In the end, and as it has been famously proclaimed by a political wit, all politics is local. This column craves the indulgence of the numerous fans and readers of its Sunday musings, particularly the Nigerian multitude, to do some ethnic arithmetic this morning and in subsequent issues. In many ways, when we beam a searchlight on the Yoruba Question, we are also beaming a powerful x-ray on the National Question and the problematic arrested nationhood in Nigeria.
Let us therefore begin with the kernel and motto of this intervention. For integration to be meaningful, it cannot afford to be piecemeal and offhand, lacking in ideological coherence and integrity. But in certain political circumstances, integration can be incremental as long as the part does not threaten the organic whole. Partial integration is a product of partial vision. Economic integration cannot take place in the absence of political integration.
A great political drama is unfolding in the oil and bitumen-rich and humanly endowed state of Ondo as presided over by the politically adroit Rahman Olusegun Mimiko. It is a drama that has pitted some of its outstanding intellectual products against the rest of their intellectual peers and comrades in arms in the old west.
It is so profoundly ironic that it is in the rump of the old Ondo province that this great battle is being fought. History often indulges in a cruel mockery of humanity. This was where it all started, when the late sage, Obafemi Awolowo, journeyed to the ancient town of Owo to team up with the equally revered late statesman and patriot, Michael Adekunle Ajasin.
Thus was born the Egbe omo Oduduwa, an organisation which sought to impose a cultural uniformity on a hitherto fractious and divided Yoruba nation which for fifty years after the collapse of the old Oyo Empire had fought itself to a political and military standstill in a series of civil wars which culminated in the Kiriji Armistice supervised by the colonial overlords. By then, even the fighters had forgotten the original causus belli.
The cultural ascendancy of the Egbe omo Oduduwa which invoked as a stirring and rallying trope the illustrious name of Oduduwa, the fabled primogenitor of the Yoruba race, led to the political hegemony of the Action Group, a party anchored on rousing rhetoric and mass mobilisation. It was arguably the best organised political machine in tropical Africa.
It is to be noted that despite being the older man, and despite being equally accomplished, Ajasin did not feel any qualms whatsoever about accepting Awolowo’s leadership. It was based on an acceptance and acknowledgement of Awo’s sterling credentials as a formidable and visionary political thinker and outstanding organiser. It was also based on the principle of noble self-abnegation in the larger interest of political group and nation.
Basorun J.K Randle once told snooper of how miffed and mystified he was as a young boy when a man with a dignified aura walked in only for his great father and all the Lagos political grandees and fabled aristocrats to quietly stand up in deference. When he later asked his illustrious father what on earth was going on, J’K Randle told his boy that that was Obafemi Awolowo, the new leader whom they had all decided to follow. This was another example of noble and collective self-erasure in the greater interest of group and nation at classic play.
Yet the fundamental paradox remains that every time a dominant faction of the Yoruba political elite achieves something close to a complete mobilisation of the Yoruba race for a political cause, the wheels immediately begin to come off the mobilising train leading to a clattering and shuddering halt in the middle of nowhere leaving both the mobilised and their mobilisers in acute distress and dismay. Then the heroic exertions start all over again like some Sisyphean venture.
This was precisely what happened in 1959, 1979 and in 1999. Now in 2012, we are beginning to see telltale signs of elite betrayal of a popular cause once again. Those who are metaphysically minded often point at the celebrated curse of Alaafin Aole when as a result of what he considered to be elite perfidy among the Oyo nobility, the distressed and embattled king was known to have shot his arrow in several directions, indicating insurmountable divisions and irreversible fracturing of inspiration and aspirations among the Yoruba elite until the end of time.
But the sociological explanation is more banal and less awe-inspiring. The wheels often come off the Yoruba train due to a combination of internal sabotage and external assault often presaged by momentous infiltration. The external factors can be briskly disposed of but with careful objectivity. Nigeria is greatly traumatised at the moment and this is not the time for ethnic vainglory and sabre-rattling.
