By Luke Onyekakeyah
The raging acrimony over a vicious plot by the authorities in Lagos to edge out the so called non-indigenes, particularly, the Igbo out of Lagos through appropriate discriminatory laws by the State House of Assembly should not bother anyone for it is only the ignorant who don’t know that cities rise and fall depending on the circumstances at a given time.
When the circumstances are ripe with positive conditions, a city may spring up and flourish so long as those conditions exist. But when the circumstances change and the conditions that made the city wane, the city begins to shrink towards eventual fall. The foregoing occurs when humans are the change agents in a city’s dynamics.
But sometimes a city may fall abruptly as a result of violent natural disaster like earthquake, floods engendered by hurricane, typhoon, tornado, etc. Circumstances like these are beyond human control and there are historical examples. Lagos as an organic city is prone to all the vagaries that shape cities, and the processes are already playing out.Lagos
sprang up some centuries ago when the conditions were ripe for it through the
agency of Portuguese explorers. Ever since then, the city has been on the march
– from colony to Nigeria’s federal capital when it attained its apogee and now
state capital with dwindling fortunes. For those who may not have realised it,
Lagos, rather than flourishing the more is dwindling in importance. With
decrepit economic and social infrastructures, the city is already on a downward
spiral.
The Economist Intelligence Unit recently ranked Lagos among the three least liveable cities in the world, namely, Lagos, Tripoli and Damascus. And Lagos was ranked below these two war thorn cities. It is incredible that rather than the authorities in Lagos to be concerned with how to lift Lagos from a squalor status it is gearing towards, they are more concerned with primordial mundane sentiments of how to rob Lagos of what seems like the last vestiges of life holding the city which is trade and commerce propelled by the Igbo.
I
would like to stress at this juncture that the plot to dispossess the Igbo of
their landed properties in Lagos might not be entirely bad in the long run. On
the face value, it will hurt the victims but in the final analysis, it will
mark a step towards the eventual fall of Lagos and the dawn of a more vibrant
Igbo nation when those dislodged return back to invest in Igboland. For those
who don’t know, there are two most important people in the life of any nation,
first is the man who turned a forest into a city and the second is the man who
turned the city into a forest.
Whereas
those who turned the impregnable brackish salt water swamps into a city called
Lagos are the first, the authorities in Lagos, unwittingly are constituting
themselves into the latter. They want to turn Lagos back into an abandoned old
city. They are the enemy of the people. Since no condition is permanent and
nothing is absolute, nobody should expect that Lagos would remain the economic
nerve centre of Nigeria ad infinitum. No, not at all; except the city is
diligently managed with the broad objective to rank it like cities elsewhere.
In
2009, I attended a conference in Los Angeles USA organised by the former
Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger on climate change. The former
Lagos State Governor Babatunde Fashola was there with Governor Emmanuel
Uduaghan of Delta State. At a caucus meeting addressed by Fashola, he stressed
that he is not comparing Lagos with any city in Nigeria but with global cities
such as Sao Paolo, Los Angeles, Jakarta, Shanghai, Dubai, and such big cities
around the world. Do the parochial authorities in Lagos share the same vision
with Fashola?
History is replete with popular cities that once flourished but later
fell to oblivion. For instance, Pompeii was once a popular city of the ancient
Roman Empire that was destroyed and buried under a thick layer of volcanic
eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Following the disaster, the thriving city
of Pompeii near the present Naples was abandoned to ruins. If Pompeii was
historic and farfetched, there were four cities in Africa that have been lost.
They include Thonis–Heraclein, Alexandria, Moroe and Jenne. Jenne was once
centre of sophistication and wealth but its fortunes waned over time. While
their ancient splendor disappeared from sight, archeology is now revealing
their glorious past.
And
if this is still far removed, we need to recall that before the Nigeria/Biafra
civil war, Ibadan used to be the most boisterous and cosmopolitan city in
Nigeria’s Western Region. It had the first television station in Africa, the
Cocoa House which was the first skyscraper in Nigeria. The popular Liberty
Stadium hosted the middleweight title where Dick Tiger knocked out Gene Fullmer.
The University College Hospital (UCH) had international reputation and
attracted dignitaries from foreign countries. Ibadan was so cosmopolitan that
it was the only millionaire city in West Africa. Millionaire city is a city
with a population of over a million people. During those periods, Lagos was
unknown. At the end of the civil war in 1970, attention shifted to Lagos and
Ibadan was abandoned. Today, Ibadan is grotesque city with disused
infrastructure. Nobody goes to Ibadan anymore for greener pasture.
For
those who don’t know that Lagos is already going, the following should open
your consciousness. The relocation of the federal capital from Lagos to Abuja
in 1991 was a major blow to Lagos. Following that, all the federal MDAs moved
to Abuja. All foreign diplomatic missions in Lagos moved to Abuja. A lot of
former multinational companies such as Michelin, Dunlop, among many others have
left Lagos.
All the benefits that accrued to
Lagos including special status as the nation’s capital were stopped. There are
no more mega flyovers being built in Lagos. Even the existing ones are left
unmaintained. What is left all over Lagos are abandoned dilapidated buildings
and other hitherto federal infrastructures. The inner city roads in Lagos are
among the worst in the world. There is traffic chaos, extortion by all manner
of traffic officials all over the city.
That being the situation, the only factor still sustaining Lagos is the
spirit of trade and commerce which is propelled by the Igbo. Unfortunately, it
is this last remaining factor that the myopic leadership in today’s Lagos wants
to get rid of for the simple selfish reason that the Igbo are growing and could
take over the political leadership in Lagos. This is happing at a time when
Barak Obama of black African origin became the president of America and both
the mayor of London and the British Prime Minister are of Asian descent.
It
needs to be pointed out that the greatest threat facing Lagos is not the Igbo
but a projected natural disaster that could destroy Lagos in the near future. A
report by Climate Central, a scientific organization based in New Jersey,
United States, published in the journal, Nature Communications, shows that 300
million people currently living in areas that are flooded at least once would
be submerged by high tide by 2050. That is to the entire Lekki Peninsula,
Victoria Island and many parts of Lagos are at risk of submergence. What are
the anti-Igbo leaders in Lagos doing about this real time threat?
It also needs to be pointed out that Lagos is the only commercial city in
the South-West unlike in the South-East where you have Onitsha, Aba, Umuahia,
Enugu, etc. As a matter of fact, everywhere in the South-East is a commercial
centre. If Lagos falls, the South-East will gain from the misfortune. No doubt
about that.
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