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Tag: Yoruba politics

  • Unity Summit: another theatrics in Yoruba politics 3

    Unity Summit: another theatrics in Yoruba politics 3

    If those promoting the recommendations of Jonathan’s conference want the support of citizens in the Yoruba region, this will be a good time to start consultations with those whose lives are likely to be affected should such recommendations become the basis for a new federal constitution.

    In the last twenty years, the Yoruba have gotten together under various auspices to examine the structure of the polity. The exercise leading to the production of the Yoruba Agenda is the most memorable of such efforts. The Yoruba Agenda contains ideas that can be reviewed and improved upon. There may be some things that are no longer applicable and need to be taken out at this Assembly. There may be other issues that need to be considered and added to the position taken by our traditional rulers, elders, professionals, and other patriots when the Yoruba Agenda was put together during the pro- democracy struggle of the 1990s. We need to brainstorm about how to make sure that “the architecture of governance”, to borrow a phrase from Chief EmekaAnyaoku, is designed to strengthen the unity of the country through a constitutional system that favours restoration of regional autonomy that made it possible for our region to create the largest pool of manpower in sub-Sahara Africa half a century ago. –General Alani Akinrinade, Rtd at the opening of the Yoruba Assembly in Ibadan on August 30, 2012.

    In the last twenty years, the Yoruba have gotten together under various auspices to examine the structure of the polity. The exercise leading to the production of the Yoruba Agenda is the most memorable of such efforts. The Yoruba Agenda contains ideas that can be reviewed and improved upon. There may be some things that are no longer applicable and need to be taken out at this Assembly. There may be other issues that need to be considered and added to the position taken by our traditional rulers, elders, professionals, and other patriots when the Yoruba Agenda was put together during the pro- democracy struggle of the 1990s. We need to brainstorm about how to make sure that “the architecture of governance”, to borrow a phrase from Chief EmekaAnyaoku, is designed to strengthen the unity of the country through a constitutional system that favours restoration of regional autonomy that made it possible for our region to create the largest pool of manpower in sub-Sahara Africa half a century ago. –General Alani Akinrinade, Rtd at the opening of the Yoruba Assembly in Ibadan on August 30, 2012.

    Over the 26 federal countries housing about 40% of the world’s population had used various methods to move from unitary to federal system. Nigeria was one of such countries. Representatives of the three regions that constituted Nigeria adopted through representatives a federal constitution, preparatory to obtaining independence from Britain in 1960. The country remained a functioning federal system until the emergence of military rule, under which the country lost its federal constitution and was moved gradually from federalism in 1975 to a quasi-federal system in 1999 through a constitution birthed and nurtured by the Abacha-Abubakar 1999 Constitution. The problem facing Nigeria today, according to some Yoruba activists, is how to move Nigeria from its current quasi-federal or quasi-unitary system back to the federal system upon which it became an independent country in 1960. The recent call by some Yoruba leaders and organisations in Ibadan for adoption of recommendations of the Jonathan national dialogue of 2014 is one of the most recent attempts to bring back to the nation’s conversation the issue of restoration of federalism. Today’s piece will conclude discussion of the need to re-start an inclusive process of mobilising citizens for a regional debate on a matter of such importance to all citizens in the region.

    Chief Obafemi Awolowo established a method of making a multilingual and multicultural society adopt a federal political system that many countries had used before him and which many more borrowed from after him. He created a political party that had as part of its core goals, establishment and sustenance of Nigeria as a multicultural federation. Whether it was his Action Group or the Unity Party of Nigeria, Chief Awolowo was consistent in asking for a federal system that promotes equality of majority and minority nationalities. Chief Awolowo did not at any time believe that sustainable federalism could be achieved through a national dialogue that did not have any legal backing nor input from citizens or their representatives. He stated in his speeches and writings that only a duly negotiated federal constitution by representatives of the federating units could lead to a sustainable federal governance. Therefore, the elation of some of his followers at the sudden convocation of a national dialogue of invitees of President Goodluck Jonathan in 2014 would have been an anathema to Chief Awolowo if he were alive, not to talk of the religiosity of some of his former followers in recommendations of a conference of appointed delegates.

