Category: Jide Oluwajuyitan

1oth parliamentary democracy and the presidential system advertise the doctrine of separation of powers between the three arms of government viz, the executive, legislative and the judiciary as antidote to tyranny. But in the real world of politics where political parties, 18th century ingenious creation of intellectuals, have to cope with intrigue of party members and  balance interest of pressure group against public interest in shaping public policy, separation of power remains an illusion or a mere picture in our heads.

But for the politicians to whose versatility and brinkmanship we owe our survival as an organized society, what matters as long as the goal is to serve humanity, is the spirit and not the letter of the law.

Having known the nature of man, the concern of enlightened and ambitious politicians is the cultivation of a harmonious relationship between the three arms of government that are in theory independent but in reality interdependent. For instance while the doctrine of separation of powers locates the power to make laws within the legislature, it ignores the fact that the executive/president, as the institution that initiates most of the executive bills needed for successful implementation of ruling party’s manifesto, in reality is the chief lawmaker. But beyond this, we also know the executive or the president has the powers to veto other bills that are not originating from its department. But that is only when there is a harmonious relationship as against adversarial executive/legislative relationship between the two arms of government. And since the objective is to serve the common interest of the people, the three arms of government in most advanced democracies and even in those societies where both powers reside in one institution, always strive to work for the greatest satisfaction of the greatest number of their people.

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In the US whose constitution we copied, to ensure the success of party policies, elected lawmakers of a ruling party are ideologically stuck with their president. In Britain, the executive and legislature are closely entwined with the Prime Minister and a majority of his or her ministers as Members of Parliament

Unfortunately, Obasanjo who emerged in 1999 was not a social engineer but a military dictator. The country paid dearly for his war against the legislature. Although the impasse led the removal of three senate presidents in three years and the labelling of lawmakers as ‘pen robbers’, but that was not until the disharmonious relationship had created a fertile ground for the legislature’s cornering of 25% of the nation’s budget, making Nigeria’s lawmakers the highest paid in the world. Beyond paying themselves humongous salaries, it was under Obasanjo with Bukola Saraki as budget special assistant that budget padding in the name of often-abandoned constituency projects started.

Because of the frosty relationship between the two, the lawmakers also frustrated the Obasanjo fuel subsidy policy which was exploited by lawmakers, PDP stalwarts and their children to defraud the country of about N1.7trilion without importing a pint of fuel. Also frustrated was Obasanjo’s privatization policy through which Nigeria’s total investment of about $100b was according to a house report, given away at a paltry sum of $1.5b. There was also Obasanjo’s monetization policy through which  many lawmakers  and other public servants including Speaker Dimeji Bankole, Senate President David Mark and CBN governor Chukwuma Soludo allegedly bought their official residences at a fraction of their real costs.

It was not much different during Buhari’s first term, 2015-2019 when the legislature was defined by impunity as a result of the frosty relationship of between the executive and the legislature.  Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara, driven by greed, sold the victory of their party to the opposition.  Buhari’s infrastructural development programme was derailed as the senate diverted the budget for the completion of all important Lagos-Ibadan expressway to their constituency projects. Of about 515 mostly self-serving bills passed by Saraki’s 8th senate, only few were given assent by President Buhari.

On the other hand, precisely because the principal officers of the 9th assembly were the choice of the ruling APC, there was a harmonious relationship between the executive and the 9th assembly.  Unlike the 8th assembly, Ahmad Lawan and Femi Gbajabiamila, roundly criticized for leading a rubber stamp Senate and House respectively, managed to pass many landmark bills including the highly applauded electoral law and Petroleum Industry Act that had been with the Senate for over 20 years.

It is therefore to be expected that the incoming administration of Bola Tinubu, the president-elect would be interested in those who emerge as principal officers of the 10th assembly. First, Bola Tinubu, unlike Obasanjo and Buhari is a politician. He understands the paradox of having to meet the rising expectations of those condemned to poverty by owners of society whose interest he must also protect. He more than any of his predecessors also clearly understands a rancour-free 10th NASS he needs to prosecute his programme will depend on the quality and character of its principal officers.

As expected, on Monday, May 8, the National Working Committee of the All Progressives Congress (APC),  after consultations of party stakeholders  confirmed the endorsement of former Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Godswill Akpabio, as Senate President and Tajudeen Abbas as Speaker of House of Representatives for the 10th National Assembly.

Members-elect, including Idris Wase and Alhassan Doguwa, who felt short-changed by their party’s position, have threatened to go the Saraki treacherous way. Claiming allegiance to the country before his party, Wase said they “will not allow this parliament to be hijacked or be made a lame-duck”. On his part, Doguwa insists “choosing their own leaders without input from their party was “in defence of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”  However, for Kalu, the APC’s preferred candidate for the position of Deputy Speaker, “party must play a key role in determining who emerges Speaker or deputy in a “democratic environment like” Nigeria.

As it was in 2015 when journalists either out of mischief or ignorance about the political process, hailed Saraki and Dogara’s treacherous act against their party, so it is today as they deceitfully aver that the effort of the president-elect and his party to influence those who will emerge as principal officers will lead to a rubber stamp 10th assembly.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Commenting on this misrepresentation last Tuesday on ARISE TV’s Morning Show, an irritated Senator Ali Ndume accused journalists of often misleading the public. He then went on to ask his interlocutors if American senate whose system we copied will suddenly become a rubber-stamp senate  just because Vice President Kamala Harris as Senate President decides to vote for her democratic party in case of a tie in the 50- 50 Republican/ Democrat Senate.

As for those seeking power and justice out of a sense of entitlement and their sponsors driven by a desire to sow seed of discord and disharmony among uninformed Nigerians, they should be reminded of Charles Dickens’ admonition: “charity begins at home, justice next door”.

Search for power through exploitation of the innermost fears of a group in multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi- religious nation like Nigeria will remain elusive. That much we saw with the defeat of Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi in this year’s presidential election.  I think Peter Obi’s rebuke by Chimaroke Nnamani, former governor of Enugu State over what he described as his “devious opium served to Christians within sections of Nigeria and to Igbo domiciled in different sections of Nigeria which in his opinion has now set “Igbo political trajectory back 24 years” serves as a sad reminder for those who in future might want to follow Obi’s path.

However, the credit for “deflowering the virgin innocence of political patriotism and nationalism in Nigeria belongs to Obi’s Igbo illustrious forbears. He and Igbo current inheritors of old prejudices are merely waging their forbear’s uncompleted war.

It all started in when Zik as President of Igbo State Union, launched in 1943, sowed the seed of Igbo nationalism when he declared “it would appear that the God of Africa has specially created the Igbo nation to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of the ages…. The martial prowess of the Ibo nation at all stages of human history has enabled them not only to conquer others but also to adapt themselves to the role of preserver”. That Zik’s fiery speech was to set the stage for Igbo’s many battles, first against weaker neighbours and later against the other two dominant groups, the Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani.

The Igbo battle against Yoruba interest started with the launching of Egbe Omo Oduduwa in 1948, five clear years after inauguration of Igbo Federal Union. Some of the Yoruba aristocrats involved in the formation were Sir Adeyemo Alakija, Dr Akinola Maja, Sir Kofo Abayomi Chief Bode Thomas, Chief H O Davies and Dr Akanni Doherty.  Strangely, Zik and his Igbo leaders who saw the Egbe’s inauguration as an affront promptly labelled it ‘enemy of Igbo and 27m Nigerians’. According to September 8, 1948 West African Pilot editorial, “The Egbe Omo Oduduwa must be crushed to the earth…There is no going back until the fascist organization of Sir Adeyemo Alakija has been dismembered”. This was followed by physical assaults on the persons of the leaders of the Egbe and damage to the houses and other properties of some of them”.

Then the rivalry between Igbo and Yoruba took a new turn. Lagos had provided the political and economic platforms through which Zik, the adopted son of Herbert Macaulay and Lagos’ white cap chiefs, attained prominence. But perhaps on account of his hostility towards Yoruba interest, Yoruba’s fractious political leaders buried their differences in 1952 to enable the AG led by Obafemi Awolowo form a government. For deciding to carry their own destiny in their own hands, Zik and his supporters labelled Awolowo and the Yoruba tribalists.

