Sanwo-Olu Again Or Nothing!

What happened in Lagos on the 25th of February left a very sour taste in the mouth of right thinking people across this country.

It was an election that saw indigenous Yoruba people ganging up with strangers to cut their noses in order to spite their faces.

It was a most putrid exercise in thoughtlessness, pettiness, mundanity and self-harm on the part of these Yorubas.

Indeed, and with respect, it was altogether most shameful, on their part.

When one would had thought the perpetrators of this perfidy would be coming to their senses by now, more so when God is clearly not on their side and divinely frustrated them in the midst of their utterly misguided voyage into envy and jealousy, by rescuing their target even as he rescued Joseph The Dreamer from the hands of his brothers, feelers from Lagos seem to show a willingness to repeat their wickedness against another one of their own on the 11th of March!

I urge those Yorubas who haven’t taken leave of their senses to exhort or, indeed shame, where appropriate, their clearly misguided fellow Yorubas into remembering who they are as a truly noble race and how it is completely at variance with authentic Yoruba culture to join hands with a stranger to destroy your own flesh and blood.

As for the Christians of Lagos, how can it possibly make any sense that the one and only Christian governor, so far, with a good chance of getting a second term, should be denied that on the basis of tribal gang-up when upon the record of his performance he has most evidentially earned himself a second term?

Have there not been two Muslim governors of Lagos who completed two terms, apiece?

Did Governor Akinwunmi Ambode, a Christian, not end up doing just one term?

If Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, another Christian, also ends up doing just one term, what would that say about the status of Christians in Lagos, even if it were to be a Christian that succeeded him?

Is it that Muslim governors are always afforded the compliment of two terms in which to excel but when it comes to their Christian counterparts, they can just be tossed out at random before they can truly and fully prove themselves?

Are the Christians in Lagos even thinking, at all?

Please, anyone who has an axe to grind with Asiwaju Bola Tinubu should go and confront him in Abuja.

The man is no longer a Lagos player – he is the President-elect of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the rest of us Nigerians made him our incoming President without his having to win Lagos.

He is now our collective property as a nation and no longer just yours.

As for Governor Sanwo-Olu, he is yours and you would do well not to forget that.

In any case, and, even more importantly, Jide Sanwo-Olu has done right by himself, has done right by Lagosians, and, has done right by God, his Creator.

And, there’s nothing God hates as much as transfered aggression.

Yet if one may even ask, how did Asiwaju Tinubu even offend Lagosians, anyway?

What in the world do these people who hate Bola Tinubu even hate him for?

For improving Lagos?

For saving the city from being swallowed up and digested by the Atlantic Ocean?

I saw people even on Victoria Island and Ikoyi, and Eti Osa, and Banana Island, and Lekki and other similar places happily voting against Bola Tinubu.

If not for Bola Tinubu you would all be beneath the ocean by now!

You would be squatting with your houseboys and housegirls in Ikorodu and Abule-Egba by now.

Instead of living in your fine houses, you would all have become internally displaced persons, IDPs, roaming about the place by now!

Is it that the crime Bola Tinubu committed against you is to have protected your overpriced properties by conceiving Eko Atlantic City to tame the ocean and save the whole of Lagos from being gradually chewed up by the sea?

That is his crime?

Is that a crime?

And you call yourselves Christians?

Christians who stab their benefactor in the back?

You repay good with evil and you think you are a child of God?

You recompense love with hatred, and reward care with wickednesses, and you think you have any part with Our Lord Jesus Christ, Saviour and Redeemer of the Universe?

How did Bola Tinubu even harm any of you?

What did he do to ever undo you?

What do you even claim to hate him for?

For making Lagos a functioning megacity and functional state?

For making it the pacesetting jurisdiction in Nigeria?

I really wish Lagos had ended up with leaders like James Ibori, then, Chinwoke Mbadinuju, then Ifeanyi Okowa or, better still, even the likes of Barkin Zuwo of the Second Republic!

Perhaps then, they would deeply appreciate any unexpected intervention of good governance whenever it miraculously showed up every once in a while!

Lagosians have clearly become so used to an unbroken two plus decades of sustained good governance that they have learnt the ingratitude of not just taking it for granted but most insolently coming to despise it.

They should go and ask the people of those states that have not witnessed a single four year tenure of good governance since 1999, how they have fared while Lagos was leapfrogging everyone else in all indices of development.

Frankly, Lagosians have just been too comfortable to appreciate what God has been doing for them since Asiwaju showed up on the scene back in 1999.

The Bible says “ask and you shall be given”.

Lagosians had better be careful what they are asking for or God will give them the horrors they seem to be inviting upon themselves.

If you reject the good governance of Sanwo-Olu, God will give you the bad governance of your preferred choice.

The math of the spiritual realm can be that simple.

Yet, come to think of it, how did Lagos even come to this?

Who could ever have believed that there could come a time that the children of the land would be constrained unto desperation in order to keep Lagos from the clutches and control of strangers to the place?

How ever did we even get here, in the first place?

Well, it has been 100 years in the making and all of it is thanks to the openmindedness and consumate cosmopolitanism of Lagosians.

Nevertheless, mistake or no mistake, on their part, Lagosians are also the children of God and their good will neither be allowed to kill them nor render them slaves in their aboriginal God given territories.

Lagos is somebody’s ancestral home and the founders of the place are a mix of autochthonous and aboriginal Yorubas, on the one hand, and Niger Deltan immigrants from Benin, on the other, whom it pleased God to bring together eons ago.

That is the history of the origin of Lagos – if you don’t know it, you shut up and learn it from those who do.

Lagos is not a “no man’s land” – it has an origin and a history and the descendants of its founders are readily identifiable today!

Yet, Niger Deltans don’t go to Lagos today to start claiming territory; who the hell is anyone else coming all the way from God knows where only to go there and start insulting the owners of the land that their inheritance from their noble ancestors is a “no man’s land”?

What total, confounded nonsense!

These badly brought up people who go to Lagos and call it a “no man’s land” would never dare such crap in Sapele or Ughelli or Warri.

They don’t even dare that in Asaba just across the river from Onitsha!

They really don’t even do it anywhere else but in Yorubaland.

This insanity must stop, forthwith.

The indigenous people of Lagos must be respected and the fact that they have been historically most accommodating to strangers should not be relied upon by cultureless people to humiliate them in their fatherland.

Governor Sanwo-Olu must be returned as Governor of Lagos or Lagos will not contain anyone!

Jide Sanwo-Olu has manifestly acquitted himself as Governor and most profusely proven his mettle as a performer.

Sanwo-Olu is an achiever per excellence and has most admirably demonstrated his capacity for leadership on its own merit.

He is easily the best performing governor in Nigeria today and certainly one of the very best Lagos has ever seen.

If he were to be voted out, it would not be on account of any shortcomings, on his part, but entirely on grounds of ethnic gang-up and transferred aggression and we simply cannot have that!

Indeed, it is Sanwo-Olu again or nothing!

Yes, we have three options for Governor of Lagos in this election.

They are Sanwo-Olu or Sanwo-Olu, or, Sanwo-Olu.

Needless to say, most certainly not any Chinedu or any “Jaguda”, sorry, Jandor!

It is Jide Sanwo-Olu, again – case closed!

Those who have ears let them hear.Onokpasa, a lawyer and member, All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Campaign Council, writes from Abuja.

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

– Jesutega Onokpasa