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  • Opinion
  • Updated: March 19, 2023

OPINION: Igbos In Lagos And The Clamour For A Voice

OPINION: Igbos In Lagos And The Clamour For A Voice

Whether we like it or not, the Lagos State gubernatorial and House of Assembly elections have been marred with the worst brand of ethnic attacks.

Lagos will still continue to be that free-trade zone where all and sundry will come to hustle after the 2023 election cycle but why all of a sudden is it that people who live in harmony fight for ethnic superiority?

From progressive and forward-thinking political observers, Nigerians from the Igbo extraction in Lagos were the catalysts and victims of name-calling, particularly after the incident of the presidential election.

Some Igbos in Lagos opened Twitter spaces for hours to tackle the Lagos Governor, Babajide Sawno-Olu, and other key figures in the state, pushing the agenda that it is high time they showed Lagos residents, that none of them could survive without them.

As the destroyers and ethnic bigots were having their illusion (it is illusional because the government owns every land), many other innocent Igbo Lagosians were being dragged into the ethnic sucker punch they know nothing about, making the whole matter messier.

Even after the election, the reality that the 2023 gubernatorial election shifted away from the strive for competence and capacity to ethnic validation will not leave the centre of excellence’s dictionary anytime soon.

Regardless of how the outcome of the election pans out, Igbos in Lagos will not leave the state in a twinkle of an eye.

They have profitable and sustainable businesses and life-changing engagements prospering in the state than abandoning them for some overblown ethnic validation. 

Therefore, many of them will remain in Lagos and pull greater weights therein.

They will do profitable businesses and get married to other tribesmen.

They will still stay in Lagos during the next election cycle to exercise their franchise.

But maybe they should not have forced themselves to have a voice because they already do.

It is advisable that Igbos in Lagos, just like every other non-indigent resident of any state in the country, do not allow political power brokers to sell any whimper of ethnic freedom to them because of politics.

On and off the media space, the crusades to unseat traditional rulers and overthrow a particular ethnic group by some individuals of calumny disguising as Igbo reformers to earn electoral sympathy is an unyielding tactic of force to earn a voice that the Igbos in Lagos already have.

Everyone who racks up tax for a state is one of the owners of the state.

No two ways about it; an attempt to stamp a narrative that the Igbos own it or wrestle it from the southwest region geopolitics is an overzealous force to give an ethnic group a voice they already enjoy.

The Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa controlling Lagos’s dichotomy was a political agenda, but the orchestrators of the mayhem did not consider that Igbos in Lagos who will resume work on Monday with colleagues that some of the people he is definitely not a part of started an overthrow mission.

So long as there are Igbos in the far north, there will continue to be Igbos in Lagos.

And unlike the social media false alarmists are painting, they will not take their profitable businesses away from Lagos considering the risks. 

What we should do as a people is to publicly condemn the media soldiers who branded the Lagos State gubernatorial election as the “break-free for the Igbos in Lagos.” 

How do you clamour for independence or self-government from Lagos when you were never colonsied? The ethnic soldeirs did a very poor job.

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