These ‘Gangs of Lagos’ characters appear very similar to real people

The action crime thriller centres around friends who grow up in a rough part of Lagos and are sucked into gang life. They have to navigate the consequences of their actions while also trying to achieve lofty ambitions.

The film’s narrative is fueled by political drama that looks strangely similar to what’s already real in Lagos where the fictional story is set.

If you haven’t watched the film yet, the spoilers start at this point.

These are the fictional Gangs of Lagos characters from whom you can draw a straight line to familiar people in the real Lagos.

The main street villain of Gangs of Lagos is Kazeem Eleniyan (Olarotimi Fakunle), a ganglord who rises through the ranks after his initial introduction as a collector of illegal taxes. That tax collection feels similar to the allegations Musiliu ‘MC Oluomo’ Akinsanya faces in the real world.

Oluomo is currently the chairman of the Lagos State Parks Management Committee (LSPMC) and was the leader of the Lagos chapter of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) before the state government disbanded it in 2022.

The union was notorious for extorting transport workers and as a breeding ground for the agbero menace in the state.

Over the years, Oluomo has faced many serious criminal allegations. He’s also been marked as the face of election violence and voter intimidation in Lagos and has even been caught on camera threatening voters.

Kazeem isn’t much different in Gangs of Lagos and it’s impossible to miss that he shares a similar beard shape with MC Oluomo.

The main political villain of the film is the shadowy Olorogun Araba (Yinka Quadri) who’s described as the “number one political godfather in the southwest”. Sounds familiar?

Throughout the film, Olorogun is painted as the man who’s been in control of Lagos for the past 20 years, since 1999.

This is a familiar story of the real-life Bola Tinubu, who was Lagos State governor between 1999 and 2007 and has hovered over the state’s governance as an influential godfather.

Olorogun’s opponents in the film repeatedly accuse him of holding Lagos hostage for decades and transferring public funds into his private accounts. Any random search about the real-life Tinubu, now Nigeria’s president-elect, would turn up exact results matching those allegations.

The main opposition candidate to Olorogun’s godfather reign in the governorship election in Gangs of Lagos is Bamidele Olanrewaju (Toyin Abraham). Her campaign narrative focuses on freeing Lagos from Olorogun’s 20-year bondage.

It’s a familiar narrative for opposition candidates in Lagos, especially over the past four years. Real-life opposition candidates like Jimi Agbaje and Babatunde Gbadamosi ran wild with the narrative in the 2019 governorship election, 20 years after Tinubu’s reign first started.

Even though Gangs of Lagos wrapped filming well before the 2023 Lagos governorship election, main opposition candidates like Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour and Abdul-Azeez ‘Jandor’ Adediran, also fit this image as they leaned heavily into the same narrative for their campaigns.

They all lost, but the fate of Olanrewaju remains up in the air by the end of Gangs of Lagos. Maybe she gets better luck than her real-life inspirations and wins the election.

The main Gangs of Lagos character is Obalola (Tobi Bakre) whose upbringing in a chaotic environment of violence clouds his future path. Alongside his friends, he’s enveloped in the web of street life that’s impossible to escape, regardless of how dreamy his personal ambitions are.

While there’s no specific notable person to tie in as the real-life inspiration for Obalola and his friends, any agbero in the streets of Lagos fits that image. Some of them may end up high on the gangster ladder like Obalola, but others end up dead as pawns in other men’s games, just like his friend, Ify (Chike Osebuka).

You only have to look around at every bus stop, under-bridge and gang fight in Lagos — you’ll see an Obalola and his friends.