As arguably the most politically advanced and sophisticated ethnic group in Nigeria, it has been noted that, in and out of power, when the Yoruba nation sneezes, the rest of the country catches cold. The fear of the Yoruba is the beginning of wisdom. This is often due to a combination of irrational envy and unenlightened self-interest. Many of the other elite groups simply feel that as the most culturally coherent, economically viable and politically savvy segment of the nation, the modernising Yoruba elite cannot simply walk away from Nigeria just like that leaving others to roast in the post-colonial hell.
Despite our shouting from the rooftop that total political and economic integration is not about the disintegration and covert dismemberment of the nation, many have refused to be persuaded. Despite our well-wrought and splendidly argued contention that Yoruba regional integration is meant to serve as a fast-tracked developmental hub for the rest of the nation and as a heroic nudge for the other regions such as was the case in the First Republic, other elite groups are not persuaded that this is not a sophisticated secessionist gambit.
The most benign view from these hostile quarters is that if the Yoruba cannot use their economic vibrancy, their political sophistication, their cultural subtlety and their prodigious intellectual endowments for Nigeria as a whole, then they aren’t going nowhere. Everybody will roast here together, may be until the western interlopers come with a coffin or a historic curfew.
At its most extreme and malignant, this argument holds that since the Yoruba region was developed with Nigerian resources, then it must serve out its peonage first before even contemplating freedom. This is not about developmental ideas but about serving feudal penance. It is a case of heads you lose and tails you lose. Recently, a rabid ethnic hegemonist even went as far as noting that if the Yoruba insist on leaving, all it will take is a bomb well-aimed at the Third Mainland Bridge to bring the empire crashing.
But anytime the Yoruba modernising elite offer one of their own authentic members to carry the torch for Nigeria, it has always ended in tears and tragedy. The argument is that the Yoruba cannot add political power to cultural and economic empowerment. If it must be a Yoruba person at all, it must be one that cannot pass muster and only one that is critically misendowed enough to continue the project of perpetual and permanent underdevelopment of the nation.
Yet this potentially great country continues to lurch from one crisis to another, stalled in historic stasis and mired in the muck of developmental degradation. It is clear that something will have to give eventually. Like animals boxed into a colonial cage, we continue to scratch and tear at each other.
We cannot just continue like this. If forcefulness of rival developmental paradigms and the clarity of alternative political visions cannot persuade those who hold Nigeria to ransom and their various collaborators, then an unspeakable and very eloquent tragedy will, and very soon too..
But hatred and irrational envy of the other is not the exclusive preserve of other Nigerian nationalities. Many fractions of the Yoruba political elite also exhibit fear, loathing, hatred and irrational envy towards each other. The modern Yoruba political culture is anchored on these pathological traits and with them infiltration is easy and external onslaught easier.
This is why it would amount to a grave error of judgement and lack of political subtlety if the unfolding political drama in Ondo state were to be framed as a clash of will and wits between two titanic personalities or a duel unto death between a rampaging lion and a rampart Iroko. Yes, there is surely a bitter personality tussle somewhere. Yes, this is a power struggle between two of the most successful masters of political mobilisation thrown up by the post-military Yoruba nation. As a ringside observer and thwarted arbitrator, this writer can write a tome on a political romance gone very sour.
But there are underlying social and historical currents to this tussle which make the personalities involved, however forceful and powerful and however attractive or repulsive to the vociferous partisans, to be mere impersonal manifestations of some greater political forces at play. This is ultimately a titanic battle of ideas about the destiny of the Yoruba ethnic group within the larger totality of the Nigerian nation.
To be sure, the struggle for total integration of the Yoruba region does not preclude and cannot exclude the struggle for power at the Nigerian centre. Each is in fact a logical correlate and corollary of the other. But in order to better understand the current forces at play and to deepen our knowledge of the order of battle, it is important to go back to 1959, 1979, 1999 and to Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s parting shot to his shell-shocked party faithful at the tail end of 1983.
(To be continued)