Fighting their forbears’ battle, Igbo political leaders mobilized against Awolowo’s 1959 prime ministerial ambition just as they did against his 1979 presidential contest even with an Igbo vice presidential candidate. The battle of Igbo against Yoruba interests only got worse in 1993 when MKO Abiola, despite winning a landslide victory across the country, secured only one state from the east.  The battle went on with Arthur Nzeribe issuing a public statement where he made it clear that he and the Igbo people were opposed to Yoruba presidency.  Abiola’s pan Nigeria mandate was eventually annulled and replaced with an illegal interim contraption. His heroic battle to reclaim his mandate while in Abacha’s detention was frustrated by Igbo leaders including Odumegwu Ojukwu who served as Abacha’s special envoy to Europe for the sole purpose of de-marketing MKO Abiola. In 1999, as against Olu Falae, Yoruba’s mainstream candidate, Igbo leaders settled for Obasanjo, an imposition of northern hegemonic class.

In the race for the 2023 election, the battle against Bola Tinubu by Igbo leaders, their media and unquestioning Obidient have been no less vicious. Following his victory, agenda of Igbo elders, Igbo intellectuals and Obimedia was to try to delegitimize his victory.

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Igbo battles with Fulani hegemonic ruling class from the north with whom they share a common world outlook on how Nigeria should be run has been no less vicious. Igbo as the beautiful bride has always found their Fulani suitor irresistible. Their 1959 (NPC/NCNC) alliance was designed to taunt and hurt Yoruba leadership who had offered to serve under Zik leadership. But trouble started with Ahmadu Bello’s northernization policy that saw to the exit of all Igbo from northern bureaucracy.  Their marriage of convenience finally collapsed following the disputed 1962/3 census.

Following the constitutional crisis that followed the 1964 election, it was Zik who by seeking the support of the military over his stand-off with Balewa, that first exposed the military to politics. With 33 Igbo military officers, 10 Yoruba and eight from the north, the Igbo thought they were invincible. Young Igbo military officer’s sympathetic to Zik’s cause later staged the military putsch of January 1966 that led to the killing of all northern military officers and northern political leaders while they spared their own military and political leaders.

Nwafor Orizu who served as acting president in the absence of Zik, according  to Richard Akinjide, one of the surviving ministers, refused to call on the most senior minister to form government as provided for in the constitution. Ironsi, commander in-chief who we were told foiled the coup, insisted he could not guarantee the safety of the ministers except power was ceded to him. Dr Nwabueze, one of Ironsi advisers was said to have drafted Decree 34 of 1966 turning the country from a federal state to a unitary state. But it turned out a pyric victory for the Igbo as their northern rivals fought back in July 1966 leading to pogroms and civil war of 1967-70

They two rivals regrouped again in 1979 as NPN and NPP. But the alliance again collapsed just before the 1983 election over sharing of spoils of office.

In 1999, the two rivals again came together under a PDP umbrella. For 16 years they did what they knew how to do best-sharing the resources of the nation through privatization and monetization policy. Again, what brought them together was to throw them apart when Saraki became a whistle-blower in the theft of N1.7t by children of PDP stalwarts in the name of fuel subsidy despite importing not even a pint of fuel.

 In 2023, infidelity over PDP rotational policy ripped them apart.  Atiku Abubakar appealed to the northern ‘born to rule’ ethnic sentiments while Obi successfully exploited the ethnic and religion sentiments of his Igbo people. The two ended up as sore losers.

The ongoing battle for Senate presidency of the 10th assembly is all that is needed to know there is no love lost between the South-south and their Igbo Southeast brothers.

With 64-year Igbo vicious war against Yoruba and her interest, with relationship between them and their Fulani suitors often defined in the main by mutual suspicion and with their South-south neighbours now savouring their freedom after years of Igbo domination, it is not difficult to see how uncertain Igbo aspiration for leadership of a multi-ethnic Nigeria where trust constitutes a building block is.

Kogi State’s Senators Smart Adeyemi and Dino Melaye are two of a kind. Bold, brash and most often gaseous, they are committed to no ideological orientation. Their Okun people did not send them to Abuja to shed crocodile tears over the state of the nation, or to become an accessory to Zamfara’s Ahmad Sani Yerima, whose motion for adopting the senate president through acclamation by 40 PDP opposition senators in the absence of APC 51 senators allowed Bukola Saraki to literally steal the chair of the 8th assembly.

Their brief, I am sure, also did not include humiliating on the floor of the senate the Customs helmsman for discovering that an SUV said to be part of the senate president’s fleet was cleared from the ports without evidence of payment of custom duties.