    Long after the exit of Awolowo, the Yoruba region in 1993 took part in a protracted struggle against the imposition of military dictatorship on the country after the annulment of the presidential election won by Chief M.K.O. Abiola. Yoruba leaders-traditional and modern-took part in the construction of a list of demands, called the Yoruba Agenda, referred to in the quotation above from General Akinrinade’s address to the Yoruba Assembly in 2012. The major demands of NADECO during the four-year struggle were restoration of Abiola’s electoral mandate and re-federalisation of the country/negotiation for a federal constitution created by representatives of the people.

    It is important for those canvassing for wholesale adoption of recommendations of the national dialogue of 2014 to remember the process of mobilising citizens and their cultural and political leaders during the pro-democracy struggle. Town meetings were held; traditional leaders, professional men and women; and civil society organisations in the Yoruba region were consulted and persuaded to take part in open debates before the document calling for return to a federal system was presented to the public. It is also worth noting that after the death of Abacha and ‘assassination’ of Abiola, many of the Afenifere leaders in NADECO called for participation in the political transition programme initiated by Abacha’s military ruler, General Abdusalam Abubakar. Some of the Afenifere leaders now calling for immediate and wholesale adoption of recommendations of the national dialogue of 2014 were vocal in making cases for an end to  the struggle, promising that once democracy was restored (even without Abiola), the path to federalism would be assured.

    The same narrow band of unelected leaders also pleaded in 2003 for wholesale support of President Obasanjo’s second term. Afenifere leaders discouraged their party from fielding a presidential candidate to contest against the candidate of the PDP, General Obasanjo. Obasanjo, like Jonathan, organised a political reform conference that did not involve citizens’ representatives and the recommendations of which are now in the archive. If those promoting the recommendations of Jonathan’s conference want the support of citizens in the Yoruba region, this will be a good time to start consultations with those whose lives are likely to be affected should such recommendations become the basis for a new federal constitution.

    In many of the countries that had moved from unitary to federal system: Canada, Spain, Germany, and the latest poster-child of devolution, the United Kingdom, the process of demanding shared power and sovereignty had been inclusive. Citizens and their representatives had created and nurtured the process of struggling for federalism. Ethiopia is perhaps the only country that became a federal country by military fiat. And this was after a civil war. No country has been able to shake off an undesirable unitary constitution through press conferences and communiques or by holding on to a document from a conference of appointed delegates.

    If the Yoruba region wants Nigeria to return to a sustainable federal system, its elected and unelected leaders need to stop fighting a civil war over the outcome of Jonathan’s conference. If the party in power in the region does not appear to be sufficiently serious about re-federalising the country, nothing should stop federalists in groups and movements from identifying with any federalist party as it was done in Scotland. But the PDP which President Jonathan led and which did not support him with a covering legislation for the 2014 conference is not a pro-federalism party. Many Yoruba public affairs observers still view the leaders at the recent Ibadan conference as members or supporters of the Jonathan version of PDP.

    Using a political party as a vehicle for struggling for change cannot be avoided or replaced by quarterly or daily communiques. In 2012, a Yoruba Assembly was called in Ibadan at which citizens, civil society organisations in the Yoruba region, and elected representatives in the region agreed to start a Yoruba Constitutional Commission. Most of those calling for a Jonathanian model of federalism or nothing chose to stay away from what was a regional conversation on the type of federal system the Yoruba put before the central government. It is rather too late in the day for individuals to claim they are leaders, if such individuals have not been chosen by citizens, regardless of how brave and honest such self-appointed leaders might be.

    Returning the country to a federal system is important, not only for the Yoruba region but also for Nigeria’s political and economic health. But there is a need for a more inclusive conversation than the one being conducted by Jonathan’s invitees to the 2014 conference. There is nothing wrong with Afenifere calling for federalism. What is not right is narrowing such call to adoption of recommendations of the 2014 conference of delegates handpicked by Jonathan. This is a right time to call another Yoruba Assembly to bring federalists from various political parties and movements together to fashion out how to engage elected representatives of Yoruba people.  Such an assembly can mandate elected representatives of the Yoruba region in state and federal legislatures to table Yoruba demands for a people’s constitution to replace the current military constitution that was designed for administering a quasi-federal Nigeria when revenue from petroleum appeared infinite to military dictators.

  • Unity Summit: another theatrics in Yoruba politics (2)

    Unity Summit: another theatrics in Yoruba politics (2)

    Even in the Yoruba region with the first free primary education scheme in sub-Saharan Africa, about 6% of children of primary age are not in school while more than 10% of those who attended primary school are not enrolled in secondary schools

    I predict that every multilingual or multinational country with a unitary constitution must either eventually have a federal constitution based on principles which I have enunciated, or disintegrate, or be perennially afflicted with disharmony and instability.—Awolowo in The Peoples’ Republic.

    To ensure effective governance of the United Arab Emirates after its establishment in 1971, the rulers of the seven emirates that comprise the Federation agreed to draw up a provisional Constitution specifying the power allocated to the new federal institutions. As in many federal structures around the world, certain powers remained the prerogative of each of the individual emirates, which already had their own governing institutions prior to the establishment of the Federation.www.uaeinteract.com/government/political_system.asp

    Today’s piece will begin to address some of the questions raised at the end of last week’s column:

    If the groups at the summit are in opposition to most of the governments in the Yoruba region, at what point are they going to call for rapprochement with elected governments of Yoruba states not in attendance at the summit? Do Yoruba citizens have a stake in the kind of federalism the Ibadan summit has called for? If so, what process does the summit have in place for mobilising citizens in the region for the fight for immediate re-federalisation or secession from the Nigerian union? But the focus of addressing some of these points today will be to demonstrate to those that organised last week’s Yoruba Unity Summit that the problem of dwindling federalism in the country is a long-term one that requires a long-term, rather than, a quick-fix solution.

    This column is not opposed to the call for federalism at the Ibadan summit of selected Yoruba socio-cultural organisations. The evidence for change of vision about how to make Nigeria achieve its huge potential is striking. For almost half a century, the country has failed to improve on the quality of life of most of its citizens while it has grown at the hands of military dictators into a centralised state system that denies subnational levels the autonomy required for innovativeness in such areas as economy, security, education, healthcare, and even infrastructure. Compared to when the country was governed as a fully federal state in the years before the fragmentation of the country into mini states, the Nigeria of today is in many respects incapable of raising the standard of living of most of its citizens. In the era of competitive federalism in the years before the civil war, it was possible for each of the four regions to apply the principle of competitive advantage to its development, despite ideological differences among the three regions. They each achieved this by raising from revenue principally from agriculture: cotton/peanut farming in the North; Palm produce in the East; Palm and Rubber production in the Midwest; and Cocoa from the West.

    In a recent World Bank report, Nigeria was ranked the third among the world’s ten countries with extreme poor citizens. Over 70% of its population live on N200 or less per day. 7% of the 1.2 billion people living below poverty line in the world are Nigerians. The Southwest in particular has lost the advantages of the head start in education that it gained in the years before independence and the civil war. Some of the causes of endemic poverty in Nigeria, according to the World Bank, include harmful economic and political systems, national conflict and violence, weak government effectiveness and efficiency, human rights abuses, weak respect for rule of law, and weak control of corruption. It has been observed that about 40% of primary-school age children are out of school. Even in the Yoruba region with the first free primary education scheme in sub-Saharan Africa, about 6% of children of primary age are not in school while more than 10% of those who attended primary school are not enrolled in secondary schools. It must be painful for those who participated directly or indirectly in promoting the importance of education under the government of Awolowo to look away from the decline in education, healthcare, security of life and property, and even lack of modest infrastructure in a region that was the actual pace setter in the years before the onslaught of military dictatorship.

