By Oladoyin Odebowale
“I find joining issues with you, once again, extremely compelling. It is important that we wean you off your delusion since you are becoming more brazen. You sure need some education on your obsession on Lagos, the land your people covet, so badly. Your mission should be clear to the discerning. You are more dangerous than the uncouth criminals, who designate our land as belonging to no one.
Your illiterate reference to Lagos as the capital of Nigeria for 86 years exposes certain predilections for greed and wickedness. Your consistent omission of Calabar and Lokoja as former Capital, even when the former was part of the defunct Eastern Region, is typical of your choice of deliberate amnesia impelled by a certain predisposition to dispossess and steal. You are fixated on Lagos for a purpose. It is good that our people are waking up to the realities of the hypocrisy of the so called moderate Ibo. You are worse than an infidel!
You started your prosaic write up with an allusion to a man from Orlu who owned 70 houses, presumably, in Lagos. If Lagos provided the enabling environment for him to thrive and Orlu was just his cemetery, your people’s acts of ingratitude must bear grave consequences. If he was not able to carry his houses to the landlocked, arid Orlu, his children should be grateful to the land which accommodated him and allowed him to flourish. The system which ensured that he acquired so much, a feat no one else could achieve in his village, must be respected. We will demand same from you and others henceforth. The gloves are getting off now.
You enquired to know why Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ondo and Ekiti States are not as developed as Lagos. The whole of your five States in the South East equals Oyo State in land mass. Anambra State is just a Local Government in Ibadan. Your mischief impelled ignorance confuses uncoordinated growth and expansion as development. You equate buying and selling finished, used and fake products imported to launder drug money with a manifestation of development. You deliberately ignore the fact that the main reason for the uncontrolled influx of your people to all the South Western States, Yorubaland, is survival. They continue to troop in to live in an ambience of a superior cultural advancement not out of choice. They are compelled by the very exigent circumstances which informed the creation of those settlements in what has become the South East by the International British Organisation, an acronym for IBO.
Try to find out how certain forest dwellers were evacuated from Equitorial Guinea and the Congo and dumped at the present site in Nigeria. Endeavour to conduct some research on the foundation of your Umuleri and Aguleri in Anambra State. Read about the adventures of Bishop Ajayi Crowther in Iboland. Learn something about the orthography of the forest dwellers and the contributions of this man to literacy among them. You will be impelled to have a better understanding and appreciate the term development. Indigeneity and why it is essential to preserve same will be more meaningful.
You behave like a typical thief, who depends on the hospitable disposition of his hosts to dispossess him of his property and still claims propriety. You are wicked and insensitive with the cynical reference to Abuja and the Justice Akinola Aguda Commission alleged compensation to the so called indigenes of the Federal Capital Territory whose virgin lands were acquired to establish the Federal Capital Territory. If your assertion is true, we must also remind you that the resources used to compensate them did not come from any of the five States in the South East.
We must assert, with confidence, that our lands were annexed through force of arms by the British colonialists. We regained those territories by operation of law at independence. The British did not leave our lands for the Ibo to acquire. You are not Yoruba and you will never be, even if you live amongst us for 100 years. There is no record of conquest of our any parts of our lands by your ancestors. We were not compensated for you and your fellow travelers to grab the collective patrimony of the Yoruba people with illicit funds. It did not come as a surprise that prominent land grabbers and supporters of Zionism propagated the dubious theory of 25% of the total votes cast for presidential candidate in Abuja as mandatory for a winner. It all falls into the grand pernicious scheme of dispossession and displacement under the mantra of the dubious One Nigeria.
That you, Joe Igbokwe, who only came to Lagos 40 years ago, was allocated a plot of land in Ikeja GRA by former Governor Fashola underscores the extent of your ingratitude. Ikeja was never a part of your Federal Capital until May 27, 1967. That place was a part of the industrial base of the defunct Western Region. The GRA was fully residential before the distortion of the master plan by the Tinubu Administration in Lagos. My late Aunt had a house at Isaac John Street, adjacent to the Radisson Blu today. The annex of that hotel was the residence of the owner of Adebowale Electricals, the business destroyed, utterly, with drug money by the “new Lagos Developers”.
