₦airaland Forum

@antichristian shey you are hearing?

sartun:
Not the smartest idea.
What about the thousands of Nigerian citizens they employed?

Apc politicians are not intelligent normally…. do you expect sensible things to come out of oshiomoles mouth?

Atlético Madrid only had one job. Anyways arsenal will still do what they do best

Oh so now you said something….if this ask you this in future again now you’ll say you didn’t say so

Champions League here we go

HacheNoire:
Why Lagos Needs to Break Free from the APC

There is a particular scene that has played out with metronomic regularity in Lagos politics, and it played out again just last week. Abdul-Azeez Adediran — “Jandor” — purchased his expression of interest forms, rallied his movement, and mounted a governorship campaign. Then came a phone call, a meeting, a presidential endorsement of someone else, and Jandor stepped aside, pledging loyalty to the party and its chosen candidate. One day’s aspiration, extinguished in an afternoon. No primary. No debate. No contest. Just a decision handed down from above and accepted below.

This is how Lagos is governed. Not from Government House in Alausa, but from a network of backrooms, phone calls, and Governance Advisory Councils that answer ultimately to one man — President Bola Tinubu. And the city of twenty million souls, the engine of the Nigerian economy, the continent’s most energetic megalopolis, has for a quarter century allowed this arrangement to stand.

It is time Lagos asked a harder question: what exactly has this arrangement delivered for Lagos — and what has it cost?

The Anatomy of a Fiefdom

Since 1999, Lagos has been governed by one political structure under successive brand names — the AD, the ACN, and now the APC. Since 1999, Lagos has largely remained under the control of the same political structure, and the state has not fully maximised its enormous potential to become a truly world-class city. The party is not merely dominant; it is the only game in town. Governors are selected, not elected. Speakers are installed, then repositioned. Governorship aspirants purchase their forms, feel the wind, and stand down.

The most recent illustration came in April 2026, when Tinubu endorsed his deputy governor, Obafemi Hamzat, as the consensus APC candidate for 2027. The unfolding developments underscore the highly centralised nature of decision-making within Lagos APC, where strategic candidacy alignments are often brokered at the highest levels of party leadership. Jandor withdrew within days. Even Mudashiru Obasa — the powerful Speaker of the House of Assembly, long one of Lagos’s most formidable power brokers — was reportedly redirected from the governorship to a House of Representatives seat after Tinubu weighed in. Political observers note that Obasa has already begun low-profile consultations in Agege, signalling early groundwork for what could become a tightly managed intra-party transition.

This is not internal party democracy. This is a succession system.

A Warning Written in Ballots

Lagos residents have already expressed their frustration — they did so loudly in 2023 and the political class has largely ignored it. Peter Obi of the Labour Party won Lagos State by nearly 10,000 votes, a massive upset over former state Governor Bola Tinubu in his own home state. It was the first time in over two decades that a presidential candidate from outside the ruling political structure had carried Lagos.

What did that result mean? It meant that the majority was hungry for better governance and wanted to change the poor political system that had been imposed on them for years. It meant that Lagos’s young, educated, multi-ethnic population — long taken for granted — had begun to vote against the machine.

The loss of the presidential vote in Lagos to the Labour Party has remained a reference point in discussions among APC party leaders. And yet, despite this warning, the response has not been reform — it has been consolidation. The same faces, the same structures, the same consensus arrangements.

What Twenty-Seven Years of Monopoly Has Produced

Defenders of the APC will cite infrastructure: the Blue Line rail, Eko Atlantic, the Lekki-Epe Expressway expansion, the Lagos-Ibadan highway negotiations. These are real. But they are not the full picture.

Critics accuse the APC of presiding over a Lagos plagued by systemic rot — perennial gridlock that turns a 30-minute journey into a four-hour nightmare, flooding that turns neighbourhoods into rivers every rainy season, a mounting debt burden that has mortgaged the future of unborn Lagosians, and a growing sense of insecurity. These are not the complaints of political opponents alone. They are the lived reality of Lagos residents, stated daily in traffic jams on the Third Mainland Bridge and flood waters rising through Surulere living rooms.

A functional multi-party system is vital for ensuring accountability, inclusiveness, and effective leadership. When one party is guaranteed power regardless of performance, there is no competitive incentive to perform. Why fix the drains when your re-election does not depend on fixing the drains? Why open the books when no one can open an alternative?

The APC’s own internal dynamics have revealed the rot. Party members in Agege have accused the leadership of manipulation, exclusion, and abuse of party machinery by entrenched interests who have hijacked the local political space. If the APC cannot maintain internal democracy within its own structures, what chance does it have of delivering democratic governance to Lagos as a whole?

