Importance Of Lagos In The Preservation Of The Political Relevance Of Yorubas In National Politics In Nigeria

Written by Aare Kurunmi Kakanfo

The last 2023 election has opened up the pandora box of fault lines that have existed in pre-colonial and post-colonial Nigeria and as a Yoruba man who wants the prosperity of the Yoruba people within Nigeria, I need to sound the warning to my fellow Yorubas about the asymmetrical warfare that has been declared upon us by our political rivals from other ethnicities under the guise of the Obedient movement in Nigeria.

During the campaign, we heard chants and slogans all the way from places like Aba, Benin, Anambra, London even New York about “Operation Capture Lagos”. We saw people we grew up with as friends whom we welcomed as fellow Nigerians who came to enjoy free education and good standards of living in the Southwest join other non-Yorubas in Lagos specifically to launch Operation Capture Lagos.

Their campaign promises were very straightforward, capture Lagos, destroy Tinubu, chase away Yoruba Obas, destroy Alpha beta, ban Yoruba language in Lagos, chase away Yoruba Muslims, jail all “Agberos”, arrest MC Oluomo and ensure Lagos is no longer a Yoruba state.

Countless Audio and video recordings exist to back up these allegations, what about tweets? That one is uncountable! That election was a war between Settlers/political Christians/deyorubanized Yorubas versus indigenous Yorubas/Yoruba residents of Lagos. It was never about good governance or capacity, it was an ethnic battle. The outcome of the elections in Enugu, Ebonyi, Abia, Rivers, Delta, or Imo was not in the interest of these people, it was about “Lagos”.

Many passive Yorubas who never showed interest in the elections started to get scared when Yoruba history was been mischievously rewritten by anti-Yoruba elements as a form of political campaign. Gbarebo Shinedu the Trojan horse of conquest of these settlers was going everywhere spitting on the Yoruba race. He called Yorubas of other Southwestern states in Lagos ‘Ajojigodogbo”. He said he does not”Think in Yoruba” and that speaking the Yoruba language officially in Lagos state is bigotry.

He was asked if Lagos state is part of the Southwest, and he said Lagos is not Yorubaland but has a “filial relationship with Yorubaland” That was when every patriotic Yoruba son and daughter knew we were in trouble in the last Lagos elections. Many of us watched with anger as Lagos APC chieftains were still doing “optics” and playing fair in a political arena where hundreds of thousands of voters were relocated from a Geopolitical zone that has no contiguous border with the southwest to Lagos in order to determine the electoral outcome of Lagos? Is this still an election or a full-scale war?

They boasted how the demography of Lagos has been successfully changed and how it is a matter of time for Yoruba people to become “landless” and chased out of Lagos. Talks like this did not emanate from illiterates but from the middle and top class of these people. This is why I will always be grateful for the Hausa-Fulani-kanuri residents of Lagos who stood firm with the Yorubas in the fight against the Zikist invasion that we witnessed in the last election in Lagos.

After what happened, people started asking questions, why this hostility against the Indigenous Yorubas of Lagos by South easterners? Why is there so much hate for the political establishment of Lagos that has given them the opportunity to thrive like other Nigerians? Why are they hell-bent on hijacking political power in a Geopolitical zone outside their zone when they know the consequences in an ethnically volatile country like Nigeria? I will be explaining the reasons for their agenda in the next posts.

The Yorubas think they are having just elections but to them, it was “CONQUEST”, the agenda to make Southwest a five-state zone like them and the turning of Lagos into a war camp for the conquest of YORUBALAND and Nigeria” just like Azikwe also planned.