I lived in Lagos for a year and half after my secondary school, wrote the Joint Admissions Examination, and left the city for my university education.
I was to return in the mid-90s, work for three newspaper companies and two international NGOs before leaving again for what now looks like for-good.
Lagos was and still is a conveniently dirty state which no governor has been able to make clean. The streets are still cluttered as they were then. Most houses are over-crowded, with the house-front serving as shopping malls. Everyone still seems to be in a hurry with a purpose. Never mind that they are actually hurrying to nowhere and coming from nowhere. Most of them are poor, many are vagrants, some are insane.
There was sports and music and love on the streets. Either you were a fan of Stationery Stores Football Club (the Flaming Flamingos) or Julius Berger, or Leventis United. The love for football and also boxing was a pandemic and one was not considered serious if they did not attend National Stadium or other stadia around Lagos on Saturdays or Sundays.
Football pundits drove from everywhere in Lagos to The Buffalo Bar, opposite NFA headquarters on Ogunlana Drive in Surulere, to drink beer, talk football and live. Those who were popular were not those who had money, they were those who had talent. And everybody talked about them.
Omo Eko was a Lagosian without a state of origin. We were all Lagosians because we were born or lived in Lagos. Nobody asked you where you came from. Government, big men or rich men, were not talking points. Sports, music, writing, acting, were all people talked and argued about.
That old Lagos is now dead. It has been replaced by a new Lagos, with plastic owners. Never mind that the new claimants are also settlers in the Lagos that was conquered by Bini Kingdom. Never mind that the kings of Lagos today, who speak with arrogance and bombast are actually colonial representatives sent to rule over Lagos by the colonizing Oba of Benin.
In the new Lagos, the Lagos the politicians and money mongers have created, long lines of trucks pack permanently on the once revered flyovers, and the road to Apapa is permanently on traffic gridlock, because Lagos government must make money to service entrenched criminal potentates and their marauding gangs.
In the new Lagos, the people don’t really matter. Only money does. There is no comfort, no recreation, no convenience, no joy. Just a money making city for few, without a soul or culture. A battlefield for bare existence. No culture. No tradition. No morals. With money as it’s religion and thugs as a constant reminder that one is in Lagos.
Yet those who own Lagos are those who make Lagos tick. Those who live here, invest here and work here. They are those who have bought land and built their houses and factories here. They are the Nupes, the Hausas, the Fulanis, the Ibos, the Ibibios, the Efiks, the Ijaws, the Greeks, the Lebanese, besides the Aworis who lay ancestral claim to it and the Binis who conquered and dominated Lagos.
In the new Lagos, Igbos are forcibly prevented from voting in the general elections because they do not come from Lagos and are very many in number. Which tribe will be added to the exemption of the Igbos in the next election, I cannot foresee. Warnings of impending pogrom are sent by Yorubas who should know better, those who have been masquerading as educated and civilised people.
The Lagos I knew is gone. Only the shadow thereof is left, ‘a different townhall’ of sorts, one may safely characterise it, and a dirty and dingy zoo for thugs and money making machines who must be Yoruba and speak Yoruba.
•Kidzu writes from Calabar
