Two Saturdays ago in Ibadan, a group of starry-eyed agitators allegedly inspired and indoctrinated by Modupe Onitiri-Abiola, one of the widows of the late MKO Abiola, carried out an utterly inept attempt to proclaim and assert the independence of the Yoruba from the Federal Republic of Nigeria. They chose the Oyo State secretariat and the House of Assembly as the symbolic epicenter of attack to underscore their revolt against the system, particularly the country’s stifling political structure. They presumed to represent the Yoruba and the entire Southwest, even when the more astute Professor Banji Akintoye and the populist Sunday Adeyemo, aka Sunday Igboho, acknowledged they were making heavy weather of their agitations for Yoruba self-determination. The militants who carried out the half-hearted attack on the Oyo State secretariat gave a bad name to agitation, if not the Southwest as a whole. They were poorly informed about the principles of self-determination, were easily hoodwinked, were poorly armed because they thought their objective was a fait accompli, and under cursory interrogation displayed immense stupidity and lack of coordination.
Mrs Onitiri-Abiola has not been apprehended. But she will be, sooner rather than later. Hopefully, interrogators will get a glimpse into the workings of her turbulent mind, whether her anger was politically motivated and even bore vestigial connections to the 1993 presidential election debacle involving her late husband, or whether it was ideologically grounded. By now she is probably disillusioned, in contrast to a few of her militants who swore to their intransigence. Whatever investigators find out, nothing will, however, detract from the horrifying incompetence she and her militants demonstrated on April 13. There is nothing theoretically wrong with agitation over any cause, particularly self-determination involving separation or dissolution of an entity, but there are legitimate ways to do it that preclude faked referendum. Prof Akintoye, who also leads a self-determination group, and others are passionate about the Yoruba nation cause, a subject that obsesses and absorbs the Southwest, but they are painfully aware of the difficulty of birthing it beyond its ideational fascination. The angry Mrs Onitiri-Abiola brooked no such scruples or hesitations.
The Yoruba may be a fractious and republican people, but they are nevertheless calculating and in some respects farsighted. As attractive as self-determination is, they were reluctant to embrace Prof Akintoye’s perspective on the subject, a reluctance helped in no small measure by the dithering of the group headed by the mercurial professor, not to say the group’s shambolic bookkeeping. Beyond the initial flurry, Prof Akintoye soon discovered that the Yoruba began squirming over his methods, particularly his characteristic impatience, and started to put distance between their aspiration and the manner the professor sought to embody the cause. Yes, the Yoruba spoke daggers, but they were extremely hesitant to use daggers. And when Mr Igboho decided to give jagged teeth to the self-determination idea following the tantalising popularity of his anti-herdsmen campaign, Yoruba leaders summoned a conference on the subject, put their feet down, and stamped the idea out before it acquired wings. It was a risky gamble, especially under the Muhammadu Buhari administration when herdsmen were running rampage all over the country. But Yoruba leaders had learnt lessons from the revolts that were laying the Northeast, Northwest and Southeast regions waste.
Had Mrs Onitiri-Abiola infused a little sense and restraint into her crusade, assuming she remained rational and less embittered over the years, she would have understood why the Southwest wanted a different method of prosecuting self-determination rather than arming a few disoriented and wild-eyed individuals to play roles far bigger than their intellects and socialisation could handle. Under President Bola Tinubu, national institutions are given room to work in line with the constitution, and they are in a vengeful mood, as the former Kogi State governor Yahaya Bello is finding out. However, Oyo State government’s hasty and indefensible demolition of the building associated with Mrs Onitiri-Abiola’s revolt and the Yoruba nation agitators will probably make the Amazon less inclined to give herself up. Indeed, her imagination about how she would be treated, should she be arrested, would be running riot already. The agitators have not the faintest clue what a rebellion looks like. They are, however, not alone in their naivety. By demolishing the agitators’ building in Ibadan, a needless resort to self-help despite a controversial procurement of a court order, the government manifests a crying lack of prosecutorial savvy. The state needs the building as well as all the items seized from it as exhibits in the prosecution of the agitators. The state needs to painstakingly build their case, down to the minutest details of which rooms arms and ammunition were stored, which room was allegedly used by Mrs Onitiri-Abiola to read her so-called treason speech, and proofs led as to what the other rooms were used for. That building ought to be preserved until the trial is over, especially because the suspects did not blow it up to cover their tracks and destroy evidence. Alas, the state obliterated much evidence on behalf of the agitators.
