Tag: Goodluck Jonathan

A few weeks back, a gathering of Yoruba political elders, grizzled royalties, politically displaced renegades and internally rank-shifted refugees , captains of industry and the odd gubernatorial hooligan, gathered in Ile-Ife,  the iconic homestead of the Yoruba people, ostensibly to chart the way forward for the Yoruba nation in a turbulent and tumultuous colonial contraption called Nigeria. This is just as it should be.  When elders and traditional savants desert the homestead, there is crisis everywhere.

Tragically enough, the meeting had hardly progressed before its real intention began to manifest.  It was the latest gambit of the mainstream mantra, an ill-disguised attempt to corral and browbeat the Yoruba people into supporting the fumbling and stumbling administration of Goodluck Jonathan. In Yoruba post-colonial history, mainstreaming, or the immoral and amoral collaboration with an equally amoral and immoral federal administration, has taken several guises, colourations and mutations. But this latest one takes the prize for perfidy and betrayal of the common weal.

What must baffle incredulous onlookers is the illustrious pedigree of some of the attendees. As this column never tires of maintaining, when the hatred of a particular individual takes precedence over all other political considerations, it leads to an occlusion of emergent political realities which in turn leads to more lamentable political misjudgments.

It beats the imagination hollow how some of the iconic Yoruba political grandees could ever belief that a politically sophisticated and eternally conscious people like the Yoruba would buy the hogwash that their salvation lies in open collaboration with inept federal governance.  Right from independence and even before it, the Yoruba people have fought on the side of freedom and justice no matter the ethnic hue, the religious inclination or the professional accoutrement of those at the helm of affairs.

Having been outsmarted and dumped on the political dunghill by Goodluck Jonathan in a quixotic bid for the radical restructuring of the federation which has now ended in dismal failure, it is inconceivable that they would ever imagine that the way forward for the Yoruba people is to go cap in hand before the same Jonathan to beg for juicy federal appointments, allocation of more resources and largesse from a dwindling federal purse. It doesn’t get more politically bizarre.

In the event, the meeting turned out to be a desecration of all values that the Yoruba people hold very dear in their over a thousand years of state-formation and state-restructuring.  The irony was lost on the confreres that this self abasement was taking place in the iconic Obafemi Awolowo University which was built with Yoruba sweat without a penny from the federal government. Within a decade of its founding, the same institution became a world-class citadel of learning and an architectural masterpiece which has attracted global admiration.

When next they choose to defecate with their mainstream mendicancy, they must choose a less holy site.  If they are unable to appreciate how central the old University of Ife is to the Yoruba psyche as a glittering symbol of their sturdy independence and devotion to excellence within the context of an under-achieving nation, they must at least appreciate the centrality of Ife in modern Yoruba history. It was in its rugged forests over a thousand years ago that a man named Oduduwa brought the inchoate sub-tribes in alignment with emergent feudal mode of centralized production by forcibly fusing them into an organic entity under the umbrella of a uni-polar authority.

It was no surprise that the ink had hardly dried on the communiqué before the sparks started flying with factions of the student populace locked in vicious combat. It could have been worse.  The Yoruba nation has a way of communicating its political and psychic displeasures.  The magical symbolism of the event we are about to reveal ought not to have been lost on some of the participants at the Ife conference.

About fifty years ago in 1964 after the Yoruba political mob had taken over the streets to communicate their displeasure with what they considered an usurper authority, a group of die-hard mainstreamers  journeyed to Ile-Ife to find a final solution to the problem of the man who had made life impossible for them and who has made it impossible for the Yoruba nation to join the federal mainstream.

They reportedly stormed the Ife palace and demanded the key to the sacred Yoruba groove from the incumbent royalty with the intent of banishing forever the spirit of the turbulent man. The reigning and supremely regal Ooni, Sir Adesoji Aderemi, reportedly warned them about the utter danger of their quest. But they were furiously adamant, whereupon the wily and sagely Oba released the sacred key to them.  Upon entering the groove, the first person they met was the man whose unyielding spirit they had come to magically excommunicate from its corporeal holding smiling calmly at them. They fled in precipitate and disorderly retreat.

But this was not the end of the matter.  As they journeyed back to the old capital, thunder struck and a multiple automobile crash ensued whose reverberations travelled for several miles. It was said that a leading Yoruba Oba (name deliberately withheld) never recovered from the wounds he sustained in the accident. He died a few months after. The stage was set for the complete combustion of the entire Yoruba nation which persisted until a military take over about eighteen months after.

Whether this story was true or not, whether it correlates with proximate reality is completely irrelevant. It was said that the old Ooni himself was at his evasively gnomic best when pressed on the matter. Only the deeply mystical can call to the deeply mystical. The point to note was that the revered patriarch was never found out of alignment with the dominant consciousness of his volatile people.

Politics has done its beat, and so has magic. Between political magic and magical politics, there is not much to choose for a nation in the throes of traumatic transition to some form of modernity.  The tragedy of our mainstreamers is that they understand neither the contradictory impulses of modernity with its wild and improbable actualities nor the native magic of their own people in its regenerative and recuperative possibilities.