Columnist Chuks Iloegbunam poses the important questions on the Lagos debate and wonders what it means to be a Nigerian national.
What does it mean to be a national of this country? Does it mean the inability to buy a piece of land in other than where someone hails from? How do you explain that Ndigbo in Ghana, Cameroon, Gabon, South Africa own more landed properties in those countries than other Nigerian ethnic groups put together?
What sense does it make that some Yoruba who own houses in London and Houston, Texas, suffer insomnia on account of Ndigbo owning ASPAMDA on the way to Badagry? If Tinubu, from the backwaters of Iragbiji in Osun State is looking forward to directing Nigeria’s affairs from Abuja, a city owned by none of his parents, why should there be a hoopla over the right of a Lagos-based Igbo to cast his or her vote for a politician of his or her choice?
Why are Nigerian censuses not including ethnic origins in their demographics? Is it not the truth that in a place like the UK where every census exercise entails detailing where everyone comes from, it is known that original Londoners are in the minority of the current inhabitants of the British capital?
Why, every careful reader of every analysis of political Lagos today should ask, is there a curious paralysis of the will to place a finger on the cause of the contemporaneous Igbo-Yoruba tension in Lagos?
Why is it that the Chagouris and the Vaswanis are not raising eyebrows even though whole chunks of Lagos have been carved up and ceded to them?
Is it because Ndigbo were massacred in the hundreds of thousands in the 1960s to the reward of the orchestrators of the genocide cornering oil blocs and having the longest streets in Abuja named after them that people believe a new massacre of Ndigbo today will go unquestioned?
Shouldn’t this submission end with a repetition of a Facebook intervention I made on February 11, 2023? Did I not say the following then?
“For the owl-eyed one busily constructing an ocean of blood in order that he presides, Dean Inge’s warning against heedlessness is apposite: ‘A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.'”.
To be a Nigerian national
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