There are indications that the Yoruba Nation agitators planned their action to engulf the whole Southwest. Hopefully the authorities, having again been caught flatfooted despite the magnitude of the plot, will get to the bottom of the revolt. Notwithstanding the tardiness of the intelligence community, the agitators and other self-determination groups will hopefully soon get the message that the Southwest will not allow a replication of the maladies demolishing the peace and stability of other regions. Yoruba leaders are clear about what ails their region economically and politically, and they have a fair idea of how to actualise regional stability and development. They are unlikely to allow themselves and their region goosestep into an inferno, or reenact the Yoruba-on-Yoruba violence that convulsed and fractured the region in the 1960s.
Yoruba leaders know just how difficult building a consensus in the region has become in the intervening years. They are, indeed, not unmindful of the shifting mores upending values and distorting perspectives in the region. They are keenly aware of the immense fascination self-determination holds for indigenes in the face of an underperforming country and inept national leaders. While they denounced the upheaval reportedly led by Mrs Onitiri-Abiola in Ibadan on April 13, they also managed to communicate to President Bola Tinubu, whom they visited last week, the urgency of rearranging the country in order to produce a political system and federal structure that completely renegotiate the 1914 amalgamation as well as dismantle the unitary command structure so inimical to the aspirations of nationalities. They may not have communicated to the president how that could be done, they will, however, leave him to grapple with the mechanics of that difficult assignment. They will hope his activist background, particularly in the NADECO trenches, can help him work the magic of conjuring what his disinterested predecessors failed to midwife – a new Nigeria. In short he will be called upon to mollify the suspicions of a North obsessed with unity as well as satisfy the longings of a South panting for decentralisation.
By now the president must have realised that the country is running out of time to design a new constitution that enables the various nationalities full expressions and aspirations, which neither rampaging herdsmen nor rapacious federal government can abridge. To do this, he must build a national consensus to achieve that great goal. But he must first lead the effort to define that goal and intuitively identify the timeframe during his tenure when that restructuring could be birthed. It won’t be easy, and it may not even be soon. But Mrs Onitiri-Abiola’s rabble makes the task very urgent and inescapable, especially because the revolts in the North and Southeast, which have lasted for more than a decade, are indeed clumsy ventilations of real regional aspirations and self-determination goals. As the amateurish putsch in Ibadan also illustrated, and as all the ongoing rebellions in other regions are demonstrating, there are too many ignorant romantics fantasising about some utopian regions where all their chimerical dreams are capable of transmuting into reality.
Under interrogation, a few of the Yoruba Nation agitators disclosed that they believed what they were told about the United Nations approving the proclamation of a Yoruba nation. It was not in their place to ask for clarifications or to disprove the fantasies of their manipulators. Many such ignoramuses believed the hooey propagated by Nnamdi Kanu of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, thus destabilising the Southeast for years, and also took hook, line, and sinker the sectarian blather garbled by Boko Haram’s Mohammed Yusuf and Abubakar Shekau, which has cost the country dearly. If a workable federal arrangement is not found fairly quickly, many simpletons and cannon fodder will be available for destructive sectional or sectarian agenda. They will not care the cost to lives, nor bat an eyelid over the destruction of their regions. If someone of Mrs Onitiri-Abiola’s standing could embrace with all vehemence a farcical plot to attack a few key buildings in Ibadan in order to instigate a regionwide rebellion, millions less intellectually endowed will believe worse and lend their innate idiocies to the actualisation of far more spurious, dangerous and consequential plots. The country should not let them. Southwest leaders will of course smother the Yoruba Nation agitators, as they have demonstrated last week, but they will not be able to hold off for too long a group of dispossessed agitators eager to self-immolate.
