Most of these partisan influencers who have ratcheted their hate campaign since the February 23 presidential vote, are supporters of Mr. Jimi Agbaje, PDP governorship candidate in Lagos.  

Mr. Agbaje must not allow them seize his campaign and turn same into a referendum on ethnicity. At least for his own sake.

For all its flaws and chaos, Lagos has remained Nigeria’s most cosmopolitan of cities and melting pot through the decades; welcoming everyone from every part of Nigeria into its dingy apartments, traffic infested narrow roads, pot-hole laden road surfaces and bellicose neighborhoods.

In the bedlam that the city has come to connote, most have managed to earn a decent living and thrive—whether they be Igbos, Efiks, Anangs, Fulanis, Yorubas, Hausas, Kanuris, Urhobos or Isokos.

Lagos, by most accounts, has been good to a lot, warts and all. 

Which is why, there is a growing community of Igbos making money and expanding their communities from Okokomaiko to Alaba, from Mile 2 to Festac, from Surulere to Lekki and from VGC to Ajah. These Igbos, have for the most part, lived peaceably with all tribes and alongside their Yoruba hosts.  

This is what Nigeria should be about after all. Everyone from everywhere having as much right as everyone else to depart their communities, venture elsewhere, join in the process of electing their leaders in their new settlements, pay their fair share of taxes and earn the right to be a part of the democratic conversation. Lagos leads the way than most in this regard.

However, one of the saddest dispatches from the Feb 23 presidential elections occurred in Lagos when miscreants and thugs masquerading as voices of the Yorubas, harassed Igbos in certain local governments into voting a certain way. It was a silly and condemnable move from these Yoruba thugs and whoever put them up to it.

Voter suppression and intimidation should have no place in our evolving democracy and the protagonists of the violence that engulfed Okota, Surulere, Oshodi and Mushin during the presidential vote should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

In the same token, the growing band of Igbo dissidents who have been chanting anti-Yoruba slogans in the build-up to the governorship election in Lagos, should be reprimanded, stopped dead in their tracks and told exactly how foolish they are.

In this regard, Agbaje and Babajide Olusola Sanwo-Olu, APC governorship candidate in Lagos, should join hands to stamp out these ethnic champions from their folds. 

Agbaje has a lot to do in this regard because most of the ethnic champions have professed their support for his candidacy. All that Otoge nonsense really needs to give way to a healthy debate on which of the two front-line candidates has the best plans when it comes to ridding the city of tons of waste, providing affordable healthcare, finding solutions to a perennial traffic nightmare, getting articulated trucks off busy highways and making public transportation cleaner and more efficient.

Agbaje, for one, has run an arguably weak campaign, one that has been short on tangible policy proposals, but high on emotion, meaningless buzz phrases and frenzy. The man has really got to do better to get his campaign off the ground in this last week before the vote.

And then he has to tell his ethnic champions to stay as far away from his campaign as possible, before they cost him the election.