    It is, therefore, not surprising that those at the Ibadan conference cried out for immediate intervention to end the system of centralisation that had been driven principally by military dictators and the belief by former military rulers that the Manna economy made possible by petroleum could support creation of tens of mini states that largely live on handouts from the federation account funded mostly by resources from petroleum. Just recently, Prof. Ango Abdullahi, leader of Northern Elders Forum, reminisced nostalgically in a newspaper interview about the positive impact of federal system of government in the past had on development in the country. He acknowledged the country’s cultural diversity and quoted Sir Ahmadu Bello on the need to construct a governing system that is driven by understanding of cultural differences rather than planning to obliterate such differences. Similarly, a leader of Northern Leaders Group in the Northeast even called for a national conference at which the North, particularly the Northeast would table its special needs. Those at the Ibadan summit are not alone in their call for a new political design of the country. This is in contrast to the new mantra being promoted by political office holders across the three levels that ethnic and religious differences are the source of Nigeria’s underdevelopment.

    Making their call for reinvention of the country at the coming to power of a former military ruler who campaigned on the platform of change and whom citizens voted for because they are hungry for change is good timing. The menu of policies for change is still being constructed by President Buhari as he shops for ministers to help him change the country. It is true that weak control of corruption has been cited by the World Bank for Nigeria’s decline, despite the country’s access to easy funds from petroleum for over five decades. It is also true that the new president has focused his attention on weakening the culture of corruption. But so is it true that the World Bank has fingered harmful economic and political systems as one of many causes. The balkanisation of the former four regions into 36 mini states at the beck and call of the central government by military rulers is an illustration of harmful economic and political systems.

    It may be myopic to just heap all the blame of the country’s underdevelopment on corruption. Since 1966, no government – military or civilian – has come to power without promising to end corruption. What appears to have been missing is coming to terms with some of the direct and indirect causes of corruption. It is conceivable that the transformation of Nigeria since 1975 into a country of unviable states in the guise of ensuring territorial unity is a major cause of corruption in the country. The competition among states had stopped for a long time being over revenue generation but over ostentatious use of funds passed to them from Abuja. If old men and women brought up on the cultural diet of achievement orientation in the decades before 1975 feel outraged by the visible decline in the Yoruba region to the extent of crying out for help, this should not surprise or alarm anybody who is interested in development of parts of the country and by extension the country as a whole. The right demand was made at Ibadan. What was overlooked at Ibadan is recognition of the complexity of restoration of federalism at the hands of a former military dictator who assisted in re-designing Nigeria away from a federal system.

    Re-federalising Nigeria is not as simple as Jonathan’s conference of 2014 that the Ibadan summit anchored its demand on. Insisting on the recommendations of Jonathan’s conference can be politically counterproductive. Jonathan’s party, the PDP, was not even in support of the conference. It was Jonathan that accepted to be goaded by many of the individuals now peddling his conference as the way out of the present political paralysis as a way of negotiating for votes. Individuals and groups that want restoration of federalism need to accept that the presidential elections of 2015 are over. The best way to move beyond obsession with Jonathan’s promise to restore federalism in a post-election period is to adopt a supra-partisan approach to ending the current unitary system that is designed for sharing of national cake, as distinct from baking the cake in all forms and in high quantities that can go round. Awolowo and other federalists and autonomists in other parts of the world had provided effective models for both partisan and supra-partisan methods of struggling for federalism. There is no evidence for such approach in the announcements of those hobbled by the Jonathan conference. We will discuss different approaches that had worked in other places next Sunday.

    • To be continued

  • Modernity and magic in Yoruba politics

    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.

  • New face of Yoruba politics

    Those who say that life is worth living at any cost have already written an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person that they will not betray to stay alive.’ —–Sidney Hook

    The crass degeneration of values that has hooked the contemporary Nigerian society by the jugular must be of serious concern to right-thinking Nigerians. As a bona fide Yoruba son, yours sincerely is worried to the marrow. Reason: The menace is getting dangerously pronounced and creeping abysmally and unchallenged into the fabric of my ethnic group’s political and economic life.

