By Abimbola Adelakun
Future historians of this period will one day note that the 2027 presidential election was one of the most remarkable in our national history, as it was the first campaign to begin even before the 2023 election was properly concluded. We know that in Africa, time ordinarily orbits around elections and electioneering. Since elections are the means to capture power—which is all about allocating resources anyway—all of our being cannot but revolve around the coming election. It is through the outcomes of elections that the worth of our respective tribal collectives is calibrated, and that is why we always fight to the finish. We often think of victory as a zero-sum game, even though past realities have repeatedly shown us that such victories rarely result in any meaningful difference in our lives.
Following the outcome of the 2023 elections in Lagos State, its politicians began preparing for a possible repeat in 2027. However, they are not doing so by courting voters through improvements in their lives. They are instead stoking the emotional politics of revanchism. The latest controversy is the outgoing Chairman of Bariga LCDA, Kolade David, who announced the renaming of some public landmarks (some of which are named after Igbos) after Yoruba people. The import was, of course, to erase the legacy and public memory of people like Charles Oputa, the artiste popularly known as Charly Boy. But it is not just “Charly Boy” as a generic Igbo man, but Charly Boy as a hyper-visible and contrarian figure; Charly Boy specifically as a critic of APC politicians and their coterie of brownnosers. For the self-commissioned censors of political expression like David, the APC has become synonymous with Yoruba identity and non-Yorubas must either “put up or shut up”.
But if David truly wanted to honour the “people who have put the name of our local council out on the global map through their respective God-given talents and craft”, as he stated at the event where he renamed those landmarks, could he also not have done so without dragging those people into the murky pit of his petty politics? By renaming the popular Charly Boy Bus Stop after the singer and rapper Olamide Adedeji (Baddo), he managed to achieve three things. One, he put Olamide in an unenviable position, where he can neither publicly accept nor reject a gift given in bad faith. Turning him into a mere substitute for the person you dislike is not honour. Rather than recognising Olamide on the strength of his contributions to his birthplace, they are drafting the social capital he has accrued to overwrite the legacy of a critic. Two, the substantial backlash that David’s little scheme of ethnic baiting generated should tell him that people are more likely to double down on calling the bus stop its original name. Names of places and landmarks grow organically around people’s lived experiences and cannot be easily swiped off through some administrative fiat. Three, this “honour to dishonour” move devalues Lagos as a cosmopolitan city that pulsates with the energy of its diverse populations. You can fight it all you like, but Lagos is only Lagos because of the creative tensions generated when people of diverse energies are thrown together in a space.
But it would be naïve to think that Olamide is the only one being dragged into the sewer of this primal politics. One way or another, we are all being conscripted into a political formation that requires us to tribalise and wage a battle that distracts us from larger leadership failures. We have seen this movie before; we know how the plot unfolds. Given how Nigerians are aggravated by the hardships and the harsh hopes they have suffered through 16 years of the PDP and 10 years of the APC, they are understandably strained. The various economic constraints we have endured have severely tensed up everyone’s nervous systems, making already frustrated people hypersensitive. How else do you address the insecurities of your political base and redirect their frustrations away from you? You invent a common enemy and invite those within your ranks to bury their hatchet in its head. The tensions that follow such machination will generate a wellspring of sentiment to be resourcefully siphoned come next election. It is an old and dirty trick, and its deployment now is only remarkable because the 2027 electioneering started too soon.
Several people in Lagos and the surrounding states are getting caught up in the sentiment of a politics that has nothing to do with improving their lives. They think they are being protective of their territories, and that this sort of revanchism is a must because liberalism makes one a dupe of intolerant others. But how far and how well has this politics worked for us? In what way have any of these shenanigans improved our lives? In situations like this, I remind people of Idi Amin’s Uganda, where Indians were kicked out because they held disproportionate economic power. Go to Uganda today, and you will not only still find those South Asians but even East Asians holding sway in their commercial sector. The irony of it all makes me wonder: if they had worked through their mutual fears, insecurities, and bigotry to cooperate instead of sending them away in 1972, would they not have built a greater and more prosperous country by now? Look at all the time and effort they wasted to arrive where they started. Does erasing others help us shine, or do we end up merely corroded by the negativity?
Yes, we now live in a world that derides diversity, construes liberalism as a woke disease of the weak, and vehemently insists that openness to differences is naivete. All these are familiar troubles, and they recur because they are emotive issues. In societies yet to develop the competence to savvily manage differences, the issues can become a matter of life and death for the parties involved. We must not continue like this; we must move to that last stop where we no longer expend the valuable resource of time stoking the tensions that avidly consume our energy but yield no productive value.
Of all the arguments I have heard about the issue of indigenous and collective ownership of Lagos, the two that stand out to me are those that highlight the differentials in interpretation by those who either want to heighten conflict or douse it. One, no human habitation is ever a “no man’s land”, but there are places in the world on which various peoples lay claim because they are joint contributors to its character and wealth. Cities like New York, London, and Singapore have become a collective heritage due to—not despite—the activities of their diverse populations; asserting a tribal domination will impoverish them. Two, claiming “we built Lagos” is part of what people say to inscribe their socio-economic relevance wherever they occupy. When Black people say their slave labour made America, or immigrants say they built the USA, it does not mean other races or non-immigrants had no part. The statement is no more preposterous than Bola Tinubu (also a non-indigene) being labelled as the “builder of Lagos”. If we must choose between ascribing that honour to either one man who uses it to gain political mileage or diverse groups of people who want an acknowledgement of their part in making a place what it is, please know I will always choose the latter.
The Punch
