Only genocide can make Lagos ‘No Man’s Land’ – TYF replies Charly Boy

The Pan-Yoruba socio-cultural group, Think Yoruba First (TYF), has said that only an act of genocide could render Lagos a “no man’s land.”

In a strongly worded statement issued by its Public Relations Officer, Ogbeni Oluwole Lewis, the group called on the Lagos State House of Assembly to criminalize the use of the phrase “Lagos is no man’s land.”

Reacting to recent comments attributed to entertainer Charles Oputa, popularly known as Charly Boy, TYF said:

“Charles Oputa is clearly too ignorant to know that Lagos Island and parts of Apapa made up the Lagos Colony, which was designated Capital by the British.”

The group further stated that Oputa “lacks the intellect to understand” that over 80 percent of what is now Lagos State was planned and developed under the Western Region before, in TYF’s words, “Charly Boy’s consanguine—Gen. Ironsi—destroyed the regional system.”

They described the “no man’s land” assertion as a dangerous and genocidal idea:

“The only way to turn people’s indigenous land into a ‘no man’s land’ is to exterminate the aborigines and replace them, as was done in the U.S. and Australia. Do Charles and his invidious mob want to replace the indigenous Yorubas of Lagos?”

Quoting the late Premier of the Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the group claimed that the status of Lagos as Nigeria’s capital was a result of its pre-existing development by the Yorubas:

“Lagos did not become what it is because it was made Capital; rather, it became Capital because of what our fathers had turned it into with sweat and blood.”

TYF credited Lagos’s early development to regional leaders such as Jakande, Tinubu, and Fashola, contrasting it with what they called the underwhelming growth of Abuja, despite over three decades as the Federal Capital Territory.

The group declared emphatically:

“We won’t share, lease, lend, or transfer our birthrights to people who have destroyed their homes, no matter how many times they echo the ‘former capital’ narrative.”

They urged the Lagos State Assembly to legislate against what they called the “genocidal term”:

“It’s a dangerous ideology for our children to grow up hearing. It is a brutal social re-engineering stratagem which must not only be countered but extinguished.”