₦airaland Forum

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.

chopnaira:
Abeg, who can summarize for us.




I saw the above and can't help but Thank Tinubu and APC for turning Lagos fortune around.

Kukutente23:
Was lagos GDP the lowest in the country before Tinubu and APC?
Too many brainwashed souls
Lagos made Tinubu not the other way round

Kukutente23:
Was lagos GDP the lowest in the country before Tinubu and APC?
Too many brainwashed souls
Lagos made Tinubu not the other way round

lawani:
Lagos would have been only a bit higher than Oyo in GDP in 1999. Because of the seizure of Lagos lg allocations Tinubu started collecting land use charges and gradually made Lagos to stand on its feet financially. Ambode made PAYE the main revenue source. No company can operate in Lagos without filing PAYE returnsas at today and Lagos is the only state like that in Nigeria made so by Ambode. PAYE is now majority of Lagos revenue
Left alone without these proactive moves by the leaders then Lagos would be ni different from Oyo state or any other state. They definitely would not have had the revenue to do all they do

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.

helinues:
You don dey carry your Sara pass moshalashi with unnecessary attack thread's on Lagos state

WizardOfNG:
Abi OO. OP is hard to work out. One of those who does not understand the adage "if it ain't broke don't fix it".

Nigeria is a complex and abnormal nation hosting ethnic groups who view themselves adversaries with some constantly seeking to use insidious expansionism to penetrate the homeland and interest of others.

Lagos politics, that throws up her Governor, is simply pragmatic, dynamic and ameoba-like with shape adjusting to fit reality on ground.


Incoherent experimentation, championed by those who seek change for the sake of that alone, is why some States are messed up, failed and even terrorised in Nigeria today while Lagos keeps moving in the right direction yeat in and year out.

helinues:
My issue with the op is trying to disrespect other states with his epistle. He should face Lagos state that he's having issue with and leave other states irrespective of the region

Sannisege:
Anambra nko from APGA? It’s not about party but individuals. The most brilliant lagosians are currently in APC so APC should continue to govern Lagos.

WizardOfNG:
Even his talk of Lagos is myopic and unwise. Everyone knows the coded reality of Nigeria whereby 'one Nigeria' is anything but that.

Get the leadership of Lagos wrong, doing yeye democracy the system isnt ready for, and that will open the door to rapacious and covetous enemies-within, with parochial agendas, messing up Lagos for good.

I shudder thinking of a character like GRV becoming Lagos Governor. God forbid.

helinues:
Abi, in my case, I have issue with Yayi but not with Yewa people, I have issue with Adelabu and reasonable of those showing face as Guber aspirants in Oyo state but my issue never get to Oyo people. Infact, I have issue with both OGD and DA representing their senatorial district but not with my Ogun East people

We all want the best for our respective states but we should be sensitive in discussing it without disrespecting others that shouldn't have been involved

WizardOfNG:
Correct talk. Dude is talking like those people who are very covetous and have not being able to develope anything remotely close to Lagos since independence yet daily insist their own , one yeye architect or whatever with no leadership track record, should lead Lagos for sake of "change" and to remove "Tinubu control".

What on earth disqualifies Hamzat and who else exactly should be favoured ahead of him? The fraud GRV?

WizardOfNG:
Correct talk. Dude is talking like those people who are very covetous and have not being able to develope anything remotely close to Lagos since independence yet daily insist their own , one yeye architect or whatever with no leadership track record, should lead Lagos for sake of "change" and to remove "Tinubu control".

What on earth disqualifies Hamzat and who else exactly should be favoured ahead of him? The fraud GRV?

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.

HIGHESTPOPORI:
Doherty is the next Gov of Lagos

chopnaira:
When you are tired, you would relocate to Anambra where Peter Obi created a Nigeria's version of Dubai.

MemphitzDgreat1:
Oga, shut up with this foolish notion of yours. Where was Peter Obi's name or Anambra mentioned in the write up?

Childish...

This is what you are known for...

Propaganda merchant
Fake News peddler
Bigotry Ninja


APC will be routed fully.. na time.

chopnaira:
Come and collect my phone and delete the reply.

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.

Kukutente23:
But Op, you cannot eat agbado in the morning and complain of toothache in the afternoon

It is completely incompatible to praise the godfather but hate the mafia

How will you extricate the sound of the wolf from its skin. You hail the sound but rail at the skin

In the wild, you can't love hunter and the hunted equally. One must be chosen over the other

In simple terms, you can't hate Lagos APC hegemony but love Asiwaju Tinubu GCFR Jagaban.

You'll only end up looking confused. Learn to explain to, and convince yourself of the need for single party structure in Lagos. It's good for your mental health

HacheNoire:
Why Lagos Needs to Break Free from the APC

marlow1962:
Lagos state is tinubu establishment.

Lagos state is like a man opening a ship, Lagos is the shop and tinubu/family is the owner.