Shortly before the inauguration of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, I travelled by public transport to Ilorin. Somewhere in Ibadan, we came upon a band of Odua Peoples Congress (OPC) toughs wielding various weapons including automatic guns, short machetes and axes. Their leaders/commanders wore various specially embroidered clothes that harked back to the era of the Yoruba wars. Apart from small gourds strapped to their jumpers, they also wore red wrist or head bands with cowries stitched to them. They stopped traffic majestically and defiantly, and strolled across the road with not a care in the world. A few kilometres down the main road to Ilorin, we again encountered another band, this time in a convoy of beat-up cars and perhaps a pick-up van, if my memory serves me well. They drove fiercely and menacingly, some sitting on top of their cars, and others popping their heads out of the windows as their vehicles bobbed and weaved through the choked traffic.
This was in the late 1990s, barely a few years after the 1994 Rwandan genocide raged in all its atavistic and sanguinary fury. Using the autocratic regime of Gen Sani Abacha as pretext, Yorubaland began to regress into anomie and idolatry. While still in traffic, and as OPC militants were strutting their stuff, I became both troubled and humiliated. Was this what the Southwest had become? Was the region’s civilisation so tenuous that it took just one destabilising incidence to demolish its accomplishments and send the region lumbering abjectly into the embrace of undemocratic and impulsive bands of area toughies? The OPC may no longer be brazen and daring as it was, but it has kept its structure fairly intact, and continues to attract mainly those who, like cultists, want a sense of adventure and meaning to life.
The Southwest was somewhat lucky to have understood very early the pitfalls of putting its hopes and trust in an ethnic militia. Given the cold shoulder in polite circles, the OPC quietly morphed into a militia of local enforcers and security consultants. These jobs were needed to keep them busy in place of the revolution they, and many people, believed loomed in the 1990s and early 2000s. After reading about the Rwandan genocide and watching a documentary on it, not to talk of the post-Tito Yugoslavia that dissolved into civil war, it was easy to make up my mind about the dangers of indulging ethnic militias, whether among the Yoruba or in Boko Haram territory. The Yoruba were lucky the OPC experienced considerable attenuation over the years; the North is not so lucky in the hands of Boko Haram, which they at first indulged, then lamely opposed, and finally watched with quiet dismay and resignation from afar.
For those who naively put their trust in the OPC as the saviour, backbone and standby militia of the Yoruba, the ongoing struggle for pipeline security contracts and leadership supremacy between Frederick Fasehun and Gani Adams can be very disillusioning. Sometime in April, Dr Fasehun had delivered a broadside on Mr Adams for attempting to match him wit for wit and brawn for brawn. But he also acknowledged that he had bidden for a pipeline security contract because the six million youths in his militia deserved the federal government’s economic patronage, just as Niger Delta youths are beneficiaries of very lucrative federal government contracts. No one knows where he got the outlandish figures of OPC membership. But responding to the ACN spokesman’s criticisms that he bade for the contract in order to fund a political party and turn it into a destabilising counterpoise to the region’s dominant party, Fasehun offered a most peremptory and non-ideological argument indicating that in his political world everything boiled down to money. That this materialism subverts the lofty principles of the Southwest, especially the lodestar of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) he is presumptuously trying to revive, is immaterial to him.
I have read many opinions on the contract bid by the OPC leaders, and find them humbling. In defending Fasehun, most of the views quite illogically ignore the contradictions between propping up oneself as a saviour or defender of the Yoruba and being a federal government contractor. The Tompolos, Boyloaf and Dokubos of the Niger Delta have never tried to sound principled or ideological. From their antecedents and their current standing, they give the firm impression they need financial empowerment more for its own sake than for any esoteric reasons. They are not driven by any principle of democracy, federalism, human rights, or any other lofty values that ennoble humanity. If the right contracts are dispensed to them, it becomes an incentive to work with and give support to the government of the day. In this they are at least honest, for they do not attempt the disingenuousness their OPC counterparts have now become famous for. How Mr Adams and Fasehun, for instance, hope to get pipeline protection contracts from the Jonathan presidency and in the same breath defend the values that have characterised the Yoruba for centuries is a puzzle. More puzzling is the fact that they do not see the tragedy of outsourcing security to ethnic militants and repentant bigots.
But the dishonesty of the OPC leaders and their self-serving philosophy do not end there. They are not squabbling over ideology, or over political orientation, or even over societal reengineering. These self-appointed defenders of the Yoruba race are squabbling over two things only: contract from the government, and leadership position in the OPC. It is a surprise that it has taken so long for many Yoruba elites to see through the gimmickry of the militia. While the contracts have not yet been awarded, Fasehun has spoken condescendingly of subletting less than one-third of the contract’s value to Mr Adams’ faction of the OPC. The latter, inured to the paradox of Yoruba defenders fighting for crumbs from a potential enemy, is asking for nothing less than half of the total value of the contract. This, he says, is because he leads about 90 percent of the membership of the OPC.
The dissembling duo already has projects in the pipeline. While Dr Fasehun is attempting to revive the defunct UPN, Mr Adams, less pretentious, less ambitious, but perhaps more practical and self-important, simply wants to keep his boys engaged and happy. Both suggest that the Southwest deserves it, for the ACN, according to them has proved incapable of taking care of the welfare of the region. On April 18, Fasehun published a rambling and innuendo-ridden advertorial in which he attempted to rationalise the revival of the UPN. The best in the advert is his exaggerated affectations on democracy. But it would have been better if he had not published anything, for it is clear that in spite of his activist years, he lacks both the depth and character to preach democracy to anyone or offer leadership to any group.
Fasehun assumes that merely invoking the name of UPN is enough to bring back the glory of the Chief Obafemi Awolowo era. He forgets that it was not the party that ennobled Awo; on the contrary it was Awo through his brilliance, depth, passion and discipline, not to say contempt for federal handouts, that ennobled the party. What virtue will Fasehun bring to the party he seeks so cavalierly and comically to resuscitate? I can see none. And what on earth has come over opinion writers and analysts that they give Fasehun a hearing, he that recently asked for Major Hamza Al-Mustapha to be pardoned, he of doubtful ideology and of hidden motives? Had the ferment in the country graduated into a revolution and any of the two OPC leaders assumed prominence, imagine what terrors, poor judgement and mediocrity would have been unleashed on the region.
As Mr Adams said in his provocative response to Fasehun’s angry and disrespecting characterisation of his rival, the two OPCs are perfectly irreconcilable. But much more than the struggle for leadership of the ethnic militia, the pipeline contract controversy has exposed the superciliousness of the older man and the superficiality of the younger claimant. The elites and opinion moulders in the Southwest must surely have taken the measure of the two pretenders to the Yoruba throne. They are first and foremost contractors, a duo of self-serving and ambitious leaders without the farsightedness, discipline, sacrifice and competence to interpret the past and decipher the tangled skein of Nigeria’s future, let alone embody the values and virtues that have stood the Southwest out for centuries.