The Okun people must have felt scandalised that those they sent to Abuja engaged in melodrama including adorning a PhD academic gown to celebrate the senate ethic committee’s confirmation after a probe that Melaye earned a third class degree in Geography from ABU despite all his wild claims, or shutting down of the Senate chambers to lead 82 ‘like- minds’ “Dinobidient’’ senators to the EFCC office in support of their senate president’s wife who was undergoing interrogation over handling of contracts.

Driven only by a desire to serve only themselves, the duo have been crisscrossing PDP and APC since the beginning of the Fourth Republic. Last week, Adeyemi, who was said to have been recruited from PDP by Governor Yahaya Bello, who gave him a third term in the Senate for which in return he promised to support all decisions taken by Bello, including imposing his political enemy, lost the November governorship ticket to Ahmed Ododo, who scored 78,704 votes to his 311.

Today, Adeyemi’s battle cry is that his denial of the ticket was an affront to his Okun people who have never produced a governor. Dino Melaye, his alter ego, who moved from APC to PDP, however, won his own contest as a governorship candidate in the November election.

 Adeyemi’s long-time friend, Comrade Tims Ejigah, has said, “based on his antecedents of use and dump tactics, he lacks capacity to win the governorship election,” adding “If per adventure, he gets the ticket of APC, it would be an exercise in futility. Governor Nyesom Wike, a close associate of Melaye, thinks Dino does not have what it takes to be a governor, saying, “When you give Dino that ticket, you know he won’t win in Kogi State.”

But for its tragic consequences for our nation, one would have wished Dino Melaye, who claims “he is in politics to ensure the youths get their own share of Nigeria’s resources,” becomes a governor so that we can see how he hopes to juxtapose his obsession with obscene display of wealth, including his Abuja huge mansion, expensive wrist watches and cars said to range from Lamborghini, Porsche to Rolls Royce , with the aspirations of Kogi youths he had told could become successful by waiting on God.

The truth, however, is that Kogi and her self-serving senators, who deceitfully swear by their people, are but a metaphor for our crisis of nation-building. I am sure the Okun Yoruba people who daily endure the drama of their representatives would have been more interested in how non-resolution of the national question by self-serving Nigerian politicians since 1999 is affecting their quest for self-realisation.

Unfortunately, the role model of these senators without a sense of history remains Awoniyi, whose integration into the ruling class as Ahmadu Bello’s secretary Adeyemi saw as evidence of justice, fair-play and recognition by the northern ruling hegemonic power.

Integrating prominent members of the federating nationalities into the ruling class through marriage, as they did with the conquered Hausas, through political office holdings as they did with Tafawa Balewa, Yakubu Gowon and Obasanjo at different periods of our nation’s history, or through business/financial awards by appointments into key positions in the CBN, Ports Authority, NNPC etc. remain the modus operandi of the Nigerian ruling hegemonic powers.

One is not sure if our Kogi senators understand that appointment of Awoniyi as Ahmadu Bello’s secretary was a political master stroke to end the agitation of the Okun Yoruba of the north for integration into the fold of their Yoruba compatriots in line with Awolowo’s demand for the equality of all Nigerian federating nationalities.

Tafawa Balewa became leader of the government and later Prime Minister. The deft political move which gave the appointed political office holders a false sense of being in control when in reality, power resided in Ahmadu Bello/the hegemonic powers, no doubt led to the pacification of restive minority groups of southern Bauchi and reduction in the level of hostilities towards their Fulani overlords.

With Lagos as the prize for his pains, Zik reneged on an earlier resolution to create states for minorities before independence during the 1957 London constitutional debate.

Awo’s efforts to integrate Yoruba in the north with their kith and kin in the west, even after a referendum, was frustrated by the coalition partners, determined to maintain a stranglehold on the minorities in their respective regions.

For his pains, Zik became Governor-General after independence with his ethnic group controlling over 70 percent of available political offices in Balewa’s government. Zik’s other reward was a gift of a horse from Ahmadu Bello, while Balewa got a copy of the Holy Quran, with Ahmadu Bello, according to Trevor Clark, expressing fulfillment and personal satisfaction that he had “shared Nigeria between his two faithful lieutenants.”

