What may be loosely described as Banji Akintoye’s version of Nigeria’s history is boldly punctuated with, and replete with murkily identified forces and interests manipulating Nigeria’s political leaders. That may have been true in the past. Should it still be the case today? Who is/are manipulating Nigeria’s political leaders presently?
The sooner Nigerians stop blaming all comers for their foreseeable and therefore avoidable failures as a people, the sooner Nigeria will restart on her journey to achieve the greatness that many informed people predicted for her and continue to believe is still possible. The smart will forever try to manipulate the dumb. What is also true is that that there is no manipulation without the consent of the manipulated.
The question that needs to be asked include:
i) why are Nigeria’s political leaders dirt easy to manipulate?
ii) why is it that that the powerful emotion of love for country and fellow citizens continues to fail to take root and bear fruit in the hearts and minds of these leaders?
iii) Why is it that education, overseas’ travel, and daily experience are generally inconsequent as the hearts and minds of these leaders are shaped on Nigeria’s present and future?
iv) Why do Nigerians seem to be more inclined to see more of what divides them and less of what unites them?
v) Why do Nigerians highlight their differences and personal/group interests, and obscure their similarities and common interests as fellow citizens?
I have had conversation on the above and other questions with Nigerians on many occasions. Some blame what can only be describes as Nigeria’s leaders irresponsibility and stupidity on greed. Others say Nigeria’s leaders are dangerously and shamelessly ignorant by choice. I say that it is possible to be greedy, stupid and ignorant and still love and truly serve one’s country and fellow citizens. It is very well for one to always choose to blame others for self-determined undesirable outcomes. A time comes however when this practice is evidently vacuous, disingenuous, dishonest, and fraudulent. That time may have come for Nigerians.
It is 2011. Anyone paying attention knows now that underdevelopment is more a choice than a curse.
oa
From: NigerianID@yahoogroups.com [mailto:NigerianID@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Valentine Ojo
Sent: Monday, September 12, 2011 9:22 PM
To: Nigerian IDENTITY
Subject: NigerianID | FOR THE YORUBA NATION: THE PRIMARY STRUGGLE OF TODAY
Another Recommended Read which buttresses the earlier one by Richard Akinjide, SAN...
Tope Fasua please take note:
The Yoruba do not buy your undeserved glorification of all the incompetent and ineffective Northern rulers who deliberately undermined and destroyed the true federation with which Nigeria started out!
The result is the chaos and rot that we are all witnessing in Nigeria today.
On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 9:39 PM, Leye Ige <ige.leye@yahoo.com> wrote:
| SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE ANNUAL CONVENTION OF EGBE OMO YORUBA USA AND CANADA ON SATURDAY SEPT. 10, 2011, IN NEW YORK, NY, USA By PROF. BANJI AKINTOYE Just over four weeks ago, on Monday the 8th of August, 2011, something of great historic importance happened in our homeland, the Yoruba Southwest of Nigeria. In the morning of that day, in every one of our six state capitals – in Lagos, Ibadan, Abeokuta, Oshogbo, Akure and Ado-Ekiti – hundreds of our people took to the streets to carry placards and to demonstrate. In every case, the demonstrators took their demonstration to the State Governor’s office and the House of Assembly, and submitted to the governor a letter stating their demands. What were they demonstrating for? What were their demands? They were demanding a restoration of our Regional Self-Government that we in the Western Region of Nigeria had won in August 1957 and that was taken away from us in 1962 by the federal government of Nigeria. They pointedly chose for their demonstration a date close to the historic date in 1957 on which we of the Western Region of Nigeria had jubilantly celebrated our Regional Self-Government. Some of their placards read simply: “WE WANT OUR SELF-GOVERNMENT BACK”. In the letter which they submitted to each State Governor, they concluded with the simple but confidently affirmative proclamation and warning: “This is the beginning. We will not rest until our demands are granted. We will return to the streets again and again. The battle is joined”. What is the significance of their action? What is the background to it all? Permit me to spend the next few minutes to answer. I assure you it will be brief. In all the meetings and conferences held in Nigeria and in the British Colonial Office in London in the years after the end of the Second World War in 1945, meetings and conferences on how to structure Nigeria and get her ready for independence, certain facts emerged unmistakably concerning the country called Nigeria. One of these is that, of the three units called the Regions of Nigeria, each had its own unique pace of growth and development, and its own unique ambitions, desires and expectations. In deference to this imperious fact, it was conceded step by step, in conference after conference, that each Region should, as much as possible, be allowed to develop in its own way, and at its own pace, in the context of a federal Nigeria. Following upon that premise, it was even conceded that though all of Nigeria would become independent on the same day, the path of the gradual steps of each Region towards that independence must of necessity be unique and be different from the paths of the other two Regions. So, each Region was allowed to chart its own path – to decide when and how quickly it would take more and more control of its own affairs, until the day when independence would finally arrive for all together. Our own Region, the Western Region, immediately showed itself the most ready to move forward. In virtually all indices