I should shed a tear for the goat. Its primal cry trembled as it flailed and failed to wriggle its dark hide from the grips of ebo men in Lagos. The goat did not know the BOS of Lagos, nor if Gbadebo has another name across the pond, nor whether a battle was afoot over who first set foot on Lagos soil. One thing, however, was certain: its blood would mingle with that soil in a finality of its oblivion. The sacrifice went viral.
This is how the spiritual can mock the political in the Nigerian space. There was a herd of the white-clothed men, singing and chanting around some parts of town. The Oro cult was there for emphasis. It was a comic spectacle although they did not see themselves as a circus. What was happening was an existential struggle. It was not about a political party, or a religious faith. It was a race in a fighting stance.
It would not have happened if one race did not boast that Lagos belonged to no one. The Igbo and some south-south persons have maintained that Lagos does not belong to the Yoruba. Some say it was a colonial port city, a white man’s beloved. The colonial master invited the others to the place they founded. This is unfortunate, and it is partly because we do not study history in our schools. They should have known that Yorubas have always been here.
The issue was that the door was thrown open and allowed others to dinner and use of the bathroom. But what the Yorubas saw was the question in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart – if a man defecates on your floor, what would you do? Of course, you would find a stick of terminator to go after the defecator. That was what happened on Saturday. An electoral truncheon or bulala.
Lagosians showed a virtue of democracy: it is not just about numbers, although it is. It is about sentiment above all else. Lagosians demonstrated the sentiment of ownership. Sociologists write about the ownership society, but they hardly refer to land and the power of the indigene. They speak about owning individual properties, careers, families and other destinies. But this version of ownership of the land is the root of all ownership, whether in a democracy or tyranny. Governor Ortom, a bumbling governor as regards development, exploited it to win elections because Buhari seemed to undermine Benue’s ownership impulse.
But advanced democracies always play this game. In the United States, the citizens describe their society as a melting pot. In Canada, they call themselves a mosaic. Lagos wanted the American model not by example but by its own history. Lagos opened its arms and others have come to take it for granted. We saw it hit its dark chapter in the presidential polls when the APC presidential candidate lost to the Labour Party man. Rather than see it as a collective sigh for the republican spirit, an ethnic dimension took hold when brothers from the east started not only to gloat but beat their chests that they would take over the state house.
They started even mocking the governor for attending churches, cooling his tongue with ice cream, et al, as though he had not been doing so in the past. They boasted about a candidate who wanted to upturn the way of the tribe by installing a rival monarch, undermine the indigene in the name of a cosmopolitan idea. He could not speak the language and he privileged the settler over the indigene.
Of course, we cannot underplay the role of the church. They turned brother against brother in Yorubaland, but the followers did not understand their pecuniary motivations. One, they had status anxiety when the Corporate Affairs Department asked them to follow the rules of succession. Two, they had Jonathan-era nostalgia when the ex-president gave them an episcopal cover. Three, they saw a pr move to swell the ranks of followers.
But what happened in Lagos last Saturday was to raise roots of origin over belief. For instance, where I voted in the presidential poll, APC had 37 votes and LP had 20. PDP had one vote. Last weekend, APC had 51 votes and LP had nine, PDP had none. I observed that those who voted Labour who were Yoruba changed camp. My voting area was outside my estate. There were two polling areas in the estate. The first one had 83 votes for APC and Labour had 23. Two weeks ago, LP had over 40 votes while APC had less than 60 votes. In the second place, the APC scored 96 votes but the din of celebration drowned the LP number. In the presidential poll, APC won by only four votes. This time, LP might have attracted less than ten votes.
The voters started to dance and scream, “a ti dibo, a ti wole.” We have voted and we have won. They started saying “this is Yorubaland. You can’t come and take our land from us. God forbid.” A visceral exhalation. That is the depth of suspicion. There were instances of violence, snatching of ballot boxes and even bloodletting in Lagos. I condemn all. But the conduct was vastly peaceful, and it reflected a primordial tension between two tribes. The Igbo and Yoruba. And for the youth who know nothing of their past, they should learn that at one time, Igbos and Yorubas went to the market to buy machetes for war when the great Zik was accused of misappropriating the funds of NCNC. Rather than address the allegation, he said it was because he was an Igbo man. Dare Babarinsa misled readers when he normalised Rhodes-Vivour’s ambition as Lagos narrative, citing Zik’s bid to be premier of the West. He did not show that Awo rose to counter him partly because Zik saw it as an Igbo man taking over a Yoruba race, and hence he failed. In revenge, Zik did not rise above a petty temperament when he dislodged Eyo Ita from the East to pave way to become the premier of that region.
Maybe to bring peace between them, Awo called Zik to coalesce their forces against NPC to be prime minister in the first republic so Awo could serve under him as finance minister. Zik preferred to be ceremonial president, sqafing tea and hosting heads of state and dinners instead of developing this country. He became a cipher under Tafawa Balewa. Why did he not trust Awo? After all, he would be the boss and could even fire the Ikenne man. He was more afraid of his own shadows.
The tension has been here all along. The man who raked it up of late was Jonathan who worked with the eastern elite and guber candidate Jimi Agbaje, who promised to install an Igbo king. This undermined the efforts president-elect Asiwaju Bola Tinubu had made over the years to integrate the Igbos into the state affairs. Jonathan relocated to Lagos and made the CBN his farmstead.
What democracy calls for is a cooperative spirit. When Obama ran for president, he ran as an American, not a black man. Hence, he won. The blacks voted as one bloc, and it riled the foul blood of the alt-right who threw up Trump as the hero on a white horse. We must be careful not to make this an ethnic city but one of ethics. It is not in the hands of the indigene to ensure peace, but those who come from outside.
Whatever the celebration must be for the APC in Lagos, it should be seen as a warning, not ecstasy. The party will have to review its party mechanics and those who have fallen victim to what Francois Rene Chateaubriand says of the phases of a cause or institution: utility, privilege and abuse. Some partisans in the party are in that place between privilege and abuse. The party has to check this, but it needs to take a deeper look.
It is a pity that many would have loved to vote for all the great things the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has accomplished. But it was reduced to an us-versus-them fireworks. However, his place in history is stout and unassailable.
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected columnist with The Nation Newspaper
