Returning to Lagos in 1971, I found the city vastly transformed.
In the five years I was away, it had assumed an identity of its own as one of the 12 states created by General Yakubu Gowon’s military administration in 1967 to correct somewhat the pernicious federal structure Britain had bequeathed to Nigeria.
Before then Lagos was the federal capital, the stage on which federal might in its rawest form was displayed. It was administered by various local councils and the Ministry of Lagos Affairs, but for all practical purposes, it was a political orphan.
That changed in 1967 when Lagos became a state, incorporating Lagos metropolis, Epe, Badagry, and Ibeju-Lekki. This status gave indigenes of Lagos State an identity of their own, and a sense of ownership. With the return to democratic rule in 1979, Lagos would acquire the full apparatus and powers of a state.
Meanwhile Lagos metropolis had sprawled in every direction. The population had exploded. Former residents who had fled on the eve of the civil war returned in large numbers, to a welcoming environment and to the property they had left behind. In Lagos, there was no “abandoned property.” There was no pogrom.
Hundreds of Nigerians poured into the city from the hinterland and from neighbouring countries, Ghana in particular, to seek a piece of the thriving economy fuelled by the oil boom.
The pathologies of runaway urbanisation soon set in. Old shanties expanded and new ones sprouted. Armed robbery, now replaced by kidnapping for ransom, became an industry, crippling night life and the night economy. Gridlock was choking the life out of the city.
A four-fold increase in the price of crude oil, and a quantum leap in production following the end of the civil war poured so much petrodollars into the federal exchequer that General Yakubu Gowon was moved to declare that money was no longer Nigeria’s problem but how to spend it. The corruption we battle today is rooted in that era.
But there was much to show for the sudden wealth. Enhanced pay benchmarks in the public sector were established, and hefty salary arrears backdated a year were paid out. Today’s ageing infrastructure was built at that time, with new settlements like FESTAC Town, Navy Town, and Satellite Town.
Lagos hosted the 2nd All-Africa Games in January 1973, in the glittering new National Stadium in Surulere. I was in the main bowl of the stadium at the first event held there, an international soccer match between Nigeria and Mali, during which Yakubu Mabo scored the first goal ever on the pitch.
I witnessed the opening and closing ceremonies and all the soccer events, thanks to free tickets you could obtain just presenting your student ID Card.
It was such a joy to watch the national soccer squad the Green Eagles beat Ghana’s Black Stars to clinch the Soccer Gold. With the victory came the re-naming of the team as the Golden Eagles. The bulk of the national team came from Stationery Stores FC, which enjoyed something close to a cult following in Lagos.
It was on the pages of the Daily Times that I broke into column writing and flourished. This development resulted from desperation. As junior faculty at the University of Lagos, I found myself blockaded on almost every front by my head of department
One day, I asked myself: Was there something I could do for credit and self-actualisation, without the HOD’s affirmation?
Write, an inner voice told me. Write for the media.
That was my stepping stone to The Guardian, and to the most fulfilling 10 years of my professional life. I actually looked forward to going to the office on Sundays. The lady of the house could not understand it. There had to be much more to the whole thing than editorial work, she often said, half in jest and half in earnest.
I told her she was free to come check things out, and that she didn’t even have to give me a notice. The day she showed up, she found me in the editorial suite with my colleagues who, unlike me, did not have to come to work.
For one month from mid-January through mid-February 1978, Lagos hosted Black humanity and people of Black descent in a giddy celebration of their culture and civilisation. This was a time of heady optimism when Nigeria seemed set, finally, to claim the greatness for which everyone said it was destined.
An activist, Afro-centric foreign policy broke with the cautious, conservative and conciliatory posture of the immediate post-colonial period. Nigeria moved the Organisation of African Unity to recognise the Marxist MPLA over rival claimants as the legitimate government of Angola after Portugal’s colonial regime fled.
At a time when most countries would have regarded it as an honour that U. S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s plane flew over their airspace, Nigeria turned down his request for a visit.
Preparations for return to civil rule set off robust and ennobling debate. Nigeria’s military leaders and a burgeoning intellectual and political class dreamed great dreams and planned on a grand scale. That period, spanning the time the Murtala/Obasanjo administration assumed power and the time Shagari administration took office, is now nostalgically remembered as Nigeria’s Golden Age.
I was in Lagos when a regression set in almost as soon as Shagari assumed office.
But Lagos State was spared the contagion. It had frontline newspaperman Lateef Jakande as its dynamic and progressive governor. Mushroom schools caring only for the money were running two, sometimes three shifts in a single day, as if they were factory assembly lines. Within a year, his administration ended the racketeering.
Few remember now that Lagos under Jakande was the first state to declare May Day work-free, and to proclaim it a public holiday subsequently. The Federal Government felt compelled to follow several years later, as did other states.
I was in Lagos when Chief Obafemi Awolowo died, and the city went into an orgy of mourning. I was there when General Murtala Muhammed was assassinated and the city almost dissolved in tears,
I was there when Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Africa’s first. I was there when Dele Giwa was blown up by a parcel bomb in his home.
I was there in 1992 when a military transport plane plunged into the Ejigbo swamp, minutes after takeoff, killing a generation of officers on board. For more than 18 hours, the authorities mounted no rescue effort.
I was in Lagos when military president Ibrahim Babangida scurried out of town to safer harbour in Abuja, following the April 22, 1990 coup attempt that almost toppled his regime. Lagos was the epicentre of the prolonged resistance to the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election won by Bashorun MKO Abiola. It was the spine of the opposition to Sani Abacha’s barbarous rule.
The former president, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, discovered to his eternal grief that Lagosians could not be purchased for any amount in any currency.
During his time as governor, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu built on and expanded the progressive template of the Jakande years. He discovered the vast, scarcely-tapped source of wealth that has made Lagos the most viable state in Nigeria today. As the PDP-led Federal Government set out to paralyse what it could not control, Tinubu was the last governor standing. He defied a federal might and survived to tell the story.
Babatunde Fashola carried on from there, and humanised the city. Akinwunmi Ambode is carrying on in that tradition, executing urban renewal projects on a grand scale
Together, they have given Lagosians splendid glimpses of the future of their city as a global megalopolis. They have done so with vision, imagination, creativity, and commitment.
Since 1971, I have lived for the most part in Lagos, until 1997when I fled to the United States, following a tip-off from an insider in Sani Abacha’s terror machine. Thereafter, I have visited regularly and followed its fortunes closely, for the city is nothing if not addictive.
I should add that it was in Lagos that I got married, and that two of my four children were born there.
Thank you, Lagos, and happy Golden Anniversary.
