On Lekki

By Pius Adesanmi

I have only just noticed some Lekki versus the rest of Lagos and Nigeria dimension to ongoing interventions in the flood matter. Maybe I’ve been too tired to notice strident, blanket attacks against Lekki residents and forceful pushbacks by the attacked.

One or two updates I have now seen reek of the usual anti-affluence bad belle that is common to all societies. Where the bad belle is just pure bad belle for bad belle’s case, you understand that it is a case of “omi inu agbon wu eiye mu, ona ati de ibe lo soro”. No bird is allergic to coconut water. Reaching it is the problem.

However, I want to take a different tack in the matter. I have immediate family in Lekki: Bamidele Ademola-Olateju, Kyke Davies, and Olufunmilayo Odunaike. I have family in Ikoyi, VI, all the way to Banana Island.

However, these family members of mine represent a minority paradigm of what I will call sophistication, enlightenment, and culture trying to bring civilization to an Ocean of money without culture.

The measure of a civilization lies in her ability to bring culture, taste, aesthetics, sophistication, and cultivation to bear on the environment through responsible control and transformation of the built environment. I have been through the groans and gnashing of teeth and agony of my aforelisted Lekki family members as they dream and envision and try to make happen a Lekki that is a function of their elevated culture and sophisticated minds.

But what do you do if your cosmopolitan ilk is a miserable minority? What do you do when you are surrounded by money from politics with very low level of culture? Money that can just decide to bribe its way through the system, buy drainage zones and green areas and build the latest French chateau in town, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, much to the admiration of the local elite? It gets to a point where you concentrate on bringing your elevated culture to bear on just the space that lies within your walled fence.

If you scream too much about how things ought to be, it gets to point where you are condemned as an oversabi diaspora returnee. I once gave the example of Maitama in Abuja. A good friend of mine took me on a drive around Maitama to showcase what the rich and the powerful are doing to their own immediate environment.

The worst thing that can happen to a society is an elite with more money than culture. I gnashed my teeth as I contemplated the violence that Nigeria’s political elite is doing to its own immediate lived environment in Abuja. The destruction of the masterplan is unbelievable. I was shown a zone for the Maitama light rail project. They cut off an entire area of the rail project where the tracks ought to be for the parking lot of a private school – one of the most expensive schools in Nigeria – owned by a woman I hear is connected to the owners of Nigeria. I saw gigantic mansions on designated green areas. This is the violence that a political elite with money and no culture is visiting upon its own built environment in Abuja.

What these people do to themselves and their own built environment is unbelievable. Light rail zone transformed to the parking lot of a private school, near the home of a former President. If they complete the light rail project, shebi it is their domestic staff it will be ferrying more easily to them?

Now, take Bamidele, Kyke, and Olufunmilayo from Lekki and plant them in the middle of this gigantic ocean of money without culture and intellection in Maitama and they will just be screaming themselves hoarse till they get tired.

Bottomline: you cannot blame everybody in a blanket manner for what happens to elite and non-elite spaces.

A much better prayer and hope is that the tribe of the Bamideles, the Kykes, and the Olufunmilayos of this world should increase in Lekki and wherever their ilk reside in Nigeria.

The more culture, rather than half-illiterate hooligan money, resides in our built and lived spaces, the closer we will get to the 21st century.

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Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

Pius Adesanmi, a professor of English, is Director of the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada