Recent events arising from the Ondo Governorship primaries have thrown into the fore, once again, the fundamental question of political alignments within Yorubaland and its implications not only for the Yoruba Nation and People but also for Nigeria itself.
Accordingly, one of the Yoruba groups, “Oodua Nationalist Coalition” (ONAC) advocates that Yoruba people work for a new political party that derives her strength from the values and civilization of the Yoruba People as the APC has been hijacked by what it called the Fulani oligarchy. It also states that this is in line with an attempt at weakening the SW political leadership through the use of surrogates and berated the “Asiwaju Group”( or as we will put it, Asiwaju Tendency) as being innocently naïve, too trusting and lacking in a deep sense of history.
Thus for ONAC, the only way out was for the Yoruba to have a political party of their own that will promote and defend the interest of the Yoruba people. ONAC said the “Tinubu Group” was desperate for “change” without being patient to understand the content and form of the change.”
Assuming, but not conceding, for this purpose that all of ONAC’s claims about the Asiwaju Tendency are correct, it will be valid only if the Fulani, by virtue of their own wiles and cunning are able to pull through their domination agenda all on their own, especially by virtue of their having executive power under their wings. We know this not to be so.
History also shows us that there are always collaborators within Yorubaland, ready, willing and able to abide by the north’s(Fulani) expectations albeit hidden under their own ambitions.
The quoted reasoning is lackadaisical in its approach to the question of “surrogates”. By making hay of northern penchant for using surrogates( who are really collaborators) the question as to the responsibility of the Yoruba Nation itself is left hanging. For this has always been our historical experience. Either ONAC is saying the Yoruba Nation is composed of hopeless and hapless people where surrogates abound or it is saying that these surrogates do not know what they are doing, which will be wrong; for they anchor their activities on their own political expectations. The answer must therefore lie somewhere else.
This is thus not about any Fulani or northern ambitions but any existing environment for Yoruba “surrogacy” in pursuit of any Fulani or northern aims and aspirations as well as the ambitions of the surrogates. That there is a historical trajectory shows that the problem is not with any political impatience or shortsightedness by anyone but the existence of a political environment without which the north is powerless.
The real question then is how these collaborators emerge within this environment. Egbe Omo Oduduwa posits that reducing our response to Nigeria’s problematic, itself a function of the Ethno-National/Regional contradiction, to pure electoralism aimed at securing dominance of this environment allow the emergence of all sorts of Yoruba collaborators against the Yoruba People and utilizing all sorts of perfidy where the center becomes the arbiter.
In contrast, the Yoruba resistance in 1965 showed that the Yoruba people had something to fight for; their autonomy, at the time. That was why no one really bothered about the then massively rigged 1964 Federal elections by the north and their collaborators but quite the opposite was the case once such a rigging by the collaborators was carried out in the 1965 Regional elections.
The question then, and now, is thus who the arbiter is or who the Yoruba people would want as the arbiter: The Yoruba Nation and People or the Nigerian center which brings to the fore the question of True Federalism.
ONAC fell short of addressing this issue by blaming Asiwaju Tinubu for being “naïve and lacking a deep sense of history”. Nigeria’s political firmament is built around Ethno-National or Regional power plays and by definition, electoral alliances will have to be operational for any meaningful electoral influences.
In 2015, the only credible and viable option was/is the APC. Prior to 2015, we also have certain Yoruba who acted as surrogates to Goodluck Jonathan who never hid his anti-Yoruba positions, up to the point of saying we are minorities in our own land. Throughout his rule, there were Yoruba surrogates who clamored for and obtained appointments and encouraged him to try to impose himself electorally on Yorubaland. Dasukigate revelations showed the extent to which these surrogates went.
Meanwhile, calling on us to work for a new party will only achieve the northern Fulani aims ONAC claims to oppose as such a new party will also have to form alliances, including the north, especially when, in our attempts to create a “ southern front” we always fail to define this “south”, whether it is geographical or geo-political, for the Yoruba can be said to occupy the south, geographically, while the Yoruba in Kwara and Kogi are already classified as the “north” thus making nonsense of a “southern” alliance.
Moreover, working for a new political party, aside from all the legal intricacies it involves, will create a distraction and diversion from the way of our stated goals, to wit: Autonomy or True Federalism. Furthermore, those forces, that is the north and their collaborators, will utilize their perfidy to even ensure that such a party is denied its legitimacy.
Therefore, since it is being said that the Buhari administration is pursuing northern hegemony though absolute control of the APC machinery, it can only follow that the subordination of the SWAPC to the national organs will be a priority and this can only be achieved through neutralizing the Asiwaju Tendency in the SW APC.
Since the SW APC is yet to be totally compromised, it is our belief that its mechanism should be used to begin a process towards True Federalism by its embarking on a Yoruba Constitutional procedure to produce the Yoruba Regional Constitution to be ratified in a Yoruba-Region Referendum as the Yoruba answer to the APC Manifesto on True Federalism and which, at this point of our history, is the only way out. Consequent interaction and political realities will determine the necessity or otherwise of a new party, which, if necessary, will be anchored on the Yoruba Regional Constitution and nothing else.
Written by Shenge Rahman Akanbi and Femi Odedeyi.
EGBE OMO ODUDUWA.
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