But it was a pyrrhic victory. The fall-out over the 1963 census crisis was to lead to Zik’s replacement with Akintola, who also received a gift of a sword from Ahmadu Bello.  Akintola’s reward was on account of his betrayal of Awolowo, his principal, in order to reclaim his position as Premier of the west following his constitutional removal from office which was upheld by the London Privy Council judicial pronouncement. But for Akintola also, it was equally a pyrrhic victory as he was consumed by the January 1966 coup.

From the above brief journey through memory, it is obvious our crisis of nation-building has been compounded by our self- serving politicians who falsely swear by their people. This is why the likes of Adeyemi, Melaye and others who look up to those integrated into the ruling hegemonic class in order to frustrate the quest for self-actualisation of Nigerians, including Awoniyi, Balewa, Gowon and Obasanjo, are not the people we need in the national assembly.

It has now dawned on everyone that we are at a crossroads. With the apparent change of mindset of descendants of Nigeria’s hegemonic power, people needed in the senate are those who will be committed to consensus building towards the arduous task of nation-building, and not those who will continue to use their people for political bargaining or jesters who claim their “specialty is to tame lions.”

To the extent that humans by nature always want to protect their identity, people of a particular race, ethnicity or religion will always form an alliance and organize politically to defend the interest of their group. It is for these reason elections are often wars among competing tribal groups.   Our 2023 election took the same pattern as our past successive elections starting with 1954, 1959, 1964, 1979 and 1983 etc.  The last week Lagos gubernatorial contest, greeted by pockets of skirmishes and violence which were, according to the police, promptly brought under control was not different from those of other states such as Delta, Bauchi, Kano, Cross Rivers and Rivers where 11 people were said to have lost their lives to violence.

But challenging some of the self-preservation strategies adopted by Lagos State in the run up to the election, ‘Obi-media’ has been beating drum of war in an effort to set the Igbo in Lagos against their Yoruba hosts. Reacting to a trending video of Igbo people holding a meeting in far-away Abia State where they declared: “We are not going to negotiate Lagos State. Lagos is our top priority. We must not give it up at any cost even if it cost us our lives”; the beating of war drum in Lagos by unruly ‘Obidient’ insisting “it must be Obi’s choice for Lagos governorship or nothing” and senior ‘Obidients’ feeding their uninformed youths with false claim that Lagos is “no man’s land”, the owners of the land sought refuge in the culture that has sustained their forbears from generation to generation. They offered rituals to ‘Esu Odara’, the god of confusion followed by parade of Oro and Ogboni cult members to sanitise their land. 

This was a natural instinct of a people under siege. I am sure this cannot be strange to Igbo people that have lived with the Yoruba for several decades. Besides, the Igbo in foreign land by culture consider themselves as strangers who must escape home during periods of adversity to allow the owners of the land who know how to appease their own gods face their own demons. (Chinua Achebe: No Longer at Ease) In 1993, they did this successfully when fearing Yoruba would go to war over MKO Abiola’s annulled election, they escaped back to the East in droves.

 Unfortunately, what would have been taken in its stride by Igbo who were not experiencing such development for the first time was blown out of proportion by ‘Obi-media’ that now want us to believe it is waging Igbo war. The hot exchanges and sabre-rattling that followed  has inadvertently brought back sad memory of Igbo elites’ suspected  lust for Lagos land dating back to 1949 and through the civil war  when Emeka Ojukwu in a letter to Col Victor Banjo declared that his short-lived Biafra would determine the fate of Lagos after pacification.

Our new self-proclaiming defenders of Igbo interest have also unconsciously done a great disservice to Igbo youths by raising the spectre of  “Wild – Wild – West operation wet e” of the 1960s without telling the youths that Yoruba always protect settlers in their midst. Despite the complicity of Igbo political elite in the travails of Yoruba in the hands of NCNC/NPC coalition partners of the period, no Igbo man was killed. Those targeted were Yoruba traitors that sowed the wind and made to reap the whirlwind. Professor Banji Akintoye also reminded us not too long ago, that even when the Fulani invaders were stopped by Ibadan warriors in Osogbo, captured Fulani Generals were allowed to return home while Yoruba Generals that worked hand-in-glove with the invaders were executed

But we have passed through this sorry path before.  In the first republic, a section of the media also promoted ethnic rivalry. The West African Pilot was for instance “a fire-eating and aggressive nationalist paper of the first order. It was natural very popular, the very thing the youths of the country had been waiting for” (Awo P.85) But while the paper in its editorial of August 8, 1948 praised of Ibibio Union as “a model union”, Egbe Omo Oduduwa formed in 1947 was viciously attacked while its leaders and their properties were physically attacked in Lagos (Awo P.140 -142.)

