MUSING OVER FANI-KAYODE’S “LAGOS, THE IGBO AND THE SERVANTS OF TRUTH”

“The Igbo had little to do with the extraordinary development of Lagos between 1880 right up until today. That is a fact. Other than Ajegunle, Computer Town, Alaba and buying up numerous market stalls in Isale Eko, where is their input? Meanwhile, the Yoruba of the old Western Region and Lagos were very gracious to them and not only allowed them to return after the civil war to claim their properties and jobs but also welcomed them with open arms and allowed them to flourish in our land. This is something that they have never done for our people in the east”-Femi Fani-Kayode, former Minister of Aviation Federal Republic of Nigeria.

The above quote was taken from Mr Femi Fani-Kayode’s treatise entitled, “Lagos, The Igbo and The Servants of Truth” in which he defended the deportation of Igbo from Lagos State and asserted that what we are seeing in Lagos, in fact the “extraordinary development of Lagos” was totally the brainchild of the Yoruba, although he did concede that the Igbo only contributed to the development of Ajegunle, Computer Town, Alaba “and buying up numerous market stalls in Isale Eko”.

 I do not think that the Igbo claim ownership of Lagos in an ancestral sense, but they are bonafide co-owners of Lagos through landed property as allowed them by the constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria. Because Lagos is not the ancestral home of the Igbo, the race ensured that none of their dead is buried in Lagos or any other part of Nigeria outside Igboland. However, the essence of this treatise is not to support the Igbo claim to being major player to the development of Lagos, which is undeniable especially in private sector driven development, but rather to show clearly that Lagos could not have been developed to what it is today without the colonial masters making it the capital of Nigeria, a position that was sustained till the capital was finally moved to Abuja in the 1980s, a few years after the Murtala Mohammed regime approved it as the new capital. It would be recalled that the movement of the capital from Lagos to Abuja was resisted by the Yoruba dominated federal bureaucracy till the no nonsense late head of state, General Sani Abacha, put his foot down that all ministries and parastatals must move to Abuja. I want to also add that it was a combination of history and geography that made Lagos what it is today. History in the sense that it was chosen to be the capital of Nigeria by the British and accepted in good faith by other Nigerians after the end of colonial rule. Geography also played a role because it has a natural entry port which the colonial masters developed to make import and export of goods and services easy. In the area of geography it was competing with two other port cities, Port Harcourt and Calabar which was incidentally the capital of Nigeria before Lagos. When the colonial masters were in charge of the country, the bulk of the nation’s resources were used in the infrastructural development of Lagos. Similarly since independence and during much of the oil boom when “money is not the problem, but what to do with it”, over 70 per cent of the nation’s oil wealth was put into Lagos infrastructural development. Yoruba resources were not as significant to the development of Lagos as the Nigerian resources mainly gotten through oil from the south-south and southeast of the country. While it is fashionable to blame the northern leaders on alleged mismanagement of our oil wealth and for the neglect of the Niger Delta and since the money was not used to develop the north either, invariably it was spent to develop Lagos. If the amount of money sunk into Lagos all these years were spent in Aba or Enugu, these southeast towns would have been the Dubai of Africa today. With southeast neglected by the federal government and lacking in federal presence, what is it that would attract large Yoruba population to Igboland so that the Igbo would do for the Yoruba what the Yoruba have done for the Igbo in Lagos? This is in response to Fani-Kayode’s assertion that the kind of freedom Igbo enjoy in Lagos have never been extended to Yoruba in Igboland. It is worth repeating that whatever rights Nigerians enjoy wherever they chose to reside is granted them by the constitution until the day Nigeria ceases to exist, either violently or peacefully. That is a matter for another day.

In the south-south city of Port Harcourt which is a few kilometres from major towns in the southeast  and where there is some level of federal presence with the establishment of a refinery, and several oil companies, are the refinery and the oil companies not dominated by the Yoruba? Did anybody begrudge the fact that in Port Harcourt, it is the Yoruba that are running the show in the multinational oil companies, while the people of Niger Delta are only good as messengers until they began to sabotage these companies’ activities? What is it that attracted so many Yoruba to Port Harcourt? Is it not the federal presence which the southeast do not have due to deliberate marginalisation?

Besides, if it was the ingenuity of Yoruba alone that developed Lagos-that is if you considers Lagos developed, given that Dubai was a mere desert a few decades ago when Lagos was the capital of Nigeria-was the Yoruba ingenuity restricted to Lagos alone? Why is Oshogbo not as developed as Lagos? Why is Ibadan the capital of Western Region bereft of the kind of development in Lagos? The cash cow of Lagos aside the disproportionate federal allocation it got for infrastructural development, is the sea port and it was developed by the federal government. In any case even if Lagos was not developed by the federal government and the city had evolved on its own(that is a city like Jos that developed around the tin mines), the governor would still be deemed to have violated the constitution if he prevents Nigerians of any social strata from residing in Lagos State. Even a madman in Lagos should be rehabilitated and not deported because when he was healthy Lagos State was happy to collect his tax. There is therefore no justification for the deportation of fellow Nigerians from any city or state in Nigeria. On a final note, is Gbagis, the original inhabitants of Abuja, responsible for the massive infrastructural development of Abuja today?