August 2, 2025
By Dr. Adedapo Adebajo
Lagos! The name itself is an incantation, conjuring images of a sprawling, pulsating organism — a concrete jungle of infinite ambition and beautiful chaos. It is Nigeria’s grand masquerade, a city where fortunes are forged in the heat of traffic jams and destinies are rewritten between the beats of an Afrobeats anthem. In this magnificent, overwhelming theatre of dreams, a dangerous whisper has grown into a chant, an assertion repeated with such arrogance it seeks to become truth: “Lagos is a no man’s land.”
Erodes the social contract, replacing mutual respect with a constant, simmering battle for supremacy. It is a direct path to the kind of ethnic strife that has torn less resilient societies apart.
The constitutional right to live anywhere is not a right to erase history. It is not a license to disrespect your host. The beauty of a truly cosmopolitan city — a London, a New York, a Toronto — lies in the dance between its diverse migrant communities and its core, foundational identity. Diversity enriches, but erasure impoverishes.
Lagos is not a “no man’s land.” It is an Owner’s Corner. It is the corner of the Yoruba nation that became a sanctuary and an incubator for the entire Nigerian dream. It is a Yoruba city that has graciously become every Nigerian’s city. To secure its future, we must honour its past. The covenant is simple: come, build, dream, and prosper. But do not, in the audacity of your newfound success, attempt to burn the title deeds of the family that built the house and welcomed you in. For a city without a memory is a city without a soul. And a city without a soul is, truly, a no man’s land.