 To Nnamdi Azikiwe, social regeneration meant the elimination of tribal prejudice among Africans, insisting an African was an African whenever he was born and that tribalism was postponing African social unity (Azikiwe, Renascent Africa P. 28)

But it soon became apparent that Zik was not practicing what he preached when in his address as president of Ibo Federal Union he said: “It would appear the God of Africa has specially created the Igbo nation to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of all ages” At the end, it was evident that all the nationalist drive and the “Elek-Zik-fication” of Nigeria press were not driven by altruism. Unfortunately it was the war between West African Pilot’s reckless journalists/columnists and those of the Nigerian Citizen, a paper owned by Northern regional government that prepared the ground for the collapse of the first republic.

And this is why it is dangerous to allow Obi-media to continue to beat drum of war even as it feeds the public with half-truth and untruths. Although what happened in Lagos was a child’s play to what happened elsewhere in the country, it has continued to whip up ethnic sentiments about the treatment of Igbo in Lagos, Obi’s victory without proof and how Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour whose only qualification was because he was Obi’s choice and of Igbo mother, was so out-rigged in Lagos that reconciliation would be impossible.

Again, as it was in the first republic, with the diversionary tactics and crude assault on all our institutions, the lesson of the 2023 election is lost.  Atiku’s smooth win in northwest, Obi in southeast and Tinubu in southwest while the rest of the country is engulfed in tribal wars, was a reminder that we must stop playing the ostrich and come up with a workable federal structure.

As Awo put it back in 1945, “Nigeria is not a nation, but a mere geographical expression. There are no Nigerians in the same way as they are “English’ Welsh or French”. There as much difference between them as there is between Germany, English, Russian and Turks. Besides their cultural and social outlook differ widely and their indigenous political institutions have little in common. The best constitution for such diverse people is a federal constitution”.

This is as true today as it was some 78 years ago when we rejected ‘the path to Nigeria freedom”. But the good thing today is that we don’t have to invent the wheel. We can adopt an Indian, Canadian, Brazilian or the Australian template.

Democracy thrives better in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society with a workable federal arrangement. Those who therefore rage against those in quest for self-actualization and those who have resolved to protect their value system must be reminded that in America from where we borrowed the new value system, constituency boundaries are periodically redrawn to ensure inviolability of their constituencies just as Canada and New Zealand not too long ago told Muslim immigrants who were not ready to embrace the values of their host communities to return to their countries.

Democracy and the federal arrangement are like twin brothers. One cannot exist without the other. Because of their landlocked and hostile country, the Igbo political elite apparently have no faith in the federal arrangement. They can therefore not be democrats because their national instinct wherever they find themselves is to dominate others.

Sir Ahmadu Bello, the first premier of Northern Region was the first to cite this tendency as justification for his northernisation policy, an instrument he successfully deployed to replace about 4000 civil servants of non-northern descent with northerners.

“The Igbos are more or less the type of people whose desire is mainly to dominate everybody. If they go to a village, to a town, they want to monopolise everything in that area. If you put them in labour camp as a labourer, within a year, they will try to emerge as head man of the camp and so on. Well in the past our people were not alive to their responsibilities…”

And as if to validate Ahmadu Bello’s thesis, the first women riot in Nigeria was in Calabar when the women protested the take-over of sales of bush meat, an exclusive preserve of Calabar women by Igbo men.

What defines Igbo politics since independence therefore, is domination. Whether their crusade is described as nationalism, search for good governance  or quest for a national rebirth, or whether masked as ‘Obidients’, EndSARS or Zikism, the endgame is domination or enslavement of their host community, an aberration the federal arrangement we adopted at independence which was unfortunately destroyed by General Aguiyi Ironsi’s Decree 34 of 1966 was designed to prevent.