    The Yoruba are known for their political sagacity; they are known for providing the developmental direction that other ethnic groups in the country admirably embrace. No wonder, there is an unabashed rush of indigenes of other areas to the southwest because of the abundance of educational, economic and infrastructural opportunities that abound in the region. This would not have been possible but for the presence of mind of visionary political leaders in the defunct Action Group (AG) led by the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo (SAN). They had reasonable integrity and pursued lofty goals that served not only the interest of western region but the country as a whole.

    This trend can continue but those reactionaries in pursuit of mainstream politics among the Yoruba ethnic group are undermining the growth of the region. They did it during the Second Republic and even during the truncated Fourth Republic when the military, under despotic Ibrahim Babangida as Head of State, went viral with dubious democratic ideas. ‘Mainstreamer’ ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo and company brought nothing but shame to the southwest after eight gruelling years that came to an anti-climax with his inordinate pursuit of his ill-fated Third Term Agenda.

    Now, the remnants of Obasanjo’s mainstream politics will not allow the southwest to rest through deployment of hurtful politics. It is left for the people of the region to quickly discern that these people are out to injure the region to the advantage of the centre that has abandoned the southwest for over almost two decades. They frustrated the Enron Power Project that former Lagos State Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration initiated and see nothing wrong with the dilapidated state of Lagos/Ibadan Express road for ages, among others.

    The emerging mean face of Yoruba politics are Musiliu Obanikoro, current Minister of State for Defence; Buruji Kasamu, supposed chieftain of People’s Democratic Party(PDP) in Ogun State and Femi Fani-Kayode, a virulent critic of Obasanjo and later compromised former Minister of Aviation under the same man, among others.

    With these kinds of impostors as Yoruba leaders, the future of the region is stinking nothing but lies. They radically crawl like genuine patriots to reach the top, making fake promises in the process. They’re cunning although they think they are clever, while they live with the bounties from the betrayal of their people. This ruling PDP new face of Yoruba politics is heartless, hardened and cruel. Integrity means nothing to them. It always makes this column really mad that politicians like these, under the erroneous guise of protecting the ruling party’s interest, act so badly in the southwest. They wear those smiles on their dials whereas they are plotting democratic evil all the while against the region of their birth. Their desperate pursuit of mainstream politics has left the poorest folk in the region in the shackles of squalor and want.

    Thomas Wentworth, the first Earl of Strafford once said: “More precious is want with honesty than wealth with infamy.” The characters projecting the new face of Yoruba politics have jettisoned good conscience and honesty in their want of political relevance and wealth. They have aligned with a ruling party which in over 15 years, has proved that it would stoop to any infamy to realise its ambition to seize power. That is why anywhere elections were to hold in the southwest, these men had gone to barbaric heights to circumvent the people’s will. This column could not easily forget how these men went to Osun State during its August 9

    Governorship Election to display impunity never heard of in the history of election in this country. It would forever remain indelible how hooded soldiers and other security men protected PDP chieftains and harassed common Yoruba people under the nose of Obanikoro, a Yoruba man.

    Obanikoro’s defence powers is derisively being deployed to fight for land in Lagos through wrongful use of soldiers at a time that soldiers are needed to combat the rampaging menace of Boko Haram. It is only in a party like PDP that Obanikoro can thrive because his managerial acumen was put to test when he was Commissioner for Home Affairs during Tinubu’s first term in Lagos, through his inept management of pilgrimage issues. It was Dele Alake, the serviceable Commissioner for Information and others that rescued him from severe sanction from Tinubu. Kashamu’s alleged antecedent is still as controversial as his involvement in subjugating democratic values in the southwest. Femi Fani-Kayode lacks electoral value of any kind but only uses his father’s name and thuggish intellect to rabble-rouse those in power that unduly attach undeserved importance to him.

    The trio and others that are undermining of southwest’s electoral fortunes have brought to fruition, Edmund Burke’s statement that: “The greatest crimes do not arise from a want of feeling for others but from over-sensibility for ourselves and an over-indulgence to our own desires.” These men are only enjoying the goodwill of being Yoruba and are not willing to support the region when it rains but only when it shines through undue currying of federal favours that never get down to the grassroots people.

