One lesson I learnt over the years is to ignore rabble rousers no matter the degree of their provocation. The recurrent decimal that defines political failures is their unalloyed penchant at deploying religion and ethnicity in craving for a seat on the political gravy train. The irony is the success rate of this tactics notwithstanding the damage it does to the polity and national cohesion. Are politicians really ready to learn or is the number the most important factor no matter the character of coalescing individuals?
Only a man on the lunatic fringe could have authored the piece in question considering the factual inaccuracies and blatant falsehoods shamelessly displayed. That the writer eulogized the virtues of Sir Herbert Macaulay of blessed memory as a thoroughbred Yoruba man is not only strange but depicts the elastic intellectual flaws associated with him. Macaulay’s father was a native Sierra Leonean of Creole origin. He settled in Nigeria and did marvelous things and his son automatically became a Nigerian hero based on his fight for the people. If the loquacious Fani-Kayode appropriated the legacy of Macaulay and used same to demonstrate the impeccable heritage of his Yoruba tribe, what is the difference between his position and those who claim Lagos to be “No man’s land?” In any case, there are many Lagosians of Sierra Leonean and Brazilian origins that are rightly classified as indigenes. What is the difference between these Nigerians and Igbos or other tribes that settled and do business in Lagos?