By CHUKWUDI OKOLIE-UGBAJA
What’s happening in Lagos today is a logical follow-up to complete commercialisation and monetisation of a city’s life. At a point, real competition kicks in and some misgivings begin to surface from persons who feel “hemmed in”.
A capitalist arrangement does have its downside.
Current happenings in Lagos are really a sad development.
South-East people in Lagos or anywhere in Nigeria for that matter, will not be beaten in a race that is won by grit and affluence.
They are just that way. But rather than take this enquiry the way of Igbo/Yoruba divisions, Lagos should know that it was once the political capital of Nigeria. That status attracted practically everyone to and into it, and expectedly too. It is still Nigeria’s commercial capital, which everyone feels rightly or wrongly, some entitlement to.
Labour won the presidential election in the FCT. Nobody is crying foul about it, at least not for now.
It will amount to insipid thinking if anyone considers that only “Igbo” (I hate these tribal terms) gave Labour the FCT votes.
That a South-East presidential candidate gave Labour a viable selling point doesn’t make Labour an Igbo political party. This is where most of Nigeria is wrong. When did Peter Obi join the Labour Party, anyway?
Former Kaduna State governor, Belarabe Musa, once granted me an interview and told me that the North and the South-West had since the end of the civil war kept the South-East in the cold, politically.
When I told him that his statement was too “segregationist”, he looked at me in near disdain and continued, since he was “cocksure” of his pronouncement. Balarabe Musa could still be laughing at me from his grave!
Now, let’s try to read the current happenings in Lagos more accurately. In the Labour Party ascension, the politically-starved South-Easterner has suddenly seen an opportunity to return to reckoning in Nigerian politics at the highest level; the presidency.
In my corner of Delta State, some of my people complain that if you give the “Igbo man” (oh, this ethnic word again) what they call “allow”, he aspires to “allowance”.
So, even my people “envy” the South-Easterner’s ability to utilise the soil better than they can. In the circumstance, the South-Easterner’s unrelenting efficiency at whatever he does actually becomes an albatross he has to bear. Some see this as a desire to “take over”. But no one can stop the South-Easterner’s enterprise. They are built that way.
What’s happening in Nigerian politics today is a discovery by the South-Easterner that they can return to political relevance without going the Nnamdi Kanu or Simon Ekpan way. They are excited! I don’t think the South-Easterner is really doing anything wrong by rising to prominence in Lagos. He deserves it. He makes part contribution to the famous Lagos IGR!
What is worrisome is the attitude of some Southeasterners in managing “success”. The boastful tendency in their remarks is the real undoing of some of them who do not pause enough to think. It only gets better as you listen to the region’s educated and informed elite. The South-Easterner could actually “annoy you by their self-assertion”, but I can assure you they don’t really mean any harm. It is what their republican life has made them. They never got “tamed” by Africa’s monarchical history.
The South-Easterner sees himself as self-made, an opinion that drives the not-too-informed among them into a verbal overkill. Their elders couldn’t tame them. I don’t see anyone from outside succeeding in reining in the gasconic tendency by the hasty among the South-Easterners.
“Amadioha fire your head”, simply expresses the free spirit taken too far by some young South-Easterners in reckless social media posts! This needs to change.
But at this point we have to pause!
Why should a country, in 2023, have human beings that are more obsessed with ethnic matters than human development? It is because the typical African is a tribesman whose forefathers were either subjected to slavery or took others into that human degradation.
When I was at Minaj Broadcast International, I was one of those who frowned on the Eze Ndigbo Lagos, arrangement. I felt as an African, that it could be interpreted as a cultural affront on that patch of earth called the South-West. I clearly didn’t think my colleagues in the newsroom should be dissipating energy chasing stories that accentuated “tribal divisions”. Some aspects of our cultures are better expressed within their native precincts if they show a tendency to emphasise fault lines. But then, that was my personal opinion.
But I knew, and still know the sensibilities of the African, many of which are the reason he doesn’t grow in real terms. Do Germans, the British, Canadians engage in our kind of ethnic brawls? Hardly, of course! But this is Nigeria where an ethnic group can launch into an aside in their local language at a moment of crisis, during an official meeting, without considering that other Nigerians around do not understand them! Some of the culprits are actually, holders of the doctorate! It is not about what academics can cleanse. It is more of the indispensability of clannishness in the regular thinking of the typical Nigerian person.
Every man for his tribe and the devil take the hindmost! We are that uncouth!
It is a pity, what’s happening in Lagos at the moment. But just like the American, I don’t care whether the Kennedy family wants to die in the White House as long as there is good education, potable water, health facilities that prolong life etc. So, why would I care what the tribe of the governor is?