You should have been able to check the files since certain elements decided, in moments of gross indiscretion and irresponsibility, to extend the benefits, which ordinarily, should be preserved for freeborn, to wandering, scavenging sycophants. You should be able to ascertain how much compensation the Remo people of Ikorodu, Epe, Igbogbo, Simawa, Imota, Agbowa, Ogijo, among others, were paid for merging their lands with the Federal Capital Territory to weaken Ojukwu in 1967. If you have read the right type of books, a better comprehension should have been much easier for you to know that Ikeja was Western Region. Check all documents pertaining to the place at the Lands Registry in Lagos. The office used to be in Ibadan before 1967.
The import of the promulgation of Decree 34 of 1966 by Aguiyi Ironsi, on the advice of Prof Ben Nwabueze, should not have been lost on you. The Unification Decree sought to achieve what the likes of Azikiwe, Mbadiwe, Daddy Onyeama, Nwafor Orizu and others failed to do when they attempted taking over the Western Region in 1951. Awolowo is hated till date for his resistance to that expansionist policy. Your people destroyed the once vibrant civil service through the harmonization policy in their bid to dominate every part of the country. They planned the 1966 coup to achieve that purpose, having failed at the October 11, 1965 elections. It boomeranged with grave consequences. Rather than learn from the bitter lessons offered by that tragic experience, you are still bent on the dubious narrative of a phantom unity designed to swindle the rest of the country. You will NOT be allowed to profit from your iniquity.
How many Nigerians, who are non Ibo, have a single plot at the Enugu Layout? How many non indigenes are allocated plots of land in Awka, your own State capital? Or are those places not parts of Nigeria? Your outburst about being treated like a foreigner in your own country is hypocritical and you know it. You are less deserving than many others who came to Lagos before you. If I am not at liberty to do as I wish in Nnewi, are you not delirious to imagine that we will cede the ownership of our ancestral lands to you and your fellow sojourners on account of the Certificate of Occupancy procured through subterfuge and treachery?
Does the possession of a C of O confer indigeneity and freehold interest on the grantee? Do you know the meaning of reversionary interest? A rude shock awaits you and those who harbour the illusion of One Nigeria to dupe people. Why are your people not flexing muscles with the Northerners in Kano and Kaduna and other parts of the North? Are those places not parts of Nigeria?
You made a reference to the sale of “Monumental Federal Assets” left in Lagos when the seat of the Federal Government moved to Abuja in 1990. You, however, failed to mention the conversion of our Western Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation, WNBC, to Radio Nigeria. Your hypocrisy blinds you to tread the path of selective amnesia to remember that the first Television Station on the Continent of Africa was grabbed by the military and it became the Nigerian Television Authority. Vincent Maduka, your kinsman, ensured it became a tool of propaganda against the very owners of the idea and its actualization. Could you be specific by giving us the names of those assets sold and to whom?
You were aware of how those assets were sold. It was also very easy for you to know the ones that were ceded to the Lagos State Government. Did that act change your status in Lagos as an Ibo sojourner, too privileged to have been allowed into the Cabinet of Lagos State? What exactly is your thesis? The people of the Niger Delta are less vociferous about these monuments like the Federal Secretariat Complex that remains an embarrassing carcass, an eyesore till date. How much of those resources came from Nnewi? You boast that nobody born of woman can take the plot of land allocated to you by the Governor, in our space. Who received the proceeds of the assets sold? Did the Federal Government pay the money to the Lagos State Government with Okonjo Iweala and Anyim Pius Anyim holding the levers of power under President Jonathan? If they sold those assets, would the proceeds not have been shared among the federating units through revenue allocations and financing of budgets?
You are too dangerous to be trusted. You are so ignorant to be oblivious of the power of revocation of the Governor once any condition precedent is breached. You were allocated a plot of land for development in Ikeja, as you claim. You failed to move, in situ, for more than a decade. As a land speculator, you want to sell to your fellow “developers” in a No man’s Land. You and your handlers will be shocked. Ikeja is Ikorodu Epe Joint Administration. It belongs to the Remo People. We will determine who lives there at the appropriate time.
You are so shamelessly capricious, bovine and serpentine in your dealings. It is good you have been unmasked. You sidestepped the reason for the outrage against the denizens of the forests, your people, who have shown disrespect to everyone and continue to violate our space. Your posturing supports their claim that our lands belong to no one. Your wickedness is a call to action. We will not fail to hearken to the voice of reawakening.
By Doyin Odebowale