In his meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari last Tuesday, Governor Abiola Ajimobi of Oyo State served what looked like a specially brewed Ibadan chieftaincy storm in a tea cup before the inscrutable Nigerian president. Speaking to reporters after the meeting, the governor said he mentioned the chieftaincy crisis to the president and hinted at the concomitant security implications of the tug of war going on in the city. He was, however, silent on what responses he got from his passive host. He did not also tell reporters that the president asked about the matter first nor fretted over any security lapses. It was clear to reporters that intimating the president of what was afoot in Ibadan was the governor’s initiative.
Hear him: “I mentioned the issue of security to the President. Recall that Oyo State has been in the news because of the issue of Olubadan Chieftaincy Declaration. So, I came to let him know that the Olubadan is my father. He is a younger brother to my own father and we have had a very long relationship, which has been a father-son relationship. I assured him (Buhari) that come rain, come shine, I will never depose the Olubadan because he is my father; a son does not depose his father. Though he has done so many things that can constitute the basis for his removal, I will never remove him. We have to continue to show respect. I also made him to realise that that particular chieftaincy declaration is being politicised. Politicians have hijacked it. Out of 11 council members, two of them are dead now and we have only nine left. It is only one that is not supporting it; and that one is a politician. He wants to run after I leave office.”
Gov Ajimobi did not tell reporters why he needed to bother the president with the chieftaincy trivia he created, nor seemed to even appreciate the illogic in the justifications he gave reporters. It is even clearer that his sense of history may be a little troubling while his appreciation of the role of the Southwest in national affairs at a time of great and turbulent political events may also be off-key. If his account of the interaction he had with the president is accurate, then it is safe to conclude that the president did not ask him about the Ibadan chieftaincy matter, and, more tellingly, did not comment on it after the unsolicited briefing. If that does not tell the governor something, then he is even more imperceptive than the Nigerian judges, among them two Supreme Court justices, who published drivelling exculpatory accounts unworthy of a magistrate after their residences were raided last October by the secret service.
Many months ago, this column had fussed that most Southwest governors were third-rate, not only in their demonstrable lack of assiduity in projects conception and implementation, but also more disconcertingly in their lack of understanding of the forces and dynamics shaping and skewing the so-called Nigerian federation. Gov Ajimobi, from his actions and reactions to the Ibadan chieftaincy issue and his depiction of same to the president, is obviously one of the gubernatorial archetypes in reference in the Southwest. The governors are less inclined to the philosophical underpinnings that shaped the governments of their predecessors, and, as their abysmal reactions to the Kogi electoral conundrum of November 2015 shows, are even less strategic in their thinking than their contemporaries, particularly from some states in the North.
Gov Ajimobi may be close to the Olubadan throne, he has, however, not shown any understanding of the city’s proud history and heritage. First, the chieftaincy crisis was avoidable. But in addition, had he a sense of the historical significance of the role the city played in Yoruba history, despite its modern weaknesses and troubles, and notwithstanding the consequences of the Yoruba wars of the 19th century, he would have done everything to strengthen the institution rather than threaten it, not to talk of needlessly dragging the reputation of its monarch before the president in a futile show of self-importance. Has the governor asked himself how many other governors have toed his line and then proceeded to Abuja to report the monarchs of their great cities?
But Gov Ajimobi’s lack of historical consciousness and strategic thinking is replicated in nearly all parts of the Southwest where most of the governors swoon over the president. The region is in decline, and despite the best efforts of regionalists and the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN), its competitive edge has become considerably blunted. Worse, the region is now also deeply divided. It is not a hidden fact that crisis is brewing below the surface in the ongoing and bitter struggle for the soul of the region. There are at least three contending groups battling for supremacy. Rather than synergise efforts or reinforce one another, they appear set to fight to the death to entrench their positions and enthrone their worldview. The battles will be sporadic for some time, as one phony skirmish dovetails into another, until next year when there will probably be a conflagration.
The contest for supremacy in the Southwest will be nasty. In June the little-known Yoruba Leadership and Peace Initiative group met in Ibadan to forge a common perspective and agenda for the region. Their communiqué made sense, but there was nothing extraordinary in it. It met naturaly with cold stare. In September, the Yoruba Summit group held a much bigger and well-attended rally in the same city. Its communiqué made waves and steered the region in the direction of regionalism and restructuring. Though controversial, the summit has seemed to noteworthily capture the imaginations of the region. Then last week, signposting the divisions inherent in the region, the All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders met in Ibadan to disavow restructuring and promote devolution of power.
