As the din of political battle reaches its crescendo in the rump of the old Ondo province, there is a creeping feeling of Déjà vu. Already, political violence, threats of assassination, accusations of prefabricated rigging have engulfed the state. This high-voltage political atmosphere may be a reflection of the stakes. But it may also presage something darker and far more sinister. Will the west unravel from Ondo this time around? Can an Iroko take the entire Yoruba forest with it?
As we have said in the first instalment, the main purpose of this two-part series is to identify with the currents of regional integration such as they are sweeping the old western region .There can be no equivocation about this. A man is entitled to his partiality and political preferences.
But once again, we have found it necessary to caution some of our numerous readers that the kind of engagement with a traumatised post-colonial society that we mainly undertake in this column is often very difficult to press into immediate political service, and deliberately so.
There is a distinction between the political writer and the writing politician. Snooper is too much aware of the complexities and complications of contemporary politics to be swayed into easy agitprop. In the heat of political battle, the unhurried reflection, the stout and stoic refusal to be panicked into sheer name-calling may often appear like an abdication of responsibility; a pact with the devil himself. In such agonistic contentions where body bags cannot be confused with lap top cases, it is felt that writing must not just be a passion of the mind but the mind of passion itself, with due apologies to Karl Marx.
But it was the same great philosopher who also advises that history must be read with its grand nuances, its delicate ironies, its perplexing paradox and great ambiguities. It is not the columnist that created what is known as the cunning of history. Yes the cunning of history must never prevent us from making a clear choice when the chips are down. Neither must it prevent us from being clamorously partisan when we have to be.
For many of our readers, a continuing problem with this column is the very structure of dialectical writing and the writer’s insistence on applying its cardinal principles to journalism. It is a stylistic battle that predates this column and one that has been going on for almost 30 years. We cannot afford to inherit the intellectual shortcomings of our colonial masters.
Unlike the canons of easy clarity and lucidity emanating from the Anglo-American schools of journalism, dialectical writing often subverts or contradicts its own initial premises in order to gain superior insight. Those who hold on to the initial argument find themselves devastatingly wrong-footed and dramatically upended.
This is not just mere writing about political drama, but the drama of political writing as a private theatre enacted wholly within itself. The writer listens in to his own argument and the murmurs of internal dissension, disagreement and outright disputation. The writing involves a constant shifting and shuffling of the dialectical gears with the writer himself as embattled protagonist.
Let us then begin our concluding remarks about the Ondo imbroglio with a dialectical conceit. Powerful political figures often stamp the badge of their personality on the outcome of a political struggle. But a political struggle cannot and must not be reduced to personalities. As Karl Marx famously noted, men make history, but not under the circumstances of their choice.
In other words, no matter how powerful a personality may be the outcome of a political conflict may be determined by material, intellectual and historical circumstances beyond his control. In the Battle of Waterloo, it was the lesser genius that triumphed. But it was Napoleon’s more egalitarian vision that eventually carried the day, and in spite of himself too..
In our concluding paragraph last week, we cautioned against framing the unfolding political drama in Ondo state as a personal duel unto death, but as a battle of ideas about the future of the Yoruba race and the destiny of Nigeria. It is important to deepen this perspective in order to understand just what is going on and how we got to where we are.
Contrary to blackmail and propaganda, regional integration is not a neo-colonial or imperialising venture. It is not about an emperor and his viceroys sent to predate on hapless captive communities. In a god-forsaken federation it is about maximising opportunities for maximal development in an ethnically unified region and its culturally compatible adjoining communities.
Neither is the inevitable political centralisation that goes with this an attempt to ride roughshod over sub-ethnic sensitivities as they may exist in the larger Yoruba society. It is not an attempt to instutionalise or consecrate a political overlordship in Yoruba land. Neither is it a ploy to grind the subtle cultural differentiations in Yoruba land into a conforming homogeneity. As their history has consistently demonstrated, the Yoruba do not transit from one empire to another empire.
Centralisation often comes with mass mobilisation and a unified and disciplined society. Of course, like many old concepts imposed on new realities, regional integration and centralisation are bound to come with a lot of local impurities and vexatious crudities but these imperfections can only be defined and refined in dynamic collision with reality and other visions and ideas of societies.
