In 2023, after Peter Obi defeated Bola Tinubu in parts of Lagos, MC Oluomo took to the airwaves and effectively addressed the Igbo: stay at home on election day if you wouldn’t vote APC. He didn’t couch the message in code. He framed non-APC votes as a punishable betrayal. The police invited him for questioning, but the exercise looked more like a photo opportunity than genuine accountability. He was released after a half-hearted apology — one which many saw as scripted.
Days later, at the polls, scores of Igbo voters were beaten, chased from polling units and hospitalised across Eti-Osa, Ojo, Amuwo-Odofin and beyond. MC Oluomo’s foot soldiers had turned rhetoric into wounds. The authorities did little. INEC pronounced the exercise credible. Oluomo and his allies celebrated what amounted to the triumph of organised hooliganism. That lack of consequence became part of the playbook.
By the end of 2023 Oluomo had handed the NURTW reins in Lagos to Alhaji Adekunle Mustapha, aka Sego — another veteran enforcer. Sego has now said plainly that in 2027 Lagos will only accommodate one party: the APC. He warned that anyone who votes otherwise “will be killed.” Sego did not name the Igbo, but context makes the target clear: Lagos’s non-APC base is disproportionately Igbo.
This is not idle bravado. Sego was summoned by the DSS for ‘insulting some groups’ — a summons that ended in a visitor’s tag, a public denial and a mealy-mouthed apology. The choreography echoed MC Oluomo’s earlier escape from accountability. It sends the same message: threats, then optics, then impunity.
Sego’s threats are more than the menace of a single thug. They are a declaration by a political machine. Worse still is the environment that allows this machine to roar with near impunity: the president’s uneasy silence. In Lagos, Tinubu is more than an elder statesman; he is the city’s godfather. If his lieutenants, paid or empowered by proximity to power, fan ethnic hatred and intimidate voters, the president’s moral authority is implicated whenever he fails to act decisively.
Violence in 2023 went largely unpunished. Hooligans were not prosecuted; instigators were not held to account. Since then, inter-ethnic tensions have festered on social media and in public discourse. When Sego publicly echoes a sentiment that others only mutter in private, he is doing so with confidence that the system will not bite back. And that creates a chilling precedent: threats normalized, victims silenced, ballots rendered meaningless by fear.
The stakes are not only moral; they are constitutional. To deny an ethnic group access to the ballot box is to undermine the very foundations of national unity. It is an electoral crime masquerading as local politics. If state power refuses to counter such threats, tacit complicity replaces governance. A president who allows his operatives to disenfranchise citizens in his political backyard risks being judged — by history and by law — as a steward who failed his constitutional duty.
Lagos must remain a melting pot — a place where tribes and trades mix, where enterprise is open to all. To win Lagos legitimately is to win hearts and votes, not to deploy thugs to the streets. If the president truly stands for democratic order, he must publicly and forcefully reject any attempt to turn politics into ethnic purge. He must ensure that the law is applied evenhandedly; that threats are investigated, offenders prosecuted, and victims protected.
For the Igbo in Lagos, the memory of 2023 is raw. Many stayed away from local elections out of fear; others were targeted and threatened. In the run-up to 2027, they need more than reassurances — they need concrete protections: increased, impartial policing at polling units; swift prosecutions of instigators; and transparent monitoring by independent observers. The state must make clear that political violence will not be tolerated, whoever the perpetrators are.
If “One Nigeria” is more than slogan, then the president must show it by action. Silence in the face of public calls for political extermination is negligence at best, complicity at worst. The callous exclusion of any ethnic group from the polls would be an electoral atrocity. It is a crime against democratic life.
The ball is in the president’s court. He can either reassert the rule of law — making Lagos a model of inclusive politics — or continue to allow the embers of 2023 to be fanned until they become conflagration. History will remember which path he chose.