RHODES-VIVOUR AND PETER OBI ARE PLAYING WITH FIRE IN LAGOS! – JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

The latest propaganda being deployed by Labour Party’s factional and illegal candidate for Lagos State, “Gbadebo”, or is it “Patrick”, or is it “Chinedu”, Rhodes-Vivour, and, his supporters, is a series of the most putrid and stomach churning lies of truly diabolical shamefulness.

This morning, someone, all the way from London, sent me three banners which these clearly badly brought up children of bile, hate and falsehood have been circulating raising the most insipid and insidious queries distilled from raw materials of division and discord.

In one, they ask rhetorically whether the Lagos rail project cost “$200 million or $1.2 billion” and like a pack of motor park touts, ask further “who took the difference?”

Does this highly irritating urchin who says he wants to govern Africa’s fifth largest economy not know how to avail himself of the Freedom of Information law to obtain precise information regarding the true cost of a public project?

It is clear to me that Mr. Rhodes-Vivour, having clearly never really worked anywhere, be it in the private or public sector, his entire life, neither understands the workings of government nor anything about public finance.

If this utter clown were somehow to become governor, it is surely Peter Obi and his bank that will take over the finances of Lagos from day one, given that neither Rhodes-Vivour nor his seemingly barely educated running mate would have the slightest idea what to do!

In another banner, Rhodes-Vivour and his goons ask Governor Jide Sanwo-Olu whether he is “from Ijebu Mushin in Ogun State and” whether his deputy, Femi Hamzat “is the son of the immediate past Oba of Ewekoro?”

This is not only cheap and without foundation but as hypocritical and self-contradictory as it gets.

As far as I know, both Sanwo-Olu and Hamzat are solid and indisputable Lagosians.

Yet, assuming, without conceding that they are of Ijebu or similar ancestry, is Rhodes-Vivour telling us that someone like him who is the descendant of immigrants to Lagos from faraway Sierra Leone is more qualified to be considered a Lagosian than persons whose ancestors migrated to Lagos from next door Ogun State?

Are we to take it that according to Rhodes-Vivour it is okay for a Sierra Leonean to be celebrated as a Lagosian while Ijebus, Ekitis, Ijeshas, Egbas, Ibarakpas, Ondos, Okuns and other people of the various Yoruba subgroups are to be discriminated against and considered outcasts in Lagos?

Is this boy even reasoning, at all?

In any case, why does Rhodes-Vivour hate is supposed fellow Yorubas with such bile and vitriol?

Why does he have such a big problem with Yorubas having any stake in Lagos but has nothing against a section of his mother’s people conquering Lagos as they have boasted they are coming to do?

Rhodes-Vivour clearly has a big problem with a Tinubu, an Osinbajo, a Rauf Aregbesola, a Lai Mohammed, a Babajide Sanwo-Olu, or, a Babafemi Hamzat being anything in Lagos but not with a Jerry Igbokwe or a Ben Akubueze, and apparently not with his fellow party man and immigrant from Iboland, Okey Onuakalusi, unseating Ganiyu Johnson, a son of the soil and supposedly Rhodes-Vivour’s fellow Lagosian!

Indeed, there must be truly something quite wrong with this newborn baby of a governorship candidate.

Yet another banner Rhodes-Vivour and his disinformation crew have been circulating canvasses a most dastardly lie from the pit of hell, itself, that President-elect Asiwaju Bola Tinubu has appropriated to himself, 100 million square meters of land in Lagos!

Does Chinedu Rhodes-Vivour and is running mate not know how to measure land?

To be fair, I might actually understand if Ms Oyefusi does not know the difference between an acre and an hectare but unless Mr. Rhodes-Vivour is really just a halfbaked graduate, he should at least have an idea of how much land exists in Lagos, in the first place, and how much of that land is unoccupied or has not been bought from indigenes by his fellow IPOB supporters, and, is therefore available to be appropriated by someone.

Indeed, how much land is even in Lagos that any one individual could be able to find as much as 100million square meters to simply allocate to himself?

This is the problem with the “Obidients” – they are pathological liars, just like their Gobbelian godfather and Hitlerian corruptor, Peter Obi, who cannot seem to be able to make a single statement without telling a lie!

Those of us who are not congenital liars must tell ourselves some bitter truths in this country in order to be set free from what can only cause us truly frightening cataclysms, going forward.

Indeed, it is by telling ourselves these inconvenient truths that we would have any real hope of sustained reconciliation and reliable healing in the wake of the horrendous ethnicism and religious bigotry Peter Obi has infused into Nigerian politics in the course of prosecuting his ridiculous ambition that was clearly doomed from the very start.

The trend amongst Obi’s and Rhodes-Vivour’s supporters to despise Lagos as a “no-man’s-land” and the emergent indigenous Yoruba reaction to their perfidy is particularly troubling to me because I am a student of history.

This satanic crap whereby people migrate to a place and have the effrontery to then denigrate its aboriginal population by referring to their inheritance from their ancestors as a “no-man’s-land” did not start in Lagos.

Indeed, for decades during the colonial period and several years after Independence, it was the norm in places like Benin, Sapele, Warri, Port Harcourt, Ikot Ekpene, Calabar and elsewhere amongst certain sections of the same sort of people currently perpetrating the same insanity in Lagos.

In fact, that unconscionable trend only ended in the wake of the Nigerian Civil War!

This is the sort of fire that a most despicable cheap trader and compulsive importer is presently playing with vide his disgusting obsession to “conquer” Lagos from its Yoruba indigenes for his fellow immigrant tribesmen.

Rhodes-Vivour and company have been even shameless enough to insinuate that Tinubu is the culprit to be fingered for the “no-man’s-land” insults a section of his mother’s people have been heaping on indigenous Lagosians, apparently suggesting that the threat to take over Lagos will somehow end with the dislodgement of its indigenous Yoruba owners!

I don’t understand what chemical imbalances are messing with this young man’s head and can’t wrap my own head around the logic that Lagos would cease being a “no-man’s-land” only when it has been conquered and appropriated by those presently denigrating it as a “no-man’s-land”!

Well, I don’t smoke controlled substances and as far as I can see, what will end the “no-man’s-land” controversy in Lagos, as Rhodes-Vivour prefers to put it, is for his uncouth and mannerless support base of tribal jingoists and rabid ethnicists to stop disrespecting, disregarding and denigrating their host communities and the indigenous Yoruba people of Lagos who are the true owners of Lagos.

What will end the “no-man’s-land” issue is for Rhodes-Vivour’s godfather, Peter Obi, to return to his native Anambra and contribute his quota to the development of that basket case of a state, and stop trying to conquer Lagos for himself and his fellow tribalists.

What will end the “no-man’s-land” nonsense in Lagos is for Rhodes-Vivour to stop playing the ethnic card, to cease behaving like a bastard, to quit conducting himself as a secessionist and traitor, and, to stop trying to conquer his father’s native land for his mother’s immigrant people.

What will end the “no-man’s-land” insult on the historically accommodating people of Lagos is for Rhodes-Vivour to stop promising to give what he does not have to his highly obnoxious support base of misguided idiots who claim to have developed Lagos for those they like to refer to as backward Yoruba people.

What will end the “no-man’s-land” insanity in Lagos is for everyone to come to their senses and appreciate Lagos for the melting pot and center of excellence that it has long been and remains, and to realize that the only sustainable paradigm for peace, harmony and progress, going forward, is for the rights and dignity of absolutely everyone in Lagos to be upheld, protected and respected starting, of course, with the rights and dignity of the Yoruba owners of Lagos.

Onokpasa, a lawyer and member, All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Campaign Council, writes from Abuja.