of development and readiness, we were ahead of the other two Regions. In brevity, as I have promised, let me summarize that we had the most educated citizenry, the most advanced educational system, the most productive agriculture, the largest export economy, the strongest professional and middle class, the most advanced modern commerce, the most developed infrastructures, and easily the most methodical and most forward-looking Regional apparatus of government. The ways in which we proceeded to employ our Regional power for very systematic programs of development and progress, even as the conferences and meetings were going on in the Colonial Office, showed clearly that we were more than ready to manage our own affairs. When our Regional government gave our Region the program of Free Primary Education in 1954-5, the first such program on the African continent, the speed of our progress increased enormously. In the light of all these, our Region was inevitably allowed to have more and more control over its own affairs – at a pace faster than the other two Regions. In this context, we were allowed to have what was called Regional Self-Government in August 1957, before any other Region could have the same. The grant of Regional Self-Government to the Western Region in 1957, therefore, is, for us the Yoruba people who constituted the majority of the population of the then Western Region, one of the most important landmarks in our modern history. Its importance was two-fold. In the first place, it was a recognition and an acclamation of our capabilities and our readiness to manage our own life, to determine our own destiny, and to become a significant factor in the world. In the second place, it threw open the door for us to embark on creative and daring new ventures for our progress and prosperity. With the new powers of Self-Government in our hands, we replaced the British Regional Governor with our own indigenous Regional Governor, and appointed one of our Obas, one of the ancient rulers of our land, to that position. Substantively, we now had our own Premier and Ministers, all appointed by our elected legislature. We even had our own Agent (like our Ambassador) in London. We were independent in all but name. And for us, the sky was now the limit. To absorb the products of our free primary schools, we knit together a partnership including our Regional government, various voluntary agencies, and our communities and private entrepreneurs, to establish secondary schools and vocational schools all over our Region. We then started to plan to establish in our ancient city of Ife, a Regional university that we hoped would be one of the best universities in the world. We multiplied the pace for the modernization of the factors of our lives – more tarred roads, more pipe-borne water for our towns, more powerful television and radio carriers, more scholarships for higher education at home and abroad, new industrial estates, new programs for the nurturing of modern agriculture, and an investment corporation, the Oduduwa Investment Corporation, serving as a holding company for industrial and commercial companies, banks, insurance companies, real estate enterprises, etc – altogether forming the largest aggregation of African-owned investment capital on the African continent. We who were young were growing up in a land in which one could dream dreams. Usually, those of us who went to universities had jobs waiting for us before we even took our final examinations. Sometimes, while we were taking our final examinations, vehicles sent by employers were waiting outside to take some of us to their new jobs. Our Region was “First in Africa” in virtually every phase of modernization, and some of our more visionary political leaders were already saying that we would soon catch up with the economic miracles of Japan. But all this time, unfortunately, we lived under a cloud. That cloud was put together by British desire to pave the way for continued British masterminding of the affairs of Nigeria after independence. It consisted of carefully designed and resolutely pursued policies aimed at achieving two objectives – first, to make the Hausa-Fulani leaders of the Northern Region the real and unchangeable rulers of Nigeria after independence; and second, to establish a client-mentor relationship between the Hausa-Fulani rulers of Nigeria and the makers of British policy - in defence of British interests in post-independence Nigeria. The plan was essentially simple. The British constructed a federal Nigeria consisting of three Regions, and did everything to ensure that the Northern Region alone would hold power over the whole. The censuses were rigged to make the Northern Region have more than half the population of the whole federation. Politically, that meant that the Northern Region would always command a clear majority in the Nigerian legislature, with power to make laws for Nigeria and to prevent any measures that they did not want. To ensure that they would always control all or enough of the legislative votes from the Northern Region, the Hausa-Fulani leaders were schooled to control the electoral commission and to adopt various means to fabricate elections. To be able to control the Nigerian armed forces, they were schooled to use their control over the federal government to plant their boys in most key positions in the Nigerian army. And to be able to deal with any Region that threatened these plans, the independence constitution was made to give the federal government the power to declare an emergency over any Region, suspend its elected government, and appoint a sole administrator to govern it. Even before the day of independence in 1960, it had become obvious to the fabricators of these plans and policies that their well laid plans could not work if the two Regions of the south were not somehow dealt with and subdued. In 1957, to destabilize the Eastern Regional leadership, a hostile inquiry was instituted into parts of the Eastