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By Femi Odere
When it remained exactly a week into this retreat of Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG) of which is the reason for the gathering of these Very Important Personalities (VIPs) here in the capital city of a state known by the federal government nomenclature as the “Fountain of Knowledge” but which has since taken another cognomen as “Ile Iyi, Ile Eye,” which was coined for her by none other than our own epitome of humility, Governor Kayode Fayemi, in accordance with the state’s age-long socio-cultural ethos, Mr. Ayo Osunloye, the state coordinator of the Lagos Chapter of ARG (of which I am a member) called to draw my attention to the email he had sent, intimating members with the format that the retreat would likely take, based on other retreats that the organization had in the past. I answered in the affirmative but made it known that I couldn’t open the attachment that was sent with the mail. The coordinator, almost in the same breath, told me that he would appreciate my coming up with an appraisal of the future state of the Yoruba nation especially in the aftermath of the recently concluded general elections as well as my assessment of ARG itself. Like a subaltern who must first obey the command of his superior officer even when he had absolutely no idea how the command could be carried out, all I said was “yes sir.” It was later in the day that it occurred to me that I probably would have asked the chairman the simple question: Why me? My wanting to ask this question is none other than the fact that there are many members of our Lagos Branch of ARG who can give account of the future of Yorubaland in national politics and evaluate ARG at the drop of a hat (even in their sleep), than someone like me whose knowledge of the politics of the Yoruba nation is just now emerging and his understanding of ARG cannot be said to have been more than 5 years as a member of this important organization. But a ‘command’ must be obeyed. Therefore, try I must!
What’s the future of Yorubaland in national politics?
Please permit me to begin this presentation by saying that it is probably futile to talk about the future of anyone or anything because of the Economists. This is because after coming up with all kinds of permutations to explain the aspect of the human condition in which they are experts, they (the Economists) said that all they told us may not matter because in the future; “we are all dead” anyway. But we’re not talking about a long, drawn-out future here but our immediate future as a people.
We cannot begin to articulate the future of the southwest geo-political region, which is predominated by people generally believed as Yoruba-speaking people, in national politics, especially in the light of the recently concluded presidential election, without drawing our attention to the votes that were garnered from the region where the vice president (and Buhari’s running mate), comes from. It is important to put the situation in proper perspective, if not context, because democracy, as they say, is a game of number in which the numbers given by the participants determine what comes, when and how much to them. In order to better understand this situation, one may have to draw a comparison between the votes delivered to Buhari/Osinbajo in 2015, which was the very first time that the progressive elements of the region’s political spectrum became a major partner at the centre, and what was gifted the same duo in 2019 from the southwest. In 2015, it would be recalled that Buhari received 2.4 million South-West votes, with a plurality of about 600,000 votes over Jonathan, then an incumbent and main rival. But in the 2019 presidential election, however, Lagos State, for instance, with its over 5 million registered voters, and a solid progressive political leadership within the All Progressives Congress (APC), was only able to deliver over 130,000 votes in defeating Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In Ekiti State, with the least number of registered voters in Nigeria, by comparison, had a better showing than Lagos. In Ogun State, where many thought President Buhari would suffer the greatest loss, he still came up with a winning margin of about 80,000 votes. In the State of Osun, APC managed to defeat the PDP with just about 10,000 votes—-at a great cost and the burning of an INEC office in the state. The Buhari/Osinbajo ticket lost in Ondo and Oyo States.
With this brief comparison, we need no one to tell us that something is fundamentally wrong with how our electorates are engaged in the voting process in a region that has more than 16 million registered voters. We also need not be told that the rain, indeed, has started beating us. Therefore, the earlier we begin to take critical assessments of our politics and our people’s participation in the voting process and the factors that may be responsible for our dwindling fortunes in the nation’s political arena the better we will be. Hence the future of Yorubaland in the nation’s body politic.
There’s no doubt that some patriots of the Yoruba nation have begun in earnest to shout from the rooftop by drawing our attention to the danger facing the southwest, I mean the progressive elements of the political spectrum of the region, in the nation’s politics. The appraisal and relevance of the southwest immediately after the presidential election that appeared in The Nation newspaper by Mr. Seye Oyeleye, DAWN Commission’s Director General readily comes to mind. But before my assessment of the seemingly precarious position of the progressive elements, which is just four years old in the matrix of our national politics, I would have thought that our much-advertised educational endowment as a people, hence our inordinate modernity and sophistication, would have naturally given us the acute understanding of the importance of higher participation in the voting process in a democracy. But it took the uncivilized, starkly illiterate Almajiris whose only life vocation is begging, and who, consistently, have been voting for Buhari since 2003 for us to finally learn in 2015 that integrity and honest living must be the overarching requirements of any politician if our polity must grow. So much for our education and sophistication.
What I am about to say in this paper may not be radically different from what keen watchers of Yoruba politics already knew. Neither does it have any dissonance with how the political class in the geo-political region makes political decisions for and on behalf of the collective. But for ease of identification, I will rather compartmentalize my observations about what could be impeding not only our fortunes as a geo-political region, but almost guaranteed to have serious repercussions on our nation if the progressives should find themselves outside the national power loop after the Buhari/Osinbajo presidency. Because let us face it, Nigeria can only begin to seriously make her way into modernity as we know it when the progressive political class in the southwest continues to be in political partnership with their counterparts in the northern half of the country into the foreseeable future.
Therefore, in order to address some of the factors that—-I believe—-make our future very worrisome, if not precarious in the nation’s body politic, there are some things we know as facts about ourselves and our political space that truly inform or determine how our politics shapes us. Whether or not we have been bold enough to tell ourselves these home truths is another thing entirely. By this same token, there are also things we now know we don’t know while there are things we do not know we don’t know.
These three situations are, what, in February 2002 during a Defence Department briefing, Donald Rumsfeld, the then US Secretary of Defence, referred to as the “Known Knowns,” the “Known Unknowns” and the “Unknown Unknowns” respectively. But I shall take the first two of these three situations to describe my observations.
The “Known Knowns”
While much has been said about the fact that Nigeria’s politics is seriously devoid of nobility of purpose and ideology as the driving forces for politicians in their quest for electoral offices probably since the end of the civil war, this unfortunate scenario seems very pronounced, if not grave, in the southwest because the people in the region had a time-tested reputation as having these two belief systems as our credos in our engagement with politics not only in our region, but also with the general society. These credos were generally believed to have been laid down by our late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. While much has also been said about the military incursion into politics and the governance architecture of the polity, it cannot be overemphasized that the advent of the military jackboots has laid waste the country’s political and governance structures, and the southwest is not an exception. Only God knows if or when the negative effects of this unfortunate incursion will finally wear off the people’s psyche as well as the body politic.
Therefore, rather than the politics that used to ennoble our society (and examples abound), southwest politicians now seem unscrupulous and unapologetic about the way they engage in politics and power acquisition for the sake of me, myself and I. In their pursuit of this rabid and highly individualistic tendency, they would have no qualms about jettisoning an entire socio-economic and political group interests if their individual interest, no matter how minimal, is perceived to be threatened or cannot be met by the group or society in which they belong. It has never been this nauseating. A typical case of throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
As if this was not bad enough, virtually all the members (and I must say but with the exception of an infinitesimal few) of our political class are so downright gullible when it comes to understanding the roles and functions of their different political offices that a former governor here in the southwest announced to his people, and by extension the world—-probably to demonstrate that his ignorance was just as good as, if not better than the knowledge of others—–that he had never for once taken the time to read the country’s constitution. If a former governor could admit (at least he was being honest) that the nation’s Rule Book was the least of his concerns, how then could we have expected him to provide quality political leadership and transparency based on the rule of law? In some climes that cannot boast of our educational attainment, he most definitely would have been recalled or impeached by that singular admittance. But here, we just went about our businesses as if we never heard anything.
Part of these “known knowns” also deals with that axiom that says a people get the leader they deserve. We can excoriate the politicians all we want for driving the polity further down the abyss of quality leadership and representation. But what about the followers themselves? Pray, how do we continue to abuse a politician (again from this state) who made it known in no unmistakable terms that she could afford not to take the electorate into account in whatever she does in her elective office because she had already paid them during her campaigns? Or how do we keep blaming a politician who was elected into office despite his criminal records that are not only as glaring, but also as long as the distance between Ado-Ekiti and Iju-Itaogbolu? What does that say about the people and their value system? Fact is that the values of our people are so twisted that one cannot help but wonder if there’s any immediate solution to our perverted moral values. These three examples of what we know about ourselves (the “known knowns”) should suffice in this given circumstance.
The “known unknowns”
As I said earlier, these are things we now know we don’t know. Perhaps, the starting point of this particular categorization should be the issue of restructuring that has been inseparable from the progressives like Siamese twins. Who would have thought that the idea of restructuring, based on true federalism that advanced nations have deployed for their developmental aspirations, would have been frowned upon, if not resisted by people not only from other geo-political regions that has more to gain if the country was restructured, but also from within our own fold? This is something we now know we didn’t know. One of the things we also now know we didn’t know is the fact that some leaders could be so audacious to select for us who our political leaders should be despite that they themselves fell far short of the minimum that are required of a political leader. Who could have thought that a governor who is patently criminally minded would emerge not once but twice in this very state that has the highest number of people with higher education per capita? The State of Osun seems presently on a shaky ground as a governorship candidate with absolutely no presence of mind to understand what governance truly means, may (but God forbid) occupy the Chief Bola Ige House. This is how bad things have gotten in the Land of Oduduwa.