The Consensus Trap

The word “consensus” has been weaponised in Lagos politics. It sounds orderly, even statesmanlike. In practice, it means that the preferences of millions of voters are pre-empted by the preferences of a handful of powerful men. Jandor stated that he had pledged to support whoever the party presents as its candidate, framing submission to the party hierarchy as democratic virtue. But this is not democracy — it is deference dressed as principle.

True internal democracy would allow multiple candidates to contest, voters to choose, and results to stand. Instead, a gubernatorial aspirant can purchase forms one day and be advised — through back channels — to redirect his ambitions the next. A party chieftain stated that open declaration of interest is often avoided in Lagos politics, noting that excessive publicity around ambition could affect a candidate’s chances within the party structure. In other words, political ambition must be managed quietly, with permission. This is the logic of a court, not a democracy.

The Structural Problem

The problem is not simply that the APC has poor leaders or weak policies in Lagos. The problem is structural: a city cannot hold its government to account when there is no credible threat of removal. Competition is not merely a democratic nicety — it is the mechanism by which governments are made to listen.

While Nigeria remains constitutionally a multiparty democracy, recent patterns — mass political defections, executive-legislative convergence, and weakened opposition — suggest a drift toward de facto one-party dominance, raising critical questions about accountability and democratic resilience.

Lagos is the sharpest example of this drift. The House of Assembly functions as an extension of the executive, not a check on it. The opposition is fragmented and, increasingly, absorbed — as Jandor’s own trajectory from PDP flagbearer to APC loyalist illustrates. When opposition politicians dissolve into the ruling structure rather than contest it, the city is left with one voice where many are needed.

What Decoupling Would Look Like

To be clear: this is not an argument that Lagos should simply swap one party’s dominance for another’s. It is an argument for competitive politics — for a Lagos in which elections are genuinely uncertain, in which the ruling party governs with the knowledge that failure carries electoral consequences, and in which the opposition is strong enough to demand answers.

It means Lagosians — young voters especially, the same cohort that delivered the 2023 presidential result — turning up in gubernatorial and legislative elections with the same energy they bring to presidential contests. The machine is most powerful when turnout is low and predictable; it is most vulnerable when Lagosians decide that local elections matter as much as national ones.

It means the opposition parties — PDP, Labour Party, ADC — presenting credible candidates with specific, costed platforms rather than simply running against the APC’s record. A governance approach centred on service delivery, accountability, and tackling core challenges including traffic congestion, flooding, inadequate housing, healthcare, and the escalating cost of living is what Lagosians deserve to hear from multiple competing visions, not just one.

And it means acknowledging that political godfather systems — however effective at delivering short-term stability — are fundamentally incompatible with long-term democratic development. Lagos is too large, too complex, too diverse, and too important to be run as a personal project.


The City Lagos Deserves

Lagos generates an estimated $136 billion in GDP annually. It is home to the continent’s most dynamic creative economy, its busiest port, its most entrepreneurial population. It is, by most measures, the most consequential city in sub-Saharan Africa.

A city of this scale and ambition deserves governance that is accountable not to one man’s political interests but to the twenty million people who wake up in it every morning. It deserves leaders who earn power through competition, not inherit it through arrangement. It deserves a House of Assembly that interrogates the executive rather than ratifying it. It deserves flooding that gets fixed because someone’s job depends on fixing it.

Lagos has lived under the same political roof for twenty-seven years. The roof leaks. The traffic is still there. The floods return every rainy season. The consensus candidates are chosen in rooms most Lagosians will never enter.

The city is still waiting to be governed as if it belongs to everyone who lives in it — not just to the men who run it.

No sir…”Tinubu built Lagos” Abi? Why are you now complaining? Lagos is okay the way it is. Next please.

LagosOrigin:
That photo is fake

I've made my research

This photo doesn’t need any research now…everyone knows Tinubu didn’t do youth service

Biodun556:
Jagaban of Nigeria. Four + four

Is this the extent to which you guys really don’t have shame?

Tombrown3:
Biggest lie of the century

We’re in 2026. Get yourself educated and stop saying gibberish with confidence. Even before everyone easily had access to internet they taught in school that sharing clippers and razors can be risky and transfer aids but it’s either you didn’t go to school or you didn’t pay attention . Yes the risk may be low compared to sexual intercourse for example but dosnt mean it’s not possible at all

Juliana2025:
Every role matters, Every workers counts. To everyone who works to keep the world together and running.

