As the street renaming controversies rages in the Centre of Excellence, the governorship candidate of Labour Party in Lagos State in the 2023 elections, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, also known as GRV, in an interview with TOPE TEMPLER OLAIYA, re-echoes the recent concerns of former Lagos governor, Babatunde Fashola, on the preservation of Lagos’s history to avoid distortion and warns that citizens should not allow politicians sow the seed of discord as a tool to distract them from the real issues of governance.

During your 2023 election campaign, ethnicity was played up as a major issue and we are beginning to see a repeat of this in the countdown to 2027…
The main issue here is that a lot of people are being played and some people are taking advantage of their lack of understanding of what is actually happening. All of these people that whip up these agitations and push for these ethnic narratives are just there to distract Lagosians. It’s a classic divide and conquer strategy. If I get all of you to be hitting your head and fighting yourselves, you can never ask me about why I spent N2 billion on air fresheners, or why I am spending billions on consultancy, or talk about why a company got the contract for coastal road without proper bidding.

These ethnic narratives do two things: One, the people that are supposed to come together and demand good governance, principally, the Yoruba and Igbo that make up the major population of Lagos State, are now fighting themselves or arguing. So, they cannot come together to demand good governance. Secondly, they are not talking about the issues that actively matter to them.

Think about it, at the end of the day, what does the name of a street really matter to you compared to how much a litre of petrol is or how messed up your drainages are, or compared to the fact that none of these people leading us can send their own children to the same public schools they attended when they were much younger, whereas they got solid education in those places.

All these leaders grew up with public taps running but today, despite the billions spent, even the Lagos State Water Corporation has no water. My father has a house in Ikeja and just a few buildings separate us and the water corporation. There was a time our borehole machine spoilt and they brought a huge bill just to excavate the borehole and replace it. Meanwhile, we thought we are neighbours to the Water Corporation so why don’t we just go and talk to them and see if we can connect to their water; we went there and to our shock, they don’t have water. These are the issues that affect us. If we had pipe-borne water in Lagos, first the issue with plastic pollution will reduce drastically.  Secondly; cholera epidemic will reduce significantly, same with a lot of diseases that are linked to not having clean water, but instead, these politicians sow discord so we can talk about things that don’t affect our lives.

So, it’s a strategy and I employ Lagosians and Nigerians at large to understand and see through this strategy. They are playing a game. After the whole election, we will go back to living our regular lives until another election cycle but the suffering of bad governance follows us.

For instance, how can you meet a country you claim was almost bankrupt yet you used N20 billion to renovate the vice president’s house; you give a contract amounting to trillions for coastal roads when we have all the roads that are linking the farms to urban centres in a deplorable states, which is why 60 per cent of goods that come from the farm to the urban centres rot away; which is also why the transport cost is so high, which then determines food inflation that has escalated the high cost of living. These are the real life issues they don’t want you to talk about.

Some leaders of thought have been raising concerns about the public outcry generated by the streets renaming, including former governor Babatunde Fashola. What should the political leaders do to douse the tension?
Lagos is peculiar; there is no other state like Lagos in Nigeria. The indigenes of Lagos are peculiar human beings, not because they are any less Yoruba than their brothers that came from Ife but their exposures are different. These are a group of people that were never conquered by Oyo or Ibadan or Ondo or Abeokuta.

They created their own system to ensure peace between the Idejos and the Benin Empire. The Benin Empire created the ruling class, the Idejos were the landowners and they lived in harmony and peace.

Already, you see the difference in thinking; they came to a compromise and they managed it and created a system. So, people should not start to twist our history and story. I give them an example; Idewu Ojulari was Oba of Lagos. When his council was angry with him and felt he was not doing things properly, this led to the Dosunmu and Kosoko wahala; they reported him to the Oba of Benin; they did not report him to the Alaafin, Ooni or Awujale. The Oba of Benin sent a skull and a knife for the Oba of Lagos to choose one. The next day he committed suicide because a skull meant to commit suicide, and a knife is let’s go to war.

These are documented facts. For the longest time, all the Obas of Lagos were buried in Benin. These are the history behind Lagos that makes the indigenes, based on their exposures, see things differently. Lagos was a place where a lot of people were kidnapped from and shipped abroad as slaves through the Badagry port. The Lagos elite then were dealing with the Europeans, especially Portuguese. That was another level of exposure, relating with the white man. Then the enslaved people that were able to get their freedom came back with their experience and a lot of them settled in Lagos; that’s a third series of exposure. Then colonialism came and you have a situation where the governance of Nigeria was based in Lagos and you have politicians coming from everywhere to talk about the matters of Nigeria in Lagos, which is a higher level of exposure. It became the norm for indigenes to interact with people from all over Nigeria and you had the fight for independence. The motion was still moved in this same Lagos.