Some Nigerians are free to continue to own Lagos, Kano, Sokoto or Oraifite. If they take this beyond culture, they will eventually fail, woefully! A young generation that has no time for the primordial fault lines of ethnicity and religion is rising in Nigeria. They, it was that powered the Labour Party to its earthquake wins.
They are not a tribe and neither do they have or show patience to their disappointing elders whose names are better written in the past tense.
These youths do not even know whether Peter Obi could have delivered on his promise, but just because he said things that resonated with their aspirations in life, they jumped on the Labour Party bandwagon. Don’t blame them! Blame the tired but not retired politicians who have made the status quo ante their mantra.
Concerning the South-East angle to the issue in Lagos, some of us DON’T GET IT! The change happening in Lagos is not a tribal one as such. It is more generational than anything else. It is further the evolution of Nigerian politics to include a third force and also an ethnic group that has been left holding the short end of the stick for too long!
South-Easterners have joined the youth revolution on the platform of the Labour party to DREAM!
Peter Obi’s emergence has suddenly made them start thinking that they could actually present a Nigerian president someday.
If we must discuss impact and affluence by any Nigerian wherever they are located, success in life is aptly demonstrated by the inscription on Pilgrim Baptist Grammar School, Issele-Uku’s badge…Audaces Fortuna Juvat, it radiates to the eyes of the onlooker. That in English is, “Fortune Favours the Brave”. The founder of the school, Rev Dr S.W. Martin, never found a better way to encourage humanity into good enterprise… Audaces Fortuna Juvat! Fortune will continue to favour the enterprising man more than his fellow man, whatever his tribe is!
So, if the Nigerian northerner, easterner or westerner shows enough courage to overcome squalor and rises to prominence in any part of Nigeria, they shouldn’t be seen as trying to conquer the natives they’ve come to meet!
The Nigerian constitution in its wisdom, never said a governor or president must come from a particular ethnic group or religion. That’s because it is an idealist document that does not dismiss the possibility of a Hausa man becoming governor in Enugu State one day and/or an Igbo man becoming governor in Zamfara State someday! The crises in this country are as usual, the handiwork of religious and ethnic bigots acting for the sake of self-aggrandising politics!
As I conclude, let Africans monopolise their cultures. It is understandable. It gives African people a unique identity in their chosen ethnic enclaves. But enclaves they are and while they could actually monopolise their chieftaincies, most of which go to persons of doubtful character, the continent queries us on how our clannish tendencies have improved our dead infrastructure!
As tribesmen from virtually all of Nigeria’s rainbow composition relish their uniqueness in jaded history, much of which is handed down by unreliable oral tradition, let no one inhibit another as long as the law tells the individual, YES, YOU CAN wherever they are located in this country! That’s the ultimate expression of the national unity we all desire but hardly encourage.
On a note of really personal opinion, it is unfortunate that the Labour Party is already being adorned with an odious garland of ethnicity. Peter Obi is merely a role model that seized opportunity to become the presidential candidate of a political party that had been sleepwalking. Mainly southern youths simply liked the “El Dorado” Obi preached! That’s why Labour!
By the way, didn’t the Labour Party produce Olusegun Mimiko as a governor in Ondo State at a point?
Labour is NOT an Igbo political party and it will be sinful to be that dismissive!
But because their son shot the party to prominence by presenting a better appeal to Nigerian youths, the regular south-Easterner now sees Labour as their opportunity to take (a) revenge on Nigerian politics which has harshly left them on the fringes for too long. They are free to think like that but it is not an errand Peter Obi has sent anyone on.
Look, maybe we should adjust our looking glasses a bit. We might end up beholding a spiritual problem rather than an ethnic assault if we consider what Balarabe Musa said about Nigerian politics and the South-Easterner.
So, is it payback time, the way of providence? Circumspection may be the only elixir to our current agitation.
Remember, Labour won the presidential election in Nasarawa, Plateau and FCT. Those places are not Lagos. And they even won in Lagos! It will be tragic for us to deliberately misinterpret what’s happening currently in Nigerian politics.
Oh, are we saying that this is the governorship election and a son-of-soil must clinch it? Is that it?
Well, if Rhodes Vivour’s maternal links have suddenly become a problem in Lagos because he is in the Labour Party, matrimony is only being provided with a reason to moan long into the night.
But then, this is Africa… still the DARK CONTINENT!
A point needs to be made here though. Lagos reverted to a South-West state immediately it stopped being the capital of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. “Lagos is no man’s land” is therefore a provocation! But whether being a South-West state restricts its governorship to a political party embraced by the dominant ethnic group there and banishes other political parties not minding whom they field, is an issue Africa has to resolve. The continent’s development owes a lot to it.
- Chukwudi Okolie-Ugbaja is an Abuja-based freelancer.