Have you even spoken about of the data breach that just happened? How will your potential clients now trust you?

casualobserver:
When the one eyed man leads the blind, the blind know not what they are celebrating.

Honestly you must really be devoid of a lot of grey matter to follow the ADC.

I have said it many times, if I was a supporter of the opposition I would be very angry with them for the manner in which they have bungled my support. Not only snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in 2023 but failing to learn from their errors and continuing with their anyhowness! ……but then if I can support this lot I’m probably not too bright myself!

1: Atiku faction. How do my ou buy a party that had 13 legal cases, how do you buy a party without reading their constitution? Where was your due diligence?
2: Obidient faction. How do you jump from a party you control to become an afterthought in a party despite having 6m votes. How do you leave the security of LP knowing you were the beautiful bride without securing certain commitments? Party Chairman…not you, secretary….not you. VP slot not you, presidential slot not you….so what are you doing there? How can you be so reckless with the hopes of 6m suppprters?

You talk too much for someone who claims 2027 is already secured for APC…won’t you go outside and touch grass small? Onisokuso

I like the way people are ignoring your folly. You didn’t get the engagement you wished in the last thread and so you want to continue another one.continue you hear? Until lawlessness that you like makes example of you like they did to that 28 year old in delta state.

Topman7:
SHUT UP THERE.

PEOPLE ARE INNOVATING IN NIGERIA WHILE YOU SIT IN YOUR BACKYARD.

DO YOU KNOW WE MANUFACTURE AND EXPORT VEHICLES, INCLUDING ARMOURED PERSONNEL CARRIERS AND DRONES?

HAVE YOU HEARD OF PROFORCE?

MOST OF YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THIS COUNTRY AND ARE ALLERGIC TO RESEARCH.

PATHETIC.

Go tell that to ya papa 👴

NetbizBoss:
We need to Start making our own military gadget. We should not always rely on other nations to sell to us.

Train more pilots
Motivate and equip them
Strong military is equal to strong nation.
Nation is only respected when it military is strong

The advice you’re giving is dead on arrival. A country who can’t handle insecurity and can’t innovate anything is not worth advising.

Flangelo12:
Una don start again.

Almost like you're all programmed to hate your country.

Can you shut up

Good morning Bimpe how are you …you’ve added weight no be small oo….business has been really good I see!!

Sinkara:
Please help me
I can't seem to concentrate
I masturbate everyday
And if I get small money, I go to brothel, have sex with more than 3 girls and still go home and masturbate
I guess alcohol is my major problem because I tend to make these brothel decisions when I'm drunk
Working in the brewery doesn't help me, I have access to alcohol a lot
So I have made a decision going forward to avoid alcohol
If I do that, my brothel addiction will reduce a lot
But for masturbation, it's really hard to go 3 days without masturbating
I don't know how I can tackle that

First of all give your life to Christ if you’re not a Christian….secondly if you’re already a Christian confess your sins to God and read the word of God….only God can break the addictions if you submit it to him then begin to set boundaries that will keep you from having triggers to perform sexual immorality. Thirdly find a genuine bible believing church that actually teaches the word of God and keep you accountable.

At this point demons are in charge that’s why you can’t stop even if you wanted to. That’s why you have to submit to God.

Seun…please can you remove these ads below people’s messages? Keep them were you used to before. It’s distracting please

I sha know arsenal cannot win

If I should yab tinubu cretins now the the spam bot will want to come for me. I find it hard to believe that the almighty God took time to create some Homo sapiens…just look at the comments of them up there

And so what? What does Elon musk know? Are people not working for him also?

Oracleee:
Their lives are not better than the folks been killed everyday in the northeast, kwara etc.


Next please.

gbam!!

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Mattswaggz:
In as much as it wouldn't make sense for him to return as president after this disastrous first term.....the chances of him coming back is very high and getting higher by the day.... It's funny when a lot of you Nigerians who have been in this country for centuries don't know how this country operates.

When evil thrives for too long it’s impossible to believe that a day of reckoning is coming. Ask Nigerians how happy they were when abacha departed to the other side while he had planned execution for obasanjo. God cannot be mocked…Nigeria will be greater than we thought

AMINDA:
I know someone that will tear an ACL trying to replicate.

Why him no shoot yerima first? Coward. Since he could not get Seun he should have at least broken his tv screen. Smirnoff ambassador.

Very soon people will gather to commemorate with Tinubu…then he will now know what the pain feels like. He doesn’t know.