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As the General Manager of Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency, Dr. Babatunde Ajayi celebrated his first year in office, recently, he explained why the agency is committed towards protecting the environment and ensuring a sustainable development in Lagos. Funmi Ogundare writes When Dr. Babatunde Ajayi was appointed the General Manager of the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency (LASEPA) one year ago, the task ahead was daunting: managing the environmental complexities of a megacity like Lagos. From noise pollution in urban centers to the rising concerns of industrial emissions, LASEPA’s role is crucial in balancing growth with environmental sustainability. Now, as the GM commemorated his first anniversary in office, stakeholders are taking stock of the progress made so far. In an interview with selected journalists, the GM opened up about the agency’s achievements, ongoing challenges, and the vision for a greener Lagos. Its key projects include launching the Lagos Carbon Registry, doubling air quality monitors to 43, and providing mechanised fish kilns to reduce smoke pollution, reduction of noise pollution, among others. The agency has also digitised its processes, secured $6 million in grants, and conducted extensive research on electronic waste and water pollution, among others. He described the launch of the Lagos Carbon Registry as the biggest and the most important project it had executed as it enabled the state to trade carbon globally. According to him, “like other cities in the world, it helped us document our carbon footprints. We’re able to tell how much of greenhouse gas emissions we were saving or were emitted. This cut across transport sector, agricultural sector, the industrial sector, as well as home use including generators and cooking emissions. He stated that efforts were being made to measure emissions from these and ensure proper documentation in the state. Ajayi added that his agency has also doubled its air quality monitors from 20 to 43, and that before the end of the year, it would have increased it to 60 with verifiable data on it. He stated the importance of air quality monitors so as to stem health challenges ” Air quality is important for many things, especially for health. For instance, if you have asthma and you live in an area with bad air quality, that means you are likely to have more health attacks.” Ajayi said his agency releases air quality data every Monday on its social media platforms informing people what the air quality is like in different areas, either good or bad,adding that it traces the source and resolve the problem. The LASEPA boss noted that though noise pollution is five cent of its mandate, but it takes 90 per cent of the agency’s time of enforcement , campaign and ensuring compliance. According to him,” 352 facilities have been shut in the last one year which is more than double the statistics of the previous year.” Ajayi revealed that religious organisations take a larger chunk of the number of facilities shutdown despite warnings issued to the owners and managers, adding,” enforcement is one very effective and existing way of advocacy. We have also done a lot of advocacy programmes by engaging the public, industries, religious organisations as well as the entertainment industry in particular , where we have the major noise problem.” Emphasising on the noise pollution and why the agency had to make people pay fines, the GM stated,” Residents are badly behaved in terms of complying with regulations. One major challenge of noise pollution is that after after enforcement, they comply for a while and before you know it, they go ballistic again and to the same offense. Then we start the process again . Then we start the process again. “The reason why they comply for a while is because they pay fines and we shut them down. There is no city in the world that dies not leverage fines and penalties for violations. There must be consequences for actions. It is not only Nigeria’s problem, it is global.peopke tend to go back to bad behavior.” Ajayi expressed concern about the use of microphones especially at bus stops and religious houses in public saying,” even Christians worshippers come out with loud speakers and microphones to preach in public. For noise pollution, they take the highest because there is little or no control in terms of how you can set up religious houses going by our current regulations. ” It takes a strong-willed policy to have that in control. In Nigeria today , some churches want to have two branches on a street.” The GM noted that the agency has been engaging regularly with representatives of religious houses on the effect of noise pollution and why they need to maintain less than 60 decibels for decorum during their services and the danger they may be posing to the public and themselves. Over the next one year, Ajayi said LASEPA will be prioritising research having partnered with state and federal-owned universities in the state. With the partnerships, he said the agency will use the opportunity to develop local skills, adding that it is also working with the ministries of health and transportation to protect the environment. “LASEPA aims to set standards and lead in environmental protection as we continue to develop and improve our practices,” the GM said, adding that it will also be prioritising training and capacity development of its staff so that they are well grounded and technically capable.President-elect Donald Trump will return to power next year with a raft of technological tools at his disposal that would help deliver his campaign promise of cracking down on immigration — among them, surveillance and artificial intelligence technology that the Biden administration already uses to help make crucial decisions in tracking, detaining and ultimately deporting immigrants lacking permanent legal status. While immigration officials have used the tech for years, an October letter from the Department of Homeland Security obtained exclusively by The Associated Press details how those tools — some of them powered by AI — help make decisions over whether an immigrant should be detained or surveilled. One algorithm, for example, ranks