THE statement announcing a Yoruba colloquium for December 3, 2018 was carefully crafted. It would involve Yoruba leaders across party lines, said the announcer who is an adviser to Bode George, a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chieftain. Some of those expected at the occasion include Chief George himself as the keynote speaker, Afenifere leaders like Ayo Adebanjo and Femi Okurounmu, and Bode Olajumoke and Ebenezer Babatope, both PDP leaders. How that eminent list constitutes Yoruba leaders across party lines is hard to say. The list is doubtless longer, but the attendance will likely be one-sided.
The objective of the colloquium, it must be conceded, may be salutary, if a little idealistic in view of the contemporary political developments upending structures and processes in Nigeria. The meeting hopes to examine the position of the Yoruba yesterday, today and in regards to the 2019 polls. They hope to find ways of engendering unity of purpose and preparing the race for leadership now and in the future. They also worried that the Yoruba seem to have declined so badly as to become rudderless.
It is not clear what Chief George is going to say in his address, considering that he seems to have inspired the colloquium, or whether what he has to say will be earthshaking and definitive. As the inspirer of the meeting, Chief George will dominate the gathering, use it as a sounding board for his pet ideas, and, given his temper and worldview, hope to mould discussions along his political and social makeup. Nor is it clear what he hopes to say that he has not said before. He is domineering and opinionated, and he will leave no one in doubt that he and others like him truly represent the Yoruba worldview, particularly politically and ethically.
Chief George’s bona fides cannot be questioned. He earnestly desires a prominent role for the Yoruba, and wants them in leadership positions because he believes that they possess the robust ideas and philosophies which Nigeria requires to forge ahead in the world. The problem, however, is that regardless of his sometimes noble intentions, Chief George lacks the discipline to accommodate other points of view, tolerate dissent, and is quite unable to see all sides of a story, especially when that story wars against his preferences and senses.
The colloquium is unlikely to end as loftily as Chief George hopes. The list of attendees is in fact likely to be one-sided, as news clips already indicate. And having reinforced one another in the PDP, particularly their support for former president Goodluck Jonathan, and having suggested at various fora that the Southwest’s endorsement of President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015 was a mistake, the possibility of suddenly being open-minded, as the colloquium would require to make it successful, is very slim. In short, despite their noble intentions, the meeting may sadly end up as a gathering of PDP or pro-Jonathan supporters.
What is in fact questionable about the colloquium is the method deployed by Chief George and his group. In view of current political realities, there is also nothing to suggest that his fundamental assumptions about Yoruba unity, the kind that existed during the Awolowo era, are both relevant now and even required. As Chief George must have found out, seeing that his meeting will unavoidably be one-sided, it will take much more than he is willing to give to call a meeting that will be truly representative of the Yoruba. It is no longer even desirable.
Instead, Chief George and other Yoruba leaders should focus their search on aggregating, disseminating and marketing the principles and values that have ennobled the Yoruba over the centuries. This is a more difficult route to traverse, but it takes care of present existential realities and transcends the political divisions and schisms that now inundate the Yoruba and obviously agitate Chief George. Yoruba politics is bifurcated; there is little Chief George can do to ameliorate or heal those divisions. But there is much more he and others can do to sell those seemingly abstract realities that occupy the subconscious of every Yoruba person and politician.
The Yoruba may be facing collective threats even now; but those threats will need to concretise in unmistakeably alarming way to engender the kind of unity of purpose shown under Chief Awolowo, Michael Ajasin and Abraham Adesanya. However, once that threat is neutralised, the Yoruba always return to their factionalised and regicidal default setting. In calling the meeting, Chief George spoke of notable achievements recorded by eminent Yoruba people, hoping that when the race comes together and speaks with one voice, such feats could be re-enacted. He must however understand that those feats, nearly all springing from individual enterprise, did not owe anything to Yoruba unity or common purpose. There is a limit to how the Yoruba can return to the past; and there is an even greater limit to how partisan political leaders, some of them quite undisciplined and uninspiring in their personal lives and philosophies, can midwife that ethnic utopia.
