₦airaland Forum

NaWhoTalkAm:
You're clearly very stupid. How did you come to determine I am an outsider? I am actually Itsekiri and from a well established Itsekiri family at that, indeed connected to the Olu of Warri himself. Go and find someone else to deliver your illiterate message to. So Ijebu and Itsekiri share ancestry, therefore they are the same ethnicity? This is your logic? Are you aware that every human being in this world if you go back far enough in time share ancestry, by your logic we are all therefore the same ethnic group. Please stop saying nonsense in your salivation to claim another ethnic group as your own. Put your head down and eat the food you already have, see whether it will satisfy you before you want to salivate for another person's food. Which Yoruba state is up to standards worthy of a human being that you have nothing else to do but to try to claim Itsekiri as your own?

lawani:
So Yoruba states paying more than their fair share of VAT, CIT, port revenue and natural resources to feed and sponsor the country and taking far less than they give are not up to standards worthy of a human being? Continue.

NaWhoTalkAm:
Go and look at the stats for any Yoruba state and all of Nigeria at that, show me one where the average standard of living is worthy of human dignity. It really is a curious thing why some of you don't seem the grasp the depths of what you need to be working on but are instead focused on annexing other ethnic groups.

lawani:
There is no stats where the Yoruba are doing badly even if some smaller groups or bigger groups are doing better per Capita in some areas. Yoruba have the highest population in this Nigeria. They have the highest number of cities, towns and villages under their control and apart from quantity they also have quality. That is why the land is the richest part of Nigeria
My own is let each group control their territory. Let Itsekiri have their own state and align it as they wish. Their state can not contain up to 2 million people and there are over sixty million people living on Yoruba land Nigeria. Be free first then align as you wish which does not change the fact that the Itsekiri are more or less the same people as the Ilaje who are a Yoruba subgroup

The Yoruba are feeding Nigeria but to you their standard of living is not worthy of human dignity?

NaWhoTalkAm:
First, the Itsekiri and the Ilaje are not "more or less the same people". That they both speak a Yoruboid language and are riverine groups does not make them "more or less" the same group. They have very significant differences in culture, traditional political structure, social order, customs and so on. While they share some similarities, particularly in language, it is not enough to amount to them being basically the same people.

Next, no state in Nigeria is doing good. They may be doing better than other Nigerian states but none are meeting basic standards, let alone international standards at that. Also, a big part of why the SW is more successful than other regions in Nigeria is because Lagos serves as the economic hub for all Nigeria which then has a spillover effect on the SW. Remove Lagos as the economic hub of the country and you will see people leave and market size reduce, businesses will close, ports will shut down, foreign corporations, financial institutions will leave and so on. They are not there simply for the sake of being amongst the Yoruba people, they are there because of the market access and all that comes with being the economic hub of the country. "Pride comes before the fall.".

lawani:
People is economy and economy is people. Before Lagos it was Ibadan before Ibadan it was Oyo ile in west Africa, in antiquity it was at a point Ijebu Eredo. Ijebu Eredo has been described as the largest city of the medieval world by some people. Cairo is bigger than Lagos in population yet Egypt is just around 100 million people like half of Nigeria. Therefore your notion that the SW is economically ahead because Lagos is Nigeria's economic hub has no validity. What Lagos has is population and it can still have that population without Nigeria. Jakarta in Indonesia is like double the population of Lagos while Indonesia as a country is not double the population of Nigeria and if Lagos does not have that population then it would have been Ibadan if the Yoruba had their own country.

So you have now gone from saying the Yoruba are living below dignity to saying their land is doing better than others?

NaWhoTalkAm:
I was hesitant to reply to this because I don't think there will be any point but I will just reply to give the benefit of the doubt. Oyo, Ibadan, Ijebu Eredo were not at their height for the same reasons as Lagos is at its height today, in a modern economy so your point there is moot. As of today, the main reason for Lagos success comes from being the economic hub of Nigeria. If you want to disconnect the economic hub of the country from the SW and say it would still be as successful and fare as better off to other regions still, then you need to provide actual realistic steps the Yoruba people will take to achieve that rather than just saying "they will do it because they are Yorubas.".

I never said the SW wasn't doing better than many regions in Nigeria, just that like the rest, the people are widely still living below human dignity. I wonder why Nigerians want to compare themselves to their fellow countrymen and feel superior, when both of them are in the pit. It's a sign of unproductiveness, in my opinion. Why not compare yourselves with Dubai, America, UK and so on?

NaWhoTalkAm:
No, this is dangerous misinformation. First, Itsekiri is Itsekiri not Ijebu. Next, Itsekiri is not Yoruba and Yoruba is not the "parent" group of Itsekiri. Yes, the two groups are distantly related just as every two groups in the world are distantly related, that does not make them the same ethnic group. Itsekiri language is classified as its own language not a dialect and it has its own unique features, nor does language similarity even amount to shared ethnicity. It seems you are salivating to be regarded as the owner of Itsekiri land where oil is. But as with many of you Yorubas, you will not go and reduce yourself and your own group to an Itsekiri subgroup, instead you want to reduce Itsekiri to a Yoruba subgroup so you can enjoy our efforts without losing place. I won't even address the rest of the misinformation you provided, I've said enough. Be very careful, we see things clearly.

lawani:
No you are the one looking down on the Yoruba by saying they live below dignity which they don't, I only pointed out that the Yoruba are not doing badly. Many groups across the country are not doing badly as well and they are not well known only because they have a low population. I am not in the pit. Maybe you are, I don't know.

Lagos is not at its height. You are saying that because of inferiority complex. Accra, Abidjan etc are better developed. I have already pointed out to you that Lagos would still have had the population it has and a better infrastructure if Nigeria did not exist. There are many Yoruba and etc scattered all over that can populate Lagos. So maybe you can explain what Lagos has that it would not have had if not for Nigeria.

