By Olakunle Abimbola
With just one challenge, Ondo Governor, Rotimi Akeredolu, aka Aketi, just sent the Yoruba secessionists and allied camps scampering into a tizzy — a tizzy near-equating the Biblical Tower of Babel.
So, what do the agitators really want; and which Yoruba mandate delivered that decision?
O, self-determination for the Yoruba nation, crowed Prof. Banji Akintoye’s Yoruba World Congress (YWC), and — torrents of vulgar abuse later, spiced with crude name-calling, as response to the Aketi challenge — a fierce bluster that its goal would be attained by legal and peaceful means.
“What we declared is the sovereignty of Yoruba nation from Nigeria,” Ilana Omo Oodua, a hardly known group linked to Prof. Akintoye swore. ”… Our agitation shall be bloodless, intellectually rooted and legally grounded.”
Sovereignty from Nigeria — an ode to sophistry, as face-saving bluff?
It “is not that of a plot for secession as erroneously branded by Akeredolu, but a struggle for self-determination.” Yeah right!
Yet, the same Prof. Akintoye beamed, with near-supreme ethnic beatitude, as Sunday Igboho — stark, tragic, deluded bloke — birthed a “Yoruba nation” out of his frenzied dreams; and uttered his rash and insane threats to go yank open “Yoruba borders”, just to walk the talk of his whimsical, nay, comical secession!
No, let’s restructure, chimed in Chief Ayo Adebanjo, new leader of the Afenifere rump.
“My reaction is clear,” Baba Adebanjo quipped. ”We don’t want Nigeria to break. But we don’t want to be oppressed. We don’t want a situation that is giving rise to Igboho or Kanu. The youths in Yorubaland and Middle Belt and other ethnic groups are restless. We should do restructuring to avoid break up,” The Nation quoted him as saying.
Fair enough. At the zenith of its influence in 2001 — and well back into its evolution from the Awolowo federalist struggles — restructuring had always been the Afenifere pitch. On that, given how things are panning out, that pitch could hardly be faulted.
Still, over the years, “restructuring” had soaked in so much dross: an immaculate idea blighted by abrasive personal over-reach. That only put off converts elsewhere, beyond the blissful corps of the converted, within the South West, because the messenger had dwarfed the message.
It also bred that arrogant, all-wise penchant: a near-tragic presumption, which powered a tiny cabal to make sweeping claims for the Yoruba — mandate be damned! — simply because that cabal enjoys high media visibility.
But that delusion, over the years, also cost Afenifere dear: a steep loss of influence, as an aggregation of Yoruba interest, in the normal elite struggle with other ethnics, in a supposed federal Nigeria.
Yes, Afenifere has been faithful to its age-long restructuring credo. Yet, if Baba Adebanjo didn’t approve of Igboho’s rash tactics, why that photo rally, at Baba Adebanjo’s Lagos home, sweetly circulated for propaganda effect?
So, the Igboho photo hero just turned zero at the slightest whiff of the Aketi challenge? Disposable fellow!
Why, even Gani Adams is playing newfound political historian-cum-philosopher, in Nigeria’s evolving crisis of nationhood! ”The only thing that can stop the agitation,” he told The Nation, “is restructuring through regionalism.” The Aare has spoken!
But if regionalism was that excellent, why did the 1st Republic collapse?
Meanwhile, the Igboho push-and-pull, abuse-and-traduce, antics endure! In that crude crusade, the “Yoruba rights activist” (his sweet new media label) has traduced the Ooni of Ife, and threatened to invade and raze the palace of the Alake of Egbaland, two eminent Yoruba monarchs, in an agitation for the Yoruba!
In truth, the Alake threat was a bit complicated. Igboho denied ever making it. But Olayomi Koiki, Igboho’s official spokesperson did — the voice of Jacob but not the hand of Esau! What a Babel: a spokesman is not his principal’s media alter ego!
Meanwhile, Koiki appears another jetsam from Prof. Akintoye’s YWC, that seems to hold, in thrall, a lot of the Yoruba Diaspora. Sometime last year, Koiki released a video, in which he banged his chest, bragged-a-million, and threatened to end it all, should anything happen to “Baba Ekiti”.
It was after another futile launch of “Oodua Republic”. Little wonder: Koiki re-found his groove in the Igboho push-and-shove universe!
Babel of YWC, Afenifere, Gani Adams and Igboho — what do the Yoruba really want?
From Aketi, however, it’s a welcome reality check, which the elected order ought to have pressed much earlier, instead of yielding space to the Yoruba equivalent of the Roman rabble.
Aketi, while throwing the gauntlet: Warning against “unthinking rabble rousing” — a point that can never be overstated — the Ondo Governor declared: “We will not be led to assured annihilation by anyone or a group of people, still smarting from the electoral defeats of recent times; and presumed exclusion from the process of decision-making.”
That was spot on. If you want to crow about the Yoruba, secure their mandate first. That is one line the South West elected order must vigorously push.
A mushrooming concert of the unelected, goading the unwary against the civil order, baiting needless catastrophe with unvarnished hate, can only end in tears.
A few days later on Channels TV, Akeredolu raised even more telling posers on rights, mandate, and the secession question.
“A few people cannot just stand up one day and say to us: ‘Yes, we want Yoruba nation,” he told the channel. ”How? Where did we sit down to discuss this? With who and who? At what point in time? So, if you do not carry everybody along, you cannot be representing us.”
That is the crux — and it’s no surprise the other side has no clear answer, though it tries to bluster its way out of the jam. They have no answer because it was all giddy presumption — which could turn costly, nay fatal, for the impassioned crowd they goad and push to the brink, on ethnic pride and cross-ethnic hate. That can only lead to perdition.
To be sure, Aketi himself has no known mandate to dismiss “secession” — or whatever excitement the other side is all about. But as elected governor, he bears responsibility to protect his people from any wild misadventure. He just pressed that democratic right, nay duty — and so should other South West governors.
Which is why they must mount a contrary, vigorous narrative, other than brinkmanship, powered by, in Aketi’s words again, “unthinking rabble rousing.”
Everyone is bothered about the South West security question. But the logical solution is not reckless excitability, pushing the people into more, if avoidable, danger.
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