It is not enough to pooh-pooh the idea of integration without coming up with other alternative visions of the society. It is intellectually lazy and mischievous to dismiss regionalism as a new form of :”Lagos imperialism”. That this pernicious propaganda is coming from what we thought were progressive quarters shows that something indeed is going on.
But it should be noted that even the old progressive tendency did not gain complete ascendancy over the entire Yoruba geo-political space in one fell swoop. It was an epic slog. The astute and discerning Yoruba electorate have often proved to be veritable masters of their electoral destiny. In 1954, the Action Group lost a general election to the NCNC as a result of venal propaganda.
The Yoruba urban dwellers and city denizens were beginning to feel the pinch of what they thought was punitive and unjust taxation in the name of free primary education and other ameliorative schemes. Overwhelmed and demoralised by the visionary thrust of Awolowo’s policies, the Action Group competitors could only carp and sniff. It worked, but only briefly.
The Action Group and its storied strategists rolled up their sleeves and went back to the people, painstakingly explaining to the populace why tribal marks even though accompanied by great pains and distress often result in greater beauty. By then the gains of the visionary programme were beginning to trickle in. The Yoruba society was rapidly modernising, transiting from farm to the factory and superlative modernity in a Great Leap Forward unknown to tropical Africa.
Ascendancy was restored to the Action Group. But there were still pockets of resistance, particularly in the royalist cities and some other sub-ethnic enclaves suffering from post-empire hang-over. Paradoxically, it was in 1959 at the height of its glory and grandeur that the Action Group began to unravel.
In a bid to capture power at the centre, Awolowo took a sharp ideological lurch to the left, embracing the full socialism which had always been implicit in his grand envisioning of human society. At its best, the Action Group was an unstable ensemble of royalists, monarchists, conservatives and progressives. It proved a Potemkin bridge too far. All that was solid began to melt into thin air.
By 1962, as a result of internal disaffection and external infiltration, the Action Group had fractured irreversibly. The split degenerated into a low-intensity Yoruba civil war which only ended with a military take over in 1966. It was the dawn of darkness as Awolowo himself almost put it. The late sage spent four years in jail.
1979 and the advent of civilian rule restored the total dominance of Awolowo and his party over the Yoruba race. Combining the authority of personal suffering and his by then larger than life status as the undeniable champion and standard bearer of the race, the late sage and his party romped home in the entire Yoruba landscape. By then it was AWO or AWOL.
But by 1982, the wheels had begun to come off the train once again. Chief Bola Ige, then Governor of old Oyo state and one of Awolowo’s most gifted lieutenants, survived a motion to expel him from the party for fraternising with General Obasanjo by the whiskers in what was dubbed the Yola night of long knives. But by then the demon of self-destruction had berthed once again. By 1983, it was being rumoured that one or two of Awolowo’s most trusted loyalists were beginning to hint that the unyielding old man had become a veritable albatross on the Yoruba race.
After he was so egregiously rigged out of contention in the 1983 presidential election, a humiliated and deeply affronted Awo took a final bow from Nigerian politics. In a vote of no confidence in democracy, Awolowo vowed never to seek electoral office again and darkly added that if Nigerians needed his services, they knew where to find him. Awolowo also famously predicted that generations of Nigerians to come may never know real democracy.
Yet the old man was not done. In a famous parting shot at his shell-shocked party faithful at the UPN Congress later that year and as a befitting riposte to the obtuse gloating of the likes of Umaru Dikko about a Third Reich, Awolowo espoused the famous Hegelian dialectic of a coming reconfiguration which would combine the best parts of thesis and antithesis in a new synthesis. This was dialectical thinking at its most sublime and majestic.
Ten years later in 1993, Awo was already six years in his final resting place, but his prophecy came to fruition. It was M.K.O Abiola, a former unreconstructed apostate, who became the standard bearer of the progressives. Those of Awo’s surviving lieutenants who could not read the historical signals correctly and who could not abide the new developments found themselves politically excommunicated forever.
In 1999 at the new dawn of civilian rule, it was the NADECO chieftains who had fought heroically to redeem Abiola’s mandate and who had borne the brunt of Abacha’s tyranny that were handsomely rewarded by the Yoruba electorate. Their suzerainty extended over the entire Yoruba landscape. But trouble began almost immediately as a result of external destabilisation by the PDP and the nuclear fallout of the AD’s presidential primaries. Somebody was misreading the historical signals once again.