Let us start with the EndSARs protest of 2020. Those who provided intellectual support for the protest and some of its field commanders including Prof Pat Utomi and Charly Boy Oputa, Falz and Macaroni, claimed it was in pursuit of good governance. But with the massive destruction of public and private infrastructure in Lagos, the best run state in Nigeria and the fifth biggest economy in Africa, it soon became obvious as confirmed by governors of other Yoruba states that came to commiserate with Lagos governor that it was a matter of some envious people trying to destroy what they could not have.

EndSARS sponsors knew Tinubu had never worked for federal government. They knew the media houses indebted to the federal government through AMCON to the tune of about N15b, those whose proprietors are in court over their illegal share in the ‘Dazukigate’ war chest during Jonathan presidency and of course those whose proprietors pretend to provide moral compass after their indictment for financial malfeasance against their states.

That those media houses were spared while media houses associated with Tinubu were torched only confirm the claim, not by a few, that those who envy and hate Yoruba even after building their fortunes in Lagos, only exploited the EndSARS crisis  to attack Yoruba interests and its political leaders.

It is also perhaps only the unquestioning Obidients who could have believed that Obi, part of PDP until the eve of the election and with nothing to show for his eight years in Anambra, beyond daily harvest of death, would win the 2023 presidential election. All the same, they have awarded themselves victory while ex-governor Chukwuemeka Ezeife of Anambra has threatened “it would be disaster if Tinubu, the president-elect is sworn in” claiming without proof, that “Obi won the presidential election across the country”.

However, whilst Aremo Segun Osoba, an elder-statesman and former Ogun State governor praised the (Obidients) for voting massively for their candidate, he could not resist raising questions as to what informed their choice of Labour Party in Eti-Osa and in Ikoyi. He was at a loss as to why Banky W and Obanikoro, well-educated scions of respected Yoruba political families would be defeated in Eti-Osa by an unknown commercial motorcycle rider.  In Ikoyi, an exclusive preserve of the rich, he was wondering why Obidients would settle for Labour Party that has no record as against APC whose urban renewal programme had led to 400-fold increase in the value of their properties.

As it is today, so it was yesterday. ‘Zikism’ was the reigning god among Nigerian youths between 1935 and 1959.  Zik of Africa and the foremost Nigerian nationalist was a fiery orator. His anti-imperialist lectures at Glover Hall were a must-attend for the youths of the period. He would quote authority after authority that no one could verify. But shouting of Zeeek was ear-jarring anywhere the African oracle spoke. Among Lagos white cap chiefs, Zik could do no wrong. Although, there was only one Igbo man in the inaugural meeting of NCNC, Yoruba, the real owner of NCNC did not raise any objection to his stepping into the shoes of Herbert Macaulay after his death. He was winning elections in most Yoruba urban centres.

But it did not take long before it became obvious Azikiwe’s nationalism was not driven by altruism but his personal ambition and love for his Igbo nation. The Ibo Federal Union was formed in 1943. Zik became its national president. According to Obafemi Awolowo, “Dr Azikiwe himself was an unabashed Ibo jingoist who gave the game away when he said during his presidential speech at the Ibo Federal Union in 1949 that “It would appear the god of Africa has specially created the Igbo nation.to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of the ages.. Not only to conquer others but also adapt themselves to the role of preserver” (Awo Autobiography PP 172) 

When Egbe Omo Oduduwa was formed in Lagos in 1949, Zik claiming it was targeted at Igbo and 27million Nigerians unleashed virulent attack on the Egbe and its leaders who were physically attacked along their properties by Zikists who behaved like todays’ Obidients. Consequently when in 1952, Zik wanted to become premier of Western Region at a period an easterner was managing the east and a northerner was managing the affairs of the north, Yoruba political elite’s elected as independent candidates including Adisa Akinloye and others elected on the platform of Ibadan People Party (IPP), opted to take their fate in their own hands, by joining Awolowo’s AG to form Western Region government in 1952.

Igbo political elite have no abiding faith in democracy, federalism, the West or even in the North. When the Balewa government freed itself from Igbo beautiful bride blackmail, the military struck in January 1966. When they envisaged they would have little role in 1993 Abiola’s landslide victory in which he secured support from only one of Igbo’s four states, Igbo leading lights  including Arthur Nzeribe, Walter Ofonagoro, Clement Apamgbo, with some help from Obasanjo supported Babangida’s annulment of the election and inauguration of an interim contraption.