The battle for Lagos in the 2023 Governorship elections

Let’s be very clear here: the Igbos are not running for Governorship election in Lagos state. The Igbos are not in the struggle for ownership of any land, as I am yet to meet that Igbo person that wishes to be buried in Ikoyi or Atan cemetery. The Igbos will always go home.

But one thing they will not do is to cut and run and abandon their hard earned investments and run away just because someone is making video tapes shouting and threatening people that withstood thirty months of global blockade and genocidal civil war.

The Igbos are in Lagos just as they are in Houston Texas or even Togo here. They see opportunities, they create and add value wherever they go as long as that place remains viable and profitable.

Go to Maiduguri in Borno State, Yola in Adamawa State and few other places that the Igbos have divested and you can only find a desolate and depressed once vibrant city.

So, let me say here that the power struggle in Lagos has nothing to do with the Igbos resident in Lagos. It has more to do with the struggle for political power amongst the Yorubas themselves. It is between the real educated, liberal and very accommodating indigenous people of Lagos and the other Yorubas who are not original Omo Ekos, but have become Lagosians by the virtue of birth or residency and dialect.

Infact, you can count the real biological Omo Ekos dating back to centuries, the family blocks of Indigenous people of Lagos from Ikorodu to Epe, Lagos Island etc. You can do that just standing because they are not that many and we know them.

Power shifted away from them following the assassination of Funsho Williams who ran for Governorship of Lagos State and was destined to win, but the rest became a proverbial history.

It is that power that Jimi Agbaje and the rest of others have struggled and tried albeit with little success to wrestle back from the current ACN/APC clique. Another dimension to the struggle is between the well entrenched Christians and the current preponderance towards liberal and Yoruba brand of Islam in Lagos. It is not a hidden fact, that it is the Yoruba Moslems that are controlling power in Lagos and by extension the South West.

These are some of the serious undercurrents in the battle for Lagos, yet the Igbos as usual are used as scape goats.

I suspect that the Igbos have become the tie breakers not only in Lagos but across many States and urban centers throughout Nigeria. This is what this current election is beginning to reveal and confirm. They have gained increasing relevance because of their block votes in this power struggle between these two sets of the Yoruba brethrens in the battle for Lagos.

Ironically, one side believes that they can use blackmail, whipping up of tribal sentiments, hate, intimidation, harrassment and voter suppression to hold on to power in perpetuity.

They attempt to discourage the Igbo alignment with the real Omo Ekos to reclaim back their indigenous home of Lagos from those who took it from them and relegated them just like many others in Lagos.

While they use force, and deploy characters like Joe Igbokwe and others in Lagos to unleash propaganda, divisive politics of acrimony, the real liberal Lagosians preach peace, mutual co-existence, tolerance, inclusiveness and mutual respect for all the residents of Lagos just like it is obtainable in New York, London and all other world class urban centers. Yet, people wonder why the Igbos and other residents of Lagos choose to align with those who have treated them with dignity and mutual respect.

So, some of these desperate actions we see today are not only laughable but a great insult to the many great intelligent Yoruba men and women who truly understand the truth. Therefore it is insulting for some desperate characters, be them Igbos or others, that are basically earning their living by conning the officials of APC with the impression that they matter in Igbo affairs. Or that their utterances merit even a pause by serious minded people across the world. No, they don’t. We know them for who they are. They are inconsequential and totally discounted or ostracized, if you will.

For these peope to concoct all these mumbo jumbo self-serving disjointed statements riddled with all manners of stereotypical nuances just to appease their paymasters is just simply absurd.

One thing with tricksters and sycophants is that they do not know when to stop. That’s their trade.

But I am confident that our brethren from the South West who stand not with political parties or any particular individual, but stand in solidarity with the truth, justice and equity are not buoyed or persuaded by all these absurdities.

The Igbo position is consistent with the rest of other Nigerians who are sick and tired of the impunity and steady drift towards abyss. Go towards the South East and see how the quiet revolution is shaping things up. Lagos is no exception to the wind of change blowing across this country, and shouldn’t be.

Thank you.

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