immigrants with a “Hurricane Score,” ranging from 1-5, to assess whether someone will “abscond” from the agency’s supervision. The letter, sent by DHS Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Eric Hysen to the immigrant rights group Just Futures Law, revealed that the score calculates the potential risk that an immigrant — with a pending case — will fail to check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. The algorithm relies on several factors, he said, including an immigrant’s number of violations and length of time in the program, and whether the person has a travel document. Hysen wrote that ICE officers consider the score, among other information, when making decisions about an immigrant’s case. RELATED COVERAGE Cheap Ozempic? How millions of Americans with obesity may get access to costly weight-loss drugs Southwest states certify election results after the process led to controversy in previous years Trump vows tariffs over immigration. What the numbers say about border crossings, drugs and crime. “The Hurricane Score does not make decisions on detention, deportation, or surveillance; instead, it is used to inform human decision-making,” Hysen wrote. Also included in the government’s tool kit is a mobile app called SmartLINK that uses facial matching and can track an immigrant’s specific location. Nearly 200,000 people without legal status who are in removal proceedings are enrolled in the Alternatives to Detention program, under which certain immigrants can live in the U.S. while their immigration cases are pending. In exchange, SmartLINK and GPS trackers used by ICE rigorously surveil them and their movements. The phone application draws on facial matching technology and geolocation data, which has been used before to find and arrest those using the app. Just Futures Law wrote to Hysen earlier this year, questioning the fairness of using an algorithm to assess whether someone is a flight risk and raising concerns over how much data SmartLINK collects. Such AI systems, which score or screen people, are used widely but remain largely unregulated even though some have been found to discriminate on race, gender or other protected traits. DHS said in an email that it is committed to ensuring that its use of AI is transparent and safeguards privacy and civil rights while avoiding biases. The agency said it is working to implement the Biden administration’s requirements on using AI , but Hysen said in his letter that security officials may waive those requirements for certain uses. Trump has publicly vowed to repeal Biden’s AI policy when he returns to the White House in January. “DHS uses AI to assist our personnel in their work, but DHS does not use the outputs of AI systems as the sole basis for any law enforcement action or denial of benefits,” a spokesperson for DHS told the AP. Trump has not revealed how he plans to carry out his promised deportation of an estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally. Although he has proposed invoking wartime powers, as well as military involvement, the plan would face major logistical challenges — such as where to keep those who have been detained and how to find people spread across the country — that AI-powered surveillance tools could potentially address. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, did not answer questions about how the incoming administration plans to use DHS’ tech, but said in a statement that “President Trump will marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation” in American history. Over 100 civil society groups sent a letter on Friday urging the Office of Management and Budget to require DHS to comply with the Biden administration’s guidelines. OMB did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Just Futures Law’s executive director, Paromita Shah, said if immigrants are scored as flight risks, they are more likely to remain in detention, “limiting their ability to prepare a defense in their case in immigration court, which is already difficult enough as it is.” SmartLINK, part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, is run by BI Inc., a subsidiary of the private prison company The GEO Group. The GEO Group also contracts with ICE to run detention centers. ICE is tight-lipped about how it uses SmartLINK’s location feature to find and arrest immigrants. Still, public records show that during Trump’s first term in 2018, Manassas, Virginia-based employees of BI Inc. relayed immigrants’ GPS locations to federal authorities, who then arrested over 40 people. In a report last year to address privacy issues and concerns, DHS said that the mobile app includes security features that “prohibit access to information on the participant’s mobile device, with the exception of location data points when the app is open.” But the report notes that there remains a risk that data collected from people “may be misused for unauthorized persistent monitoring.” Such information could also be stored in other ICE and DHS databases and used for other DHS mission purposes, the report said. On investor calls earlier this month, private prison companies were clear-eyed about the opportunities ahead. The GEO Group’s executive chairman George Christopher Zoley said that he expects the incoming Trump administration to “take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.” “In GEO’s ISAP program, we can scale up from the present 182,500 participants to several hundreds of thousands, or even millions of participants,” Zoley said. That same day, the head of another private prison company told investors he would be watching closely to see how the new administration may change immigrant monitoring programs. “It’s an opportunity for multiple vendors to engage ICE about the program going forward and think about creative and innovative solutions to not only get better outcomes, but also scale up the program as necessary,” Damon Hininger, CEO of the private prison company CoreCivic Inc. said on an earnings call. GEO did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, CoreCivic said that it has played “a valued but limited role in America’s immigration system” for both Democrats and Republicans for over 40 years.
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