Restructuring from within the region
The South West and its leaders had been the earliest proponents of Restructuring the Nigerian polity. This has largely been resisted by a section of the country. In all the years the governments of the South West had not demonstrated their fidelity to the ideals of Restructuring. A typical and sore example is the relationship between states and their Local Government Administration. All States had virtually strangulated the Local Governments by taking over without performing their revenue yielding functions as clearly spelt out under the Constitution. This has resulted in stultifying the capacity development, service delivery to the citizenry, revenue generation at the third tier of governance and the general deterioration of government and our environment. We must be in the vanguard of insisting on the faithful operation of the Constitution at all levels so as to improve governance and service delivery. All vestiges of the aberration of military governance must be expunged from our body politic.
Challenging and calling our elected leaders to account
The Governors and elected officials had been left to their own devices as they control the levers of the economy of their various states. This has resulted in a situation where the polity had become tame and subservient. The political parties cannot control or direct the members any longer. The ARG is eminently positioned through consistent advocacy to correct some of these anomalies. We should attempt to rein in our elected officials to do the bidding of the people by constantly interrogating their policies and actions.
What about ARG?
Although I may be the least qualified to say anything about ARG, considering my relatively limited experience in the organization. But it is not only important to reflect on us as an organization on a day like this, which doesn’t come as regularly as it should, but equally important because of the possibility that whatever would be said has the potential to draw the attention of ARG leadership, most of whom are gathered here today. For human entities to truly live up to their billing, they must not only continuously challenge and reinvent themselves, but they must also ask themselves critical questions, regardless of how some of these questions may make us feel. From the little I can claim to know about ARG and the limited research made for the purpose of this presentation, four areas are identified that, if addressed, cannot but help strengthen ARG now and into the foreseeable future.
These are:
Rebranding ARG
The Afenifere brand had succeeded in confusing many of our people by the fluid disposition of Yinka Odumakin whose name is almost synonymous with Afenifere. His domination of the media in respect of Yoruba politics cannot be denied. The deliberate mischief of certain media organizations in introducing him as the ARG Spokesperson had also aggravated the confusion. The ARG in the recent years had little or no media presence. The reasons listed above are enough for the organization to consider an aggressive image refurbishment. The concrete interventions in promoting Yoruba interests hardly ever find traction with the people because of confusion of its image. The association of the sister organization with conservative tendencies in National politics had further diminished the progressive credentials of anything Afenifere. It is the right time for the organization to correct this lapse. And if for some reason, we cannot do a comprehensive rebranding, we must at least be more aggressive in engaging the media in order that the chaffs are separated from the substance. We owe this much to ourselves, ARG and our people in the southwest region.
Election within ARG itself
The foundation of ARG needs to be revisited. It will be recalled that there was a Draft Constitution which was supposed to guide the running of the organization. The ARG had performed creditably in its over ten years of operation. This is judging from its achievements in pioneering the establishment of the Yoruba Academy and Dawn Commission. Great institutions are formed to transcend generations and the ARG is by no means a promising great institution if we the operators diligently insist on putting it on a proper foundation. The need to revisit its Constitution, Articles of Association and Succession Plans are codified. The organization must renew the mandate it gives to its leadership periodically so as to reinvigorate the leadership and the organization.
Review of ARG ideological orientation
The ARG Credo has largely been the guiding light of our activities. This document and its contents were the intellectual reflections of our political forebears. The message had been canvassed for so long and so well that it might sound worn to the populace. This generation, should subject the Credo to vigorous intellectual interrogation to either improve on it or modernize the language to flow with the dominant demography on the Nigerian political terrain without losing the core message.
Financing ARG activities
The Human Resources available within the ARG if properly harnessed with the assistance of knowledgeable associates can be turned into a functional NGO that can attract funding for its activities. Experienced Sociopreneur like our host First Lady Erelu Bisi Fayemi can be of immense assistance in visioning and reinventing the organization to be able to deliver on its mandate.
Conclusion
If I said at the beginning that I am probably the least qualified member of our branch to have been picked to enunciate what the future may hold for Yorubaland in national politics as well as the place of ARG in the southwest geo-political region for the reasons earlier stated, it goes without saying that I am also the least suited to proffer solutions to the problems facing us as a people. Much of our problems—-it seems to me—-are self-inflicted. What is needed, however, is the courage and the will to tackle these problems headlong. But whatever we end up doing, we should not lose cognizant of the fact that our youths are chronically under-represented in both the general membership and hierarchy of ARG. And the time to redress this unfortunate situation is not just now but like yesterday—-as the saying goes. Sirs and madams, please don’t blame me for whatever you might have been looking for in this paper that you didn’t find because I didn’t ask for this. Blame my state chairman who outed me for no just cause.
I thank you for listening.
• Special thanks to Mr. Ayo Osunloye, my state coordinator for giving me this opportunity, and for his help in rearranging my thoughts and his submission of anecdotes for this paper.