NaWhoTalkAm:
The sad truth is that most Yorubas and most Nigerians are living below basic standards. How much of Lagos is considered a slum, how much of Ogun, how much of Osun? This is not a reflection of Yorubas, just as it's not a reflection of any other group but a corrupt, incompetent government. Is it not funny how Nigerians will not unite against the government that has swindled them for the past 60 years but instead prefer to denigrate their neighboring ethnic groups?

I said Lagos "at its height today", I meant the position its in today not that it's at the highest it can be so my mistake if I expressed that wrongly. As to your other question, most of the economic advantage Lagos has is not only from having a large population. It is because it serves as a gateway to the rest of Nigeria, which is what attracts so many investors there. Not because it is a "Yoruba state". Had Lagos not been connected to the rest of Nigeria, you would not see goods being imported to Lagos for across the entire country, warehouses and businesses settling there to service these goods and investors pouring money into Lagos because goods from Lagos can easily move through the entire country. I can go on but I think this is enough.

lawani:
You are the one denigrating other ethnic groups and not me.
What are your basic standards? All my family are well educated and my parents died around eighty years of age. They had their own house and were even chauffeur driven. They are not billionaires. All my sisters who are married and are either in the private sector or in the civil service are ok with their family. Their children are in the university including private and public. They live in their own house fully paid for but they are not billionaires. You don't need to be a billionaire if you are not employing thousands but most people I know are okay including people in the villages. They are struggling too but are ok. I think I have only met two Yoruba adults in my entire life who are illiterates but both are doing well. They have built houses. One is a successful carpenter I met in Lagos and another a successful transporter in the same Lagos. So I don't know what you mean by living below dignity. They feed their families.
Lagos when this democracy started was just a little bit above Oyo in population but it is now more than double. That is only because Lagos is fiscally independent with its own money and therefore ability to attract investors and never because of anything put there by the FG after 1999. Any state could have done it but it was only Lagos that did it.

NaWhoTalkAm:
You are taking yourself and your family as if it to say they represent the majority of Yoruba population. In addition, you are conflating your own personal standards of what is ok, as the global standards. Look up global standards of what is considered a slum and you will start to see why many Yoruba states and thereby many Yorubas are not meeting global living standards.

So why did other Yoruba states not follow the same path and become Lagos, since after all they are even more solely dominated by Yorubas? Lagos could only collect so much money because it already had a highly taxable economy for the reasons I mentioned earlier. Good tax administration does not create ports, banks, corporate headquarters, import networks, oil and gas service companies, media houses, or national distributors from nothing. It collects value from an economy where those things already exist, and that revenue can then be used for further development.

lawani:
Well from what I can see and observe my family represents the majority. The majority have basic education. They have built their own homes by age fifty and etc. I don't see how the condition of my family don't represent the majority. Houses and mansions spring up everyday all over Nigeria. In my neighborhood there are plenty being constructed presently and while some old buildings can be said to be below standard, no new building is below standards and the old buildings serve to keep the rent low etc.
Lagos is not better than any state if you remove the leadership and presently it has a high cost of living crisis. Lagos is only like four times the population of Osun state and Osun state will therefore have at least one quarter of Lagos GDP if not for cost of living. There are industries employing tens of thousands in Osun that does not exist at all in Lagos. Cocoa, coffee, kolanuts, gold mining and etc add up to billions of dollars to Osun GDP or at least hundreds of millions and they don't exist in Lagos. All those sectors in Osun have billionaires that Lagos don't have. We have manufacturing that more or less don't exist in Lagos. If Osun had the population of Lagos and the government has the revenue drive then it will be better than Lagos because of its agro allied and other sectors that Lagos don't have.

Don't ever forget that if Oyo had a governor that created local governments and refused to abolish them when told to do so by the FG and got it's allocation seized and then refused to play ball then resorted to igr starting from Landuse and then later PAYE, then it would have been Oyo state with a population of over twenty million people today and not Lagos since the government would be able to attract investors with funds. Even the number of civil servants they will be able to employ and pay will swell the population of the state by many times the number of those civil servants.

Nothing already existed in Lagos after military rule. It was as backward if not moreso than other states and it was only a bit more than Oyo state in population. If majority of the customers of banks operate close to Lagos, you would expect the banks to prefer Lagos as headquarters instead of Abuja or any other place. There are ports in Lagos just like in other places and fg projects in Lagos just like other places. The private sector's preference for Lagos is market driven but let other states fight for a share too. Lagos will remain Lagos no matter what. I wonder if this discussion would be taking place if the former federal capital were properly separated from the western region part of Lagos as a separate territory. That is what should have been done.

Abuja too is growing as It is now second only to Lagos and unlike Lagos it is not dominated by the Yoruba. Give it time, it will overtake Lagos. It probably has more Yoruba residents presently than any non Yoruba city in Nigeria.

Then Oyo for it's population is not doing bad by way of VAT when compared to Lagos and when you consider that a lot of it's economic activity is not VATable eg farming. Only Rivers is doing better than Oyo economically in the south if VAT were considered and things like VAT paid are better as indicator of economic strength than any statistics that can not be easily verified. If you paid it, you have it. Therefore it is not right to say only Lagos is doing well in the SW but the SW like the rest of Nigeria would have done better if they had governments like the LASG

NaWhoTalkAm:
Sir, I think at this point I've pretty much explained how all your points are invalid. I've also directed you on how to find information that can give you an idea on where the Yoruba states sit in global standards. If you don't consider any of these relevant and prefer your own opinions, then that is your prerogative.