration.
After years in civil service, Mr. Shabi was elected for the first time as a member of the House in 2023. He also served as the House Committee Chairman on Environment.
Early life and education
Mr. Shabi was born in Lagos on August 26, 1962. He attended Africa Church Primary School in Ebute-Metta and Federal Government College, Kano.
After his secondary school studies, he got a United Nations scholarship to study chemical engineering in Romania and bagged a Master’s degree in the same course in 1985. He returned to Nigeria and went on to obtain another master’s degree in environmental management from the University of Lagos.
In 2016, he began a Phd program at the University of Ibadan, but had to defer. In an interview with the Record in 2023, he noted that an accident had interrupted his studies halfway through. He has plans to resume and complete the Phd.
Political career
Mr. Shabi’s involvement in politics began in the year 2000, shortly after the death of his father.
In a 2022 interview he noted that he focused on grassroots development and made significant impact within two years by, for example, facilitating the distribution of over 7,000 exercise books to schools across Lagos Mainland.
Subsequently, he contested for and won the chairmanship of the Yaba LCDA on the platform of the Alliance for Democracy (AD).
He served the LCDA between 2003 and 2008 and, according to him, constructed roads, built over 65 boreholes and rehabilitated schools and health centres across all nine wards of the Yaba LCDA.This was despite the withholding of the federal allocation to Lagos state by then President Olusegun Obasanjo.
According to Mr. Shabi, his ability to think out of the box in managing the LCDA led to the then Lagos state Governor, Bola Ahmed Tinubu appointing him as General Manager of the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency (LASEPA) — a position he occupied for nine years.
During his tenure as LASEPA chief, Lagos state became the first state in Nigeria to implement a comprehensive e-waste policy, Mr. Shabi has claimed.
Legislative Work
Mr Shabi has said his work as a legislator is centred on service as making his constituents comfortable is something he holds dear.
According to him, he prefers to operate an all-inclusive government where ideas from all quarters are openly discussed.
Since he became a lawmaker, he claims to have built boreholes, cleared canals, given scholarships to the less privileged, as well as back-to-school kits for secondary school students.
“I am tying down part of my running cost that once it is up to four, five hundred thousand I am putting solar street lights in selected areas within my constituency” as well as generator sets to power the street lights,” he said in March, 2024.
Apart from proposing bills for the improvement of his constituency, his work as a legislator has been centred around promoting a sustainable environment, emphasising his “passion for mother earth”.
“As an environmentalist and a chemical engineer. I believe in conserving our environment. Even the Good Book talks about God giving us dominion over the earth to protect and preserve it and not to destroy it,” he said in an interview.
As a lawmaker, Mr. Shabi has campaigned for the reinstatement of the Saturday environmental sanitation exercise in Lagos state.
In August 2023, Mr. Shabi was part of an eight-member committee set up to probe an elevator incident that led to the death of medical doctor, Vwaere Diaso.