There is no subtle way of putting this: the so-called warning that Oba Rilwanu Akiolu of Lagos issued to Igbo people living in the city is the height of hubris, and should not be condoned. The Oba was taped telling the representatives of the Igbo community who visited him in his palace that they must vote for Akinwunmi Ambode, gubernatorial candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, or risk drowning in the lagoon.
I am writing this while voting in the governorship elections is still in progress, and am not sure when I will finish the composition. But no matter; irrespective of who emerges as the winner of the election in Lagos, the king’s aggressive behaviour towards an embattled minority group in a city where they have rights of citizenship will remain with us as an act of intolerance, displayed by someone occupying a chiefly office of a most consequential kind.
Why single out the Igbo for this kind of incendiary threat? The oba knows the history of ethnic relations in this country. He knows how much victimisation the Igbo, especially, have experienced in Nigeria. The wounds that have not healed. The hurt that many non-Igbo are loath to acknowledge. Yes, the Igbos were not the only victims of the Biafran war, but why single them out for reprimand? Will the Oba speak thus to the Hausa, or the Ijebu? Even if he would, it isn’t right, and if anyone should know, it is the Oba. He was a former police officer, trained in rhetoric. To be an Oba is also to be a master of courtly speech. What one may think of royal power is a different matter; the point is that the terrain of all speech is one you enter with a complete sense of responsibility.
It was from this same Lagos that, about two years ago, people categorised as destitute were deported as aliens. The act was carried out by the government of Raji Fashola, the incumbent governor. The problem was, the overwhelming majority of the deportees were Igbo.
The Igbo are Nigerian citizens, like the majority of the residents of Lagos. They have the same rights as anyone else and should not be victimised or made out like strangers. I don’t subscribe to the equally provocative chutzpah that Lagos is a No Man’s Land (you need more than a rhetorical claim to be the Oba of Lagos), but the rights of a Yoruba or Kanuri person should be no different, one from the other, in Lagos, Aba, or Abuja.
The Oba said in the same speech that Jimi Agbaje, the candidate of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP was his relation, a way of saying that he had no ill-will towards the man. The question is, since when have residents of a city divided into local councils or local development areas begun to do the biddings of a potent to whom they owe no tributes?
There is no escaping the fact that the Oba is working with the assumption that, going by the support given to the PDP in the presidential and national assembly elections in the South-East, the Igbo in Lagos might want to extend such a support to Lagos in the governship election. The choice to vote for the ruling party was a democratic one, freely exercised – one imagines, and the concerned political elite from the South-East know the cost in terms of political leverage. That is how it should be.
What must not escape attention is that under regimes ostensibly favoured by the Oba, an Igbo technocrat has risen to the position of state commissioner. Small step, no doubts. Yet, like the choice of whom to vote, this is a sign of a society on the way to developing a healthy sense of the civis. The ideal of the city.
It used to be that the default view of Lagos held by the Igbo people was expressed by the elder addressing the Umuofia People’s Union in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, in the mode of a prayer: We are strangers in this land. If the good comes, let it come to us. If evil comes, let it go to the owners of the land who know what gods to appease.
But that was time past. The notion of a separation between “owners of the land” and “strangers” belongs to a past to which we should look with the understanding proper to a society steadily mastering its history, amidst the great mutations of modern history.
Lagos, like Nigeria, like the world, belongs to all people.
Akin Adesokan teaches comparative literature at the University of Indiana, Bloomington.
