OPINION: Lagos Was Not Developed By Niger Delta Oil — Adeyinka Grandson

I don't get where this idea of the Igbo that oil money developed Lagos comes from. Lagos had been thriving since the 1800s before Nigeria.

Lagos was a major centre of the slave trade until 1851. It was bombarded by the British colonial thugs in 1851, captured on 6 August 1861 and declared a British colony on 5 March 1862. By 1872, Lagos was a cosmopolitan trading centre.

Lagos emerged during the colonial period as a homogeneous town populated by the Yoruba people of various tribes such as Aworis, and Eguns in Ikeja and Badagry Division and the Ijebu of Ikorodu and Epe Division.

The European community lived in relatively distinct districts. This community established the physical foundations of the city, which consisted of warehouses, and government buildings built along the Marina and around the racecourse in 1901 from the money collected as taxes from the Yoruba people.

Lagos became the obvious place to develop as the capital of the colony and protectorate incorporated into Southern Nigeria in February 1906, and naturally became the main location of the first capital of the protectorate of Nigeria in January 1914, when oil hasn't even been discovered.

The period after 1906 was an important period of further development on Lagos Island, of buildings still in existence, such as the Supreme Court, the Old Secretariat and the Government Printer on Broad Street. There was also the first Government Secondary School, Kings College, both of which were located by the racecourse in which polo was played in the central area of the course, and which from the time it was laid out in 1859 was a central feature of the British colonial government, paid for by the taxes from the Yoruba people.

Lagos ports on the Atlantic coast, in which segregation schemes were introduced between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were built from the taxes paid by the Yoruba.

The building that became the Government House, and then State house after independence, went through a number of transformations; the version most recognized was built in the time of Lugard to occupy as Governor-General in 1914. It was built with money collected from the Yoruba people as taxes.

Governor Carter (1891-1897) had the vision to push through the railway, the great project of the 1890s, which opened its first stretch to Ibadan as the century turned. The year 1900 saw the opening of the Iddo rail terminus, but also the first version of Carter Bridge, carrying pedestrians and afterwards, the steam tram, which gave the development of Lagos Island, as the hub of the capital, a tremendous boost, were all built from the money collected from the Yoruba people as taxes.

After the bubonic plague of the late 1920s, the Lagos Executive Development Board was set up in 1931 and was responsible for some of the earliest planned developments on the Mainland such as Yaba. These were also added to and partly reconstructed in the later colonial period, as was the new model suburb of Surulere, all paid for from the money collected from the Yoruba people as taxes.

Lagos maintained its status as capital when Nigeria obtained its independence from the British colonial thugs in 1960. It ceased to be the capital of Nigeria in 1991 when it was replaced by Abuja.

The expansion of Lagos' political economy has led to growing wealth, which in turn has brought a range of new aspirations for modernity that has followed in the wake of colonization.

Without oil, Lagos nourished the social, commercial and even political being of the city and the people of Nigeria, erected upon the blood, sweat and tears of the Yoruba people and it is still a success.