Tag: 2015 elections

Yoruba masses are not worrying about ministerial appointments but about jobs and infrastructure that can make their life meaningful

Most Nigerians will find it hard to believe that the Yoruba have a silent majority or minority, given the folk belief in the country that the Yoruba are the noisiest political animals on Earth. But having observed the political behaviour of the Yoruba as an adult for over half a century, I make bold to say that most Yoruba are silent voters while many of their political leaders are noisy campaigners. The presidential campaign events in the Yoruba region by aides and supporters of President Jonathan are reminiscent of the campaign culture of 1965 in Western Nigeria, especially in the frantic character and tone of campaigns by individuals and groups that choose, in the character of asunrara (professional mourners) to cry more than the bereaved.

Although the level of desperation today in pushing the case of preferred candidates by supporters is as palpable as what obtained during the electoral contest between Alhaji Dauda Adegbenro and Chief Ladoke Akintola, campaign on behalf of PDP and its presidential candidate in the Yoruba region in 2015 evinces significant traits of cultural decline that makes the bizarre electoral campaign of 1965: “Whether you vote for us or not, we have already won the forthcoming election” a child’s play. One thing that was in vogue in the 1965 NNDP campaign and that is more pronounced in 2015 is targeting campaign messages at the elite and with little consideration for the masses, which was the sole focus of Action Group campaign in 1965. For example, President Jonathan and his aides in the Yoruba region have given more attention to elite groups such as the Yoruba Council of Elders, Old Afenifere, and assemblage of Yoruba Obas.

On the part of Yoruba Council of Elders, the decision to support Jonathan’s candidacy is hinged on his readiness to sign a memorandum of understanding with the council on how he would include Yoruba people in his distribution of the largesse of office in his second term. No date and time have been set for the signing. As it was in the days of Obasanjo, so is it now with YCE. The Council of Yoruba Elders is more interested in extracting concessions from Jonathan in terms of how many ministers or board chairpersons he would allocate to the Yoruba region if he gets elected. Nobody in the council seems to be interested in asking why an Ijaw man from a region of the country that used to be a part of old Western region would marginalise Yoruba people in the last five years, despite the contributions made by Yoruba activists to his emergence as president after the death of UmaruYar’Adua and votes from Yoruba states for his bid for the presidency in 2011. It is not clear if YCE is aware of the worries of silent Yoruba voters who have been trooping out to welcome Buhari from Akure to Lagos. Yoruba masses are not worrying about ministerial appointments but about jobs and infrastructure that can make their life meaningful.

Still on elite politics, whatever is left of Afenifere has chosen to hoodwink Yoruba voters by trying ‘to call a dog a monkey.’ Harping on the Jonathan national conference of appointees, Afenifere has chosen to focus on its belief that it is only President Jonathan that can implement the recommendations of his conference. Assuming that there are significant recommendations from the conference, it is wrong to claim that it is President Jonathan or any other person as president that can implement such recommendations. Restoring federal provisions to the constitution is not an executive matter. It is the legislature at the federal and states that can do this. It is thus dishonest to keep harping on the issue of allowing President Jonathan to come for a second term for the purpose of implementing re-federalisation of the country.

Ironically, it was only during Jonathan’s visit to Yoruba region that he himself spoke of the national conference. He did not mention anything like this during his visit to the North nor before his own people in the South-south. Given the President’s selective mention of the national conference and Afenifere’s obsession with the recommendations of the conference, silent Yoruba voters are now put in a position to accept the charge at the beginning of the 2014 conference that the national dialogue was convened principally to divert attention from Jonathan’s accomplishment or lack of it during his first term and to focus on a mirage or a ploy to cultivate Yoruba voters.

It is true that as a leading member of EgbeOmo Yoruba, Action Group, and Unity Party of Nigeria, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his political associates struggled for enhancement and sustenance of federalism in the country. It is also true that Yoruba people since the 1980s have called stridently for return to federalism. But Awolowo and others have not asked for a federal system that denies federating units the power to raise revenue with which to fund their development. Chief Awolowo called for a federal constitution that would allow each federating unit to have an education system that is linked to its culture. The 2014 conference did not consider this aspect of federalism as well, despite several papers sent to Yoruba presidential appointees to the conference. The conference was pleased with the status quo of federal government interfering in education at all levels. Chief Awolowo and other Yoruba federalists did not at any time call for continuation of a judicial system that had grown out of decades of military dictatorship and distortion of the judicial culture of the country, but the 2014 national conference, now being referenced as indispensable to federalism by Afenifere elders, did not see anything wrong with a judicial system in which the federal government is the be-all-and-end-all of judicature in the country, in contradistinction to what obtained in the years before the first coup d’etat in 1966.

Is it not curious that the PDP as a party did not openly support the Jonathan conference in 2014? Even now, the PDP as a party has not joined the Afenifere group in using the national conference as a talking point in the campaign for a second term for the incumbent. Given the fixation of Afenifere on recommendations of the national conference, it is not out of place to ask if there are other things about the national conference report known only to Afenifere elders and that are unknown to President Jonathan and the party for which he is the flag bearer.

The immediate task before Yoruba voters is not implementation of recommendations for a new federal system that invokes the principle of federal legislative supremacy for every item on the Concurrent list. The failure of the conference to touch the principles of fiscal, cultural, and judicial federalism, all hallmarks of shared governance and sovereignty that set federal systems apart from other governance models is obvious to Yoruba voters most of whom may not have the means to call press conferences.

This is the time to push each candidate to tell voters how he would provide leadership for the project of re-structuring the polity in a way that citizens can own the process, rather than just 400 appointees of the president. Yoruba voters also know that not all the 400 appointees share the optimism of Afenifere elders about the outcome of the conference, and this includes people from President Jonathan’s region of Nigeria. As it is, it appears that it is only Afenifere and its cheer leaders that are pleased with the conference. But Yoruba federalists have reasons to suspect any conference recommendation that responds, in the words of Afenifere to just Yoruba demands. This may be why President Jonathan himself shies away from raising the issue of the conference in his campaign outside Yoruba land.

Afenifere elders, like any other Nigerian citizen, have a right to associate with any candidate and party of their choice. What they do not have is the moral right to hoodwink silent Yoruba voters by claiming to think and act on their behalf on the issue of bringing federalism back to the country, an exercise once described by Sir Olaniwun Ajayi (a conference participant and a federalist in thinking and scholarship) as game playing. Afenifere elders must remember the character of the political dynamic during the campaign of 1965. Yorubaland was split between elite politicians as forces for the status quo and mass political movements represented by the silent voters who often sang Bo o r’owo mi o orinu mi (what you see is not what you get). Silent Yoruba voters today know the difference between functional and cosmetic federalism, just as their counterparts in 1965 knew the difference between power politics and welfare politics.