M.O. ENE
A debate was titled, “Is Lagos on the path of becoming New York or old Kigali?” The title stirred my interest in last Friday’s debate hosted by Rudolf Okonkwo. I logged in to listen.
My first trip to Lagos was memorable. I flew in from Enugu, a 45-minute flight on a Nigerian Airways Fokker F28. “Is this the Lagos?” The next day, I gladly flew out to Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci International and into an ‘air-conditioned’ environment: It was winter!
Back from studying abroad, Lagos was on offer for national service. I declined. I like Lagos, but I dislike the organized chaos of sprawling cities. The people are good. They know their history from the Awori, Edo’s Ekoo, Portuguese Lagos, transatlantic human trafficking, British colonialism, federal capital city, influx of other Nigerians, etc.
Over the centuries, emigration and immigration have defined the sociocultural transformations of the great Lagos megalopolis. Alas, pre-independence politicians exploited ethnic differences to harness bigotry for favorable partisan and personal electoral outcomes. The bias targeted the increasing ethnic Igbo population.
Listening in 2023 to concocted and convoluted reasons for Igbophobia, to supposedly sane souls spinning sorry stories from the hearth of hell, many were driven to the edge of emotional embarrassment. The depth of ignorance, group-labeling, and baseless denigration was crass, crude, and cruel. Let’s lighten the bitterness a bit: Take the silly smear of ‘Igbo showoff’ from folks who casually closed an entire street for all-night weekend parties called ‘owambe.’ Funny!
On the extreme, the Igbo have been massacred for just being Igbo. They have never retaliated. No Igbo leader in history has harbored such a bestial murdering mindset. Besides, shedding of human blood is an abomination, a crime against the Earth deity.
Nigeria could not stand Ndiigbo leaving to survive a pogrom; hating their presence and productivity is the tonic that holds Nigeria together. It took the blood of three-million humans, yet little has changed. What really is the color of Nigeria’s problem with Ndiigbo?
I found it mindboggling that a Nigerian elite living in New York City, USA believed for whatever reason that the Igbo pogrom was justified…. the disembowelment of pregnant women, the massacre of males in Asaba, the carpet-bombing of churches and marketplaces, the starving to death of a million children…. Lord, have mercy on the soul of this animal called man!
The only good things from the often-unruly session were paths to solving the lacks in Lagos: promoting the rule of law, provision of basic amenities, opening more seaports (Calabar, Onitsha, Port Harcourt, and Warri), east-west fast railway link, more international flights to Enugu, PH, and Calabar, and anything else to ease Lagos life before it chokes its citizens.
Lagos is heading in the direction of New York City, USA—not old Kigali, Rwanda. The campaigns for Saturday, March 18, have vented hate of the Igbo citizens for doing exactly what they were accused of not doing: registering and voting! Candidates now worship at churches and visit commercial outlets to meet Igbo constituents.
Nonnative interlopers have framed the contest between urbane Rhodes-Vivor (GCRV) and Governor Sanwo-Olu (BJSO) as an Igbo-Yoruba conflict. It is not. The Yoruba and the Igbo have no major problem beyond ephemeral ethnic egotism, nothing like the Hutu-Tutsi horrors of hate! Tụfịakwa! Lagos is beyond the bestial butchery of Kigali.
The serpentine scions of irrational irredentists misrepresent the matter, meddle much, and mind Lagos natives to take back their state from a long line of nonnative stakeholders, including incumbent BJSO. Here comes GCRV, a native Lagosian (‘bread and buttered’), and nonnative interlopers dare to dichotomize his DNA.
No matter the outcome of the elections, change has come. The revolution is real. The Bar Beach breeze has revealed the daring derrieres of detractors. This is their last lamentation in a city where the Dangotes and Khourys own more prime real estates than the average Adamu, Emeka, Nosa, and Olu combined.
The Indomie-Internet generation is not the ‘agbado-agbalagba’ age grade. Lagos has an increasingly posh population that is educated, enlightened, energized, and envisioning enabling economic environments. GCRV promises to deliver with a spouse that compares with Germany’s Angela Merkle and America’s Hillary Rodham Clinton in her own right: Dr. (Mrs.) Iféyinwa Rhodes-Vivour.
In another 200 years, sociologists will gloss over this gross glitch on the way to Nigeria’s happening megalopolis of Lagos, where more people speak English than in any other city in the world. The Igbo believe that “Ebe onye bi ka ọ na-awachi”: Where you live, there you thrive. It shall be so with Lagos, where eagles perch and kites perch: Live and let live.
#moe
3.15.2023
aladimma.net 