By Bayo Wahab
The Lagos governorship candidate of the African Democratic Congress, ADC, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, has said he will campaign in Yoruba ahead of the 2027 election.
Rhodes-Vivour, who contested the 2023 governorship election on the platform of the Labour Party, disclosed this during an interview on Arise TV on Thursday.
He was responding to questions about his inability to speak Yoruba, an issue that featured prominently in the campaign against him in the 2023 election after an interview in which he said he did not “think in Yoruba.”
The ADC candidate said he had since taken steps to learn the language, stressing that language and culture remained important to his engagement with Lagos voters.
“This tribal thing, speaking language situation and all that. Yes, culture and language is very important and I’ve gotten a Yoruba teacher, and I’ve learned Yoruba, and I’ll campaign in Yoruba, and that is wonderful,” he said.
Rhodes-Vivour, however, said the central issues in his campaign would go beyond language and ethnicity, arguing that Lagos residents were facing challenges that affected them regardless of their background.
“My passionate interest is to ensure that we have a Lagos that no longer stinks,” he said.
He cited flooding, housing and traffic among the problems confronting residents, saying the impact of such challenges was shared across the state.
“All of us are going to — when you translate it — all of us are going to hear the smell. Everybody is experiencing the failure of our flooding, of our housing crisis, of the traffic, of the loss of dignity of Lagosians, and that connects all of us, regardless of language,” he added.
Rhodes-Vivour was the Labour Party’s candidate in the 2023 Lagos governorship election, where he finished second behind the then-incumbent Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of the All Progressives Congress.
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