THEY may not want to hear it, but the truth is that Lagos is becoming an ill-famed place. And the Lagos being referred to here is the Lagos being governed by its lawyer–governor. And if anyone wishes it, he or she can confine the Lagos of our title to the city of Lagos and its immediate environs where the majority of the people of Lagos State have been in bad pains, at least on account of the strike by Lagos doctors.

Now Lagos, as city or state, has been touted over time as Nigeria’s leading democratic place. Perhaps “touted” is the wrong word to use. So let’s say that Lagos has for quite sometime entered our imagination as the democratic leader in Nigeria. It has been the perfectly suitable place for worker democrats, professional democrats (such as medical doctors), literary democrats, political democrats and other sundry democrats. Indeed, over time, Lagos has had a tremendous success in democratic pursuits and propensities despite the fact that it is a society imbued with annoying foibles and renegade tendencies.

The recent example that has come out of Lagos is destroying our democratic theory pertaining to Lagos. The Lagos State governor, a lawyer and a presumed democrat, has just displayed an attitude that one would not expect from a leader who wishes us to believe that he is from the natural habitat and capital of democrats. His recent sack of well over seven hundred Lagos democratic medical doctors is nothing short of the tendency of a despot and a totalitarian. He has just behaved as a tsarist monarch would by his attempt to crush the medical doctors whom he has clearly treated as some loathsome monsters.

Contrary to what the Lagos governor and his spokespersons, including his image-builders, want us to believe, the Lagos doctors on strike are selflessly devoted to their duties and the democratic process. What’s wrong when the Nigerian worker demands for the correct wage commensurate with the kind of service he renders to the government and the society? I saw on television an official of Governor Fashola’s administration uttering what was an immodest justification of the government’s suppression of the open democratic action of the Lagos doctors who belong to the most skilled professional class any country is glad to be blessed with. What the utterance of the senior official amounted to was sheer anti-democratic propaganda. It was a pretentious and a crazy echo of his master’s anti-democratic campaign against the medical doctors who, like other medical doctors elsewhere in the land, are being blackmailed every now and then. In fact, the other day, Governor Oshiomhole of Edo State also treated medical doctors of Edo State shabbily. He, like Governor Fashola, is an ACN governor. What is happening to our exemplary democrats? What is their problem? Do we now label them as democratic pigs that are now too “dirty, repulsive, over-fat and smug” to listen to the people and professionals who ought to come home every evening with correctly necessary victuals from the market stalls of our truly and deeply democratic party? Indeed, if the ACN was truly and deeply a democratically progressive party, shouldn’t all forms of professionals and associations of workers, including domestic servants as well, be making unprecedented progress in their controlled states?

The other day the preeminent Save Nigeria Group (SNG) marched against the madly astronomically price-rise in petroleum products which the President Jonathan regime indecently approved against the wish of the people and masses. Governor Fashola was rightly in solid support of SNG which mobilised a large number of the Lagos crowd against Dr. Jonathan’s scandalous action. Then Governor Fashola endeared himself to all decent Nigerians for his decent solidarity with the masses. Does he now want us to believe that what is good for the goose is no longer good for the gander? Is he now intolerant of nobly democratic criticism? It is painfully intolerable to see Governor Fashola clutching at the coat-tails of exploitative and merciless villains who have ruled Nigeria at different times since we became a Federal Republic. His uncomfortable attempt to suppress the legitimate strike action of the Lagos doctors is an action that clearly indicates that he is following in the footsteps of the wrong ones. Unless he is now an anti-democrat, the lawyer-governor of Lagos State must himself bitterly deplore his action and hit the right tone by listening to the medical doctors and agree to their demands. The governor has nothing to lose if he now hits the tone pleasing to the ears. Or is the lawyer-governor no longer a comrade-governor who is for the people who suffer greatly anytime things go amiss between governments and professionals such as is the case between the Lagos government and medical doctors?

Perhaps by the time you read this the unnecessary disagreement/impasse between both parties would have been amicably resolved. In that case Governor Fashola would have helped himself to rescue himself from the dirty verdict of history on him. Caveat emptor. Let the buyers beware, the buyers who are hell bent on purchasing the democratic governor from his natural home, and thereafter take him to the rubbish place of history. Caveat venditor. Let the sellers also beware, the sellers who are selling poor advice to the governor whom they will thereafter ditch as he miserably struggles to free himself from the ditch of the big, bad wolves ready to consume him. These are anti-democrats. The governor does not belong to them. He belongs to the people, the masses, the crowd of true and eminent progressives.

Let the governor listen and accede to the medical doctors’ demands. He loses nothing. Let him not throw my adversa here over-board. He is a learned man who needs and ought to listen and act learnedly at all times. Caveat emptor. Caveat venditor.

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