It is these exposures that made the indigenes of Lagos create the environment that welcomed the whole of Nigeria and which made it the commercial capital of the country. So, the reason many of these legacies are being eroded today is because Lagosians are not at the helm of affairs. Go and look at the people distorting the Lagos legacy; they don’t carry this story; their grandfathers have not passed down these values.

You know they say you either use head or leg to enter Lagos. A lot of people used leg to enter Lagos and there is nothing wrong with that but the value system and exposure of Lagos is what they are tampering with. The indigenes of Lagos, from the Awori, to the Egun, to the Saros, to the Bini and the Tapas are welcoming people.

Will you say the outcome of the 2023 presidential election in Lagos could have been the trigger with President Bola Tinubu losing his stronghold to Peter Obi?
This is not the first president we had that’s Yoruba. We have had Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. Was anybody doing any of these at the time? But for one man’s ambition, they will go to any length to just divide and dehumanise citizens. We need to see past these distractions. These politicians should come and tell us what they have done with the resources of the state for over 20 years.

It is not about the last election but the strategy of one man. President Tinubu was not campaigning when Jimi Agbaje was contesting and they were calling him Jimi Chukwu and that he will be the governor of the south-easterners. Once you question or stand up to challenge the hegemony of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the first thing they attack is your Yorubaness. You have a titan like the late Chief Ayo Adebanjo; because he supported somebody else in the last election, you were questioning his heritage. Same with Chief Obasanjo, a man that delivered the best performing economy in this Fourth Republic, because he didn’t support you we started hearing stories that his father is Igbo. When people don’t have a vision to sell, they sell divisions.

The funny thing is that it’s not about right or wrong; it is about fairness and justice. A Dosunmu cannot go and be governor in Ogun State even with Lagos being a Yoruba land and a part of the Southwest but the indigenes of this same Lagos cannot go and be senators or even local government chairmen in Osun, Ondo or Ekiti. It can never happen; the way you have a James Faleke representing Ikeja, then go and run for governor in Kogi State or you have Senator Olamilekan Yayi that was serving Lagos West then switched to become Senator for Ogun West. It’s not reciprocal and yet it’s the same Yoruba we are speaking.

Talking about the opposition, the African Democratic Congress (ADC) seems to be the beautiful bride of the opposition. Are you also contemplating crossing over?
For me, for the longest time, I have made it clear that the only way to face the All Progressives Congress (APC) is by forming a coalition. There is no group that can face Bola Ahmed Tinubu by themselves. You saw how tightly contested 2023 elections were and if you are fair, you will see that there was an attempt by former President Muhammadu Buhari to conduct a free and fair election; there was a genuine attempt to ensure that the election will not be monetised. Now, that’s not going to be the case in 2027. We are seeing a huge amount of money borrowed by this administration. You can’t see what they are using the money for; a lot of these funds will come in to monetise this election.

So, we need a coalition and we cannot afford to divide the opposition. Dividing the opposition is not just in votes, it is in ideas and strategy. When you add Peter Obi’s votes to Atiku Abubakar’s votes, they defeat Tinubu’s votes with almost five million votes. Five million votes is a very high number to rig. You can change 10 to 100, 50 to 500 but to do that to get to cover five million becomes a very difficult task. This is why we need a coalition. My hope is that reason will prevail and we would be able to get an opposition that Nigerians can truly buy into, not just a section of the country, because the suffering and effects of bad governance is shared by the whole country, not just a section of the country.

The coalition is a reflection of the new type of politics we have come into. There was a time when it was not so much about the person, it was about the party. If you have a solid party, there are solid men on ground in every state. They will work for you and deliver but what Peter Obi has shown is a new type of politics that is reflecting a new type of Nigeria where the electorate is looking at the individual and not the party. And this is tied to the new way we live. Our phones are always with us; we can fall in love with a candidate, not necessarily the party and do your research with social media. People are not searching online to read about PDP, it is about personalities and the candidates. When those personalities come together, the party now becomes strong.

So, is that your next destination?
Yes. The coalition has adopted ADC as its party for 2027. So, whether you’re from PDP, APC or SDP, ADC is the party we have adopted. ADC has been adopted by the leaders of the coalition. I don’t see that changing any time soon. I think even if other parties are registered, they’ll be brought into the coalition.