Today, if Lagos State is in any sports competition against Abia State, I will be cheering Lagos on. My children will be playing for Lagos State. I am not an indegene of Lagos State. I am not Yoruba in origin. I do not need either of these identities to be Lagosian. They have their own usefulness and their own contexts. However, I speak in the context of being a good and responsible citizen of Lagos State. That is the context in which I am as Lagosian as Lagosian can be.
Lagos was built and is being sustained by Lagosians like me – people who for one reason or the other found themselves in this place and have embraced it as home. They gave and still give their all to ensure a better place and community for themselves and their fellows.
Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa, as a quality has not built any modern Nigerian city. Yoruba is in Ekiti, Ondo, Oyo, Osun and Ogun. It has not translated those places into Lagos. As a quality, it has not replicated Lagos in those places. It is of no value to the building of Lagos State as a city comparable to other cosmopolitan cities in the world. I don’t say that being Yoruba has no innate value. It is a good thing. However, it is not what has resulted in the Lagos of today and if the Lagos of today should be stripped of its true quality as a cosmopolitan society down to an exclusive Yoruba town, it would diminish in every respect with time to the status of the average town in the average Yoruba State.
Lagos, is the result of history – history of being a colony of Britain for decades, capital of colonial Nigeria for decades and the capital of the Federal Republic of Nigeria for decades. The British Colonial Government poured money to develop Lagos as a natural port city. They built social and economic infrastructure. They built the ports, railway terminus at Iddo and the Eko Bridge and Carter Bridge. They built Ikoyi as their high class residential area. They built Yaba and Ebute Metta and Apapa as the high commercial and residential places on the mainland.
The Federal Government of Nigeria poured oil money from outside of Lagos into continuing the building of infrastructure in Lagos. They built Victoria Island and Surulere under the Ministry of Lagos affairs and Lagos City Council both headed by Igbo men. Gowon built the National Stadium National Arts Theatre and FESTAC town, as well as institutions such as Trade Fair Complex and ASCON in Badagry, Lagos State. He built, Ikorodu Road and Western Avenue. The colonialists had built the old Agege Motor Road. Babangida completed the Third Mainland Bridge which Gowon started. Obasanjo built the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway.
With the Government administrative headquarters and infrastructure came commerce. The headquarters of all the multinationals and the biggest companies, both local and foreign in colonial Nigeria were in Lagos. Population followed. Lagos became one of the most populous cities of the British Empire. The population attracted further commerce. A new and vibrant city with its own cosmopolitan culture was born.
Igbos were prominent in colonial Nigeria, both in the colonial Government and in the multinationals and other private companies. So, Igbos flooded Lagos. After the war, Igbos went heavily into trading. They began to search out every nook and crany of Lagos to build markets. That was how Alaba International Market was born, built on what was formerly water.
Like Ananse, the spider of Ghanaian folklores, some people, who were shipped in from far flung parts of the South West, who have deceived the true indegenes of Lagos State to join the cheating common purse of Yoruba land and non existent threat to Yoruba interest, have jumped down from the tree to claim it all, in the name of Yoruba.
NO WAY!
Lagos belongs to all those who truly love and cherish her and are happy to call her home.
By Chuks Nwachuku; legal practitioner and good governance advocate; [email protected]
