The problem that Sam Amadi and people who think like him have is that, they criminally and intentionally disregard the ethnic differences and the volatility of the Nigerian state. That same mistake cost the Igbo nation a lot in the first republic due to the myopia of people like Zik.
Firstly, the people who control political power control the culture and traditional authority of a state.
If an Igbo man becomes the governor of Sokoto state, that means the Sultan of Sokoto the great grandson of Uthman Dan Fodio and the head of the caliphate is under the political and spiritual authority of an Igbo man and a catholic. That Igbo man can dethrone and give out commands to the Sultan of Sokoto.
Furthermore, an Igbo man becoming the governor of Bayelsa, will automatically control the oil wealth of the Ijaw nation and might even stop any empowerment to the indigenous Ijaw people of Bayelsa.
Political leaders in Nigeria are not just leaders, they are the cultural preservers of a people.
Lastly, the creation of the 12 state structure and balkanization of the 3 regions by Gowon was due to the agitation of the ethnic minorities who wanted political control and sovereignty over their ancestral homeland. What Sam Amadi is suggesting is not patriotism, he is trying to weaponise the nomadic nature of the Igbo people as a leverage to project power outside the South east via the instruments of democracy.
Professor Sam Amadi, Your Doctorate Is a Disgrace to Real Scholarship – A Man Who Cannot Distinguish Between Citizenship and Indigeneship Should Be Stripped of His Professor Title
A creature draped in the decaying robes of a professor, one Sam Amadi, has slithered out of whatever hole he crawled from to declare that it is "an error" to tell Igbos they cannot contest for the highest office in Lagos because they are not Yoruba. Let us disembowel this intellectual fraud with the precision his hollow credentials do not deserve.
Citizenship is a statutory contract. It grants you the right to live, work, pay taxes, and enjoy public infrastructure. Indigeneship is a blood covenant. It grants you the right to govern, to sit on ancestral thrones, and to speak for people whose grandparents share the same soil, the same deities, the same wars, and the same grief. Any first-year political science student knows this. But Professor Amadi, in his infinite stupidity, conflates the two and expects us to applaud his ignorance.
Why did you not use Kano as your example? Why not Maiduguri? Why not Katsina? Why is your intellectual cowardice always trained on Lagos? The answer is simple: because you know that in the North, your argument would be met with laughter, dismissal, and possibly a plane ticket out. But you assume, like many before you, that Yorubas are weak-willed, confused, and ready to surrender their birthright to anyone who screams "one Nigeria" loud enough while clutching their own ancestral lands with iron fists.
Here is the rot you refuse to address. A Yoruba man cannot be governor in Enugu. A Yoruba man cannot be governor in Abia. A Yoruba man cannot be governor in Imo. The very Igbos you are defending would never, under any circumstance, allow a Yoruba man to govern their land. Not one. Not ever. They would call him a "stranger." They would tell him to "go back to the West." They would not even allow him to be a local government chairman.
But wait. Wasn't it on this very space we saw an Igbo man saying that an Ebonyi man cannot be a leader in another Igbo state? If you cannot even trust your own kinsman from another Igbo state to lead you, how dare you lecture Yorubas about accepting leadership from non-Yorubas in their own land?
The hypocrisy is staggering. You deny your own blood brother leadership in your region, but you expect Yorubas to open their gates to everyone. You build walls around your own political space, but you demand that Yorubas tear down theirs.
We are not demanding it. We are simply demanding the same reciprocal respect in our own territory.
But you, in your hypocrisy, will never speak of that. You will never write a paper on it. You will never raise your voice on any podium. Because your problem is not justice. Your problem is not fairness. Your problem is that you believe Yoruba land should be a free-for-all, a no-man's-land, a colonial outpost for anyone's ambition, while other regions remain fortress states with "indigenes only" signs boldly posted at their gates.
Let us rub your nose in the stench of your own contradiction. If Lagos must be open to all for the highest office, then Enugu must be open to all for the highest office. If citizenship is enough for Lagos, then citizenship must be enough for Enugu. If an Ebonyi man cannot lead in another Igbo state, then a Yoruba man cannot lead in Lagos. Fair is fair. Equal is equal. But you do not want equal. You want special. You want exception. You want Yoruba land to remain the only place in Nigeria where indigeneship is a crime.
Your PhD should be recalled. Your professorial chair should be re-evaluated. A man who cannot grasp the difference between a citizen and an indigene has no standing to lecture anyone on political morality. You are not a scholar. You are a charlatan with a title, a fraud with a certificate, a village drunkard who somehow stumbled into academia.