Analysts contend that the Yoruba thrive despite their divisions and even in political opposition. They may be right. But no one has yet proved that this great dispositional flaw has not at bottom clearly undermined regional progress and retarded their sophistication more than they imagine. Moreover, the decisions of the APC leaders’ meeting indicate that there are two tendencies within the group that met in Ibadan on Thursday, with one section evidently and remorselessly pro-Buhari and oriented towards Abuja on the plausible ground that the party is after all in government; and the other a bit hesitant, quizzical and feeling trapped between a rock and a hard place. The APC leaders are, however, finding it increasingly difficult to justify their exuberant support for President Buhari because of his appalling prejudices, insularity, anti-democratic tendencies, evident lack of restraint, and fair-mindedness.
In the battle against the less openly partisan Yoruba Summit, the Southwest APC leaders may be fighting the most difficult battle of their lives. They may occupy the most visible political positions in the region, but they have not proved circumspect in reading the signs of the times, placing President Buhari’s divisive and militaristic policies accurately in the right context, and aggregating the deep existential yearnings of the region. The Yoruba Summit might contain many discredited leaders, some of them lapdogs of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and zanies of the Goodluck Jonathan era, but they are increasingly wrong-footing the Southwest APC leaders, some of whom lack the wisdom and foresight to offer strategic leadership within the context of a highly polarised nation. It is indeed alarming that Gov Ajimobi could say this after Thursday’s meeting: “Besides, we should realise that we owe a lot to the President and Commander-in-Chief, Muhammadu Buhari, whose major preoccupation, since assumption of power, has been how to meet the basic needs of the ordinary citizen and make life comfortable for him.” Surely, there must be a limit to the self-abnegating politics of Southwest governors.
There is trouble ahead for the Southwest, just as Igbo leaders’ incompetence in channelling the demands and aspirations of the restive, maligned, and angry Southeast showed a few weeks ago. It is tragic that even when they acquire the right cause, sections of the Yoruba leadership still demonstrate the requisite lack of character, courage, dispassion and judgement needed to make their people thrive in Nigeria. And when they embrace the wrong cause, it is depressing how they bad-temperedly prosecute their battles. Manifesting the characteristics of the curse of liberalism in a country where the North is still partly theocratic and feudalistic and thereby largely cohesive, and where the Southeast is culturally monolithic, aggressive, republican and sometimes schizoid, the regicides of the Southwest may finally be prepared to undo themselves, just as their values and virtues are being denuded by external influences. Their worldview does not admit of the excesses and narrow-mindedness being displayed by the president. That a significant section of their elite still finds it comfortable to embrace and support him is more a function of their foolish and indefensible internal schisms than their cracked ideological compass.
If they are wise, the Southwest APC leaders will not insist on maintaining cohesion within their depleted and jaded ranks just because the ‘other people’, as ex-governor Bisi Akande inelegantly put it last Thursday, had taken a countervailing position on restructuring. The APC men have a responsibility to actively rediscover the character and principles that formed the leitmotif of the politics of the Yoruba during their historical ascendancy. It was not foolish to support President Buhari against Dr Jonathan in 2015, given what is now known of the economic damage superintended by the latter; but it is monstrous to rhapsodise the president’s politics despite the incontestable fact that everything he stands for and every underhand politics he plays with monarchical airs war against not only the character and worldview of the Southwest but also against the very essence, both spiritual and physical, of the Yoruba.
If the great minds of the North are not shocked and embarrassed by the sectional politics and distorted appointments of the Buhari presidency, it must not be the duty of Yoruba leaders across quarrelsome divides to defend his divisiveness and lack of ideological conviction, not to talk of propping him up in the hope that on some fortuitous tomorrow a president whose taciturnity extends to difficulty in verbalising appreciation and whose ethnic impressions are balanced on the fulcrum of exceptionalism can somehow commit the self-immolation needed to return the favour to the Southwest after he has had his political fill. If the Southwest must grovel in a manner their history has not accustomed them to, let them at least do it before someone who exudes inspiring political and philosophical achievements.
