“Omo a ni, e je o se!” (He’s our child, let him rule) — was the Ibadan battling cry, during the tempestuous 1983 general election. On the stump were two brilliant fellows.
The one was Bola Ige, aka Cicero of Esa Oke, the charismatic incumbent of Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s beloved party, Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). Ige, the razor-tongued Ijesa man of formidable intellect, had talked himself into trouble with his Ibadan hosts, from whose stock even came his wife, Atinuke; and among whom he had lived, all his colourful adult life.
The other was the genius of numbers, Victor Omololu Olunloyo and the intellectual’s intellectual, at home with any topic under the sun, though he was — still is — a razor-sharp engineer. He was something of a maverick, though. He was the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) governorship candidate.
Ige versus Olunloyo? Something had to give! So, everyone fell back to sentiments; and the rather defensive Ibadan, relishing the first time a homer would be boss at the Agodi Government House, gushed: “Omo a ni, e je o se!”
Roll the camera forward to Great Britain 2022. Boris Johnson had just self-destructed. Rishi Sunak, the ethnic-Indian though now a thoroughbred Brit, loomed large in the horizon to be Prime Minister.
But a conclave of Tories and the British establishment popped up Liz Truss — “Omo a ni, e je o se!” The only difference, from the Oyo 1983 scenario: Sunak was the far better material, as his campaign economic proposals clearly showed.
Well, the Brits settled for the native — but she spectacularly crashed after 45 days: the shortest tenure of a PM in British history! But before her, Truss had sacrificed Kwasi Kwarteng, the ethnic-Ghanaian, whose disastrous proposals as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance minister) did Truss in! So long for the shimmer of “most racially diverse British cabinet in history!”
Just as well: Jeremy Hunt (who succeeded Kwarteng as chancellor and rolled back his catastrophic proposals) is not hunting for Ms Truss’s job. But he sure haunted her out of it, by utterly dismantling the PM’s controversial proposals to stabilize the market!
Well, back to another Oyo cultural parallel: perhaps with her short rule and spectacular crash, Liz the PM, just “followed” namesake Elizabeth 11, the monarch? Talk of the British “Abobaku”!
With Sunak now PM, and Labour’s Sadiq Khan already Mayor of London, the Raj is finally having its own against the flickers of mother empire! Interesting times!