After the 2003 elections, the AD fragmented irretrievably. Although the Yoruba electorate did not mind Obasanjo returning to the misbegotten centre, they frowned at the nicking what did not belong to his party under the even more misbegotten slogan of mainstreaming. After the electoral debacle of their favourite sons, the Yoruba seem to abhor being corralled into the so called unitarist mainstream of stifling suffocation.
It was then left to the lone survivor, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to begin the process of heroic retrieval of the electoral patrimony of a race. The recovery and recuperation of stolen electoral goods is a hard slog indeed. Bola Tinubu’s titanic exertions in this regard have already passed into Yoruba and Nigeria political folklore.
It is said by Unamuno that under tyranny men seek liberty but under liberty they also seek tyranny. The entire Yoruba political elite ought to be grateful to this man and his associates for rescuing them from the jaws of internal slavery. From the beach head of Lagos, the ACN began to claw and muscle its way into the Yoruba interior. In 2007, the PDP compounded the original electoral larceny with a more blatant perfidy.
But the ACN rollercoaster was unstoppable. It had locked into the dominant mood and aspirations of the Yoruba people. In 2011 and in a telling historic rebuff, the Yoruba electorate gave General Obasanjo a sensational shellacking in his own local polling booth. As it was in the beginning in 1979, so it has been at the end.
This, ironically, was the momentum and goodwill Rahman Olusegun Mimiko tapped into when his own mandate was ostentatiously pilfered. Snooper was physically present at the Marina when his defence team was being constituted even before the beleaguered politico had physically shown up.
As a party, the ACN is not perfect. There have been loud and legitimate complaints. But we cannot throw away the baby with the bathwater. The hideous scars of the lineage of the Fourth Republic in military autocracy are here for all to see. This translates into the militarisation of the polity, the monetisation of politics and the regimentation of parties as if they are fighting formations. Politics is the continuation of war by other means. It is better to fight for the deepening of democracy in a party with possibilities than to indulge in the proliferation of political platform for the sake of ego and ambition.
Snooper has not been able to sit down with the Ondo state governor since his memorable reinstatement. Given their noble antecedents and reputation for radical integrity, there is nothing on ground to suggest that the good people of Ondo state are not in tune with the dominant aspirations of the Yoruba race.
Unfortunately, this is where Mimiko’s gravitational odyssey through all the parties irrespective of ideology constitutes a setback for progressive consciousness. It is a measure of Yoruba tolerance and liberality that these gyrations in the shuttle spacecraft of ambition have not earned him a severe censure. Other people have not been so lucky. But the question must now be asked in the larger interest of the race and the nation. What does Mimiko really want, and is he in tune with the larger Yoruba aspiration?
It is not enough to slam ad hoc and haphazard developmental projects on a state without articulating these to a grander vision of regionalism or a deep integrative base which reflects the dominant mood of the people. These are just token tidal twitches in a mighty ocean. The Lagos state miracle is not a happenstance but the result of deep strategic thinking in which the megalopolis is envisioned as a developmental hub in the manner of Hong Kong, California, Taipei, Singapore and other emerging state-cities and city-states.
As it is, Mimiko is propelled along by a folksy populism without any deep intellectual content or serious integrative and theoretical base. His party, the so called Labour Party, is a vexatious and pernicious nuisance emptied of all radical contents and without any links to real labour; a mere opportunistic decoy and doppelganger of the ruling party. It will not take Mimiko beyond Ode Ondo. Even the fabled timber merchants of that district will tell you that an iroko does not make a forest. Is Mimiko content to remain a local champion and a political warlord in a provincial laager?
That question will be answered on Saturday. Win or lose, Mimiko would have exhausted the political and historic possibilities of his gambit. By trapping himself in a sub-ethnic cocoon, he has foreclosed further development either horizontal or vertical. It doesn’t get more politically suicidal than that. The Yoruba tend to reward patience, honesty, integrity and perseverance in aspiring leaders. Pa Ajasin who never aspired to be Yoruba leader but who became one in spite of himself would be smiling in his grave.