    This is a warning: The Yoruba across the globe must take note of this bunch of opportunists that see no wisdom in Ludwig Tieck’s admonition that: “He is not dead who departs from life with a high and noble fame; but he is dead, even while living, whose brow is branded with infamy.” Some of them should learn from their family’s history, while their co-travellers should equally draw a cue from the rich political history of the Yoruba. The Yoruba, they must be quick to realise, have no place for political rodents as 2015 general elections approach.

     

  • History 101 for political renegades

    As the progressive forces look set to reclaim their traditional political redoubt of the old west, one can feel a mood of upbeat defiance and rugged optimism sweeping through the region. There is a sense in which it feels like the end of another inglorious era in Yoruba politics or what is known by the fastidious French as a fin de siece.

    But since history is full of paradoxes, it also feels like just the end of a particular beginning rather than the beginning of a particular end.  In this modern equivalent of the War of the Roses, a battle is only the culmination of an engagement between opposing forces and not necessarily the end of hostilities. It is a small arc within a wider arc of history in a long revolution full of stunning victories and equally daring retreats.

    Although ideologically and intellectually vanquished, the Yoruba reactionaries may yet regroup under the federal might with a new retrogressive war-cry, but that is if the federal might itself were to remain federal or mighty. There is a time for everything and nothing remains forever, not even oppression which often has to change its hue in order to accommodate new realities.

    All of which is to say that it doesn’t really matter which way the Osun Tribunal proceeds. All over the political ramparts of the old west, the forces of retrogression and their mongrel offspring have their back to the wall. The entire region is in ferment. The fat lady is walking towards the stage with roly-poly assurance.

    If it pleases their lordships, they may choose to prolong the misery of a government and party in total disarray by a few months. It simply means the end will be even more cataclysmic. And who can query their wisdom? It was the great Mike Tyson who wryly noted that he knew of certain blows that can make a heavyweight boxer crash to the canvas many cynical minutes after delivery. Let it be with the mainstream adventurers in the old west.

    But for this politically turbulent region, an epoch also seems to be coming to an end. Just as oppression changes colour, the forces of resistance also undergo critical transformation in terms of engagement and in terms of the men and material they have been saddled with. Adjustments have to be made to accommodate new developments. Since you cannot step into the same battlefield twice, you cannot also fight new battles with old weapons and strategies.

    In the event, this is the first time you have in power in several parts of the old west people who are not direct disciples of Obafemi Awolowo but who seem to buy into the progressive ideals and ideology dominant in the region. Twenty three years after the demise of the late sage and with a new generation of voters who grew up without his overpowering aura, it may no longer be enough to swear by the old man’s name, or to appeal to him directly.

    But as the old political wizard from Ikenne recedes into the background, we must still pity the mainstreamers. They seem to have read their history books upside down, that is if they ever completed a history book in the first instance. When Zik urged the late Sardauna of Sokoto that they should forget their differences, the great grandson of Othman Dan Fodio famously retorted that it was more important that they should understand their differences.  This is the ideological and intellectual tragedy of our modern day mainstreamers.

    A gifted and outstanding political strategist, the scion of the Sokoto caliphate never surrendered his semi-theocratic vision of the modern nation-state to any mainstream. It is a troubling and unviable proposition all right, but the great man never wavered in his granite determination to remould modern Nigeria as a semi-feudal fiefdom. All he did was to identify acolytes and collaborators all over the country willing to subscribe to this quaint and anomalous notion of the modern state.

    This was no political crime. He had the force of history and political culture to back him. He was even willing to surrender the levers of the state and their immense leverages to non-native believers. After all, Saladin, the great Islamic conqueror and ruler, was of Kurdish extraction. Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa himself belonged to an endangered minority ethnic group from the old Bauchi province.

    The problem, then, is not the mainstream but what you bring to the mainstream. If you surrender your own political and cultural dominant for a mess of federal pottage, it is your business. Obafemi Awolowo, the Sardauna’s greatest political adversary, despite being co-opted to the mainstream at a time of grave national crisis, never surrendered his unflinching belief in the destiny of Nigeria as a progressive modern nation-state based on  rationality and order.

    In book after book and tract after tract, the Ikenne titan railed and rallied against feudalism as a homophobic nuisance and the greatest threat to national aspiration. The feudal mindset was a veritable obstacle to the development of mental magnitude and the emancipation of human-kind as a free autonomous rational being capable of taking his destiny into his own hand.

    Just like his arch-rival, the Sardauna, Awolowo was stubbornly unyielding and unwilling to surrender his vision of Nigeria as a progressive, genuinely federated modern nation-state. If his antagonists were willing to cooperate with him and allow him to move the nation forward by moulding it along his visionary ethos for the benefit of everybody so be it. If not, tough luck to Nigeria.

    It was a collision of altars and of mutually contradictory and savagely antagonistic worldviews. But Awolowo did not just emerge from nowhere. He was at once a product and great beneficiary of what is known as the political unconscious of his Yoruba people, their progressive libertarian outlook and their fiercely robust sense of self-worth.

    It is to be noted that those progressives who jumped into the mainstream without their battlements and order of battle always come back in political body bags. On the other hand an early mainstreamer like MKO Abiola who finally saw through the charade and chicanery was also brought back home in a body bag. It may have to do with an ancestral curse, but it also has to do with the political consequences of surrendering the initiative to the adversary.

    If anybody calls the Yoruba republican monarchists, he would not be wide of the mark. This apparent contradiction would probably have been resolved in favour of full modernity or some compromised variant had they been allowed to follow the trajectory of their own history without colonial irruption.

    For two centuries before colonial conquest, the Yoruba had been locked in a battle of wits and will with their kingship institution, relentlessly subverting the system from within through periodic eruptions of rebellions and civil disobedience. By this they had hoped to tame and domesticate the institution by curing it of its grosser and more tyrannical absurdities. Some of their subversive lyrics and wittily profane proverbs attest to this battle royale.

    In the old Oyo Empire, a tyrannical Basorun Gaa was eventually subdued and summarily incinerated by an angry mob. After the old empire fell to Fulani incursion, the former prince Atiba who had converted the old Ago hamlet to a new Oyo was openly mocked, disdained and treated as a powerless feudal dinosaur by a succession of Ibadan warlords. The same fate was reserved for his successors. An “empire” without an army was a huge joke indeed.

    Meanwhile as the  Ibadan army went about establishing its suzerainty and hegemony over the rest of Yorubaland, it was also resisted and undermined militarily and politically from within. After Owu was defeated and sacked, old antagonisms culminated in the Ijaiye war with Kurunmi who was originally from a village near Ogbomosho squaring it up with the Ibadan generalissimos in a bitter military duel which reverberated throughout the region .

    Yet this was the same Ibadan army that stood between the Yoruba and Fulani subjugation. In the meantime, the Ijebu and the Egba armies made sure that they were frustrated in their territorial ambition by standing between them and the sea from where they could have obtained more deadly ordnance. The Ibadan army eventually met its Waterloo when the Ekiti people chose confrontation and rebellion rather than acquiesce to tyranny and feudal servitude.

    In Awolowo this healthy rebelliousness, stubborn self-will and fiercely independent outlook seemed to have crystallised in the way it normally happens when there is a total convergence between public destiny and the private destiny of the exceptional individual. Journeys end in lovers’ meeting, as Shakespeare famously noted.  Awolowo could not have imposed the feudalism and prebendalism of mainstreaming on his own people without falling on his political sword. That would have amounted to a historic retrogression and a negation of the gains of two hundred years of struggle. In times of stress, an organic nationality must throw up its own organic standard bearer.

    Those who have attempted to drag the Yoruba people into the mainstream of greed, opportunism, power pragmatism and its buccaneers’ ethos must now realise their historic folly. Judging from the irascible mien, the gloomy grimace of their current principal and the frozen, death-like grin of their minions, they seem to realise that the game has reached injury time. It is time indeed for restitution.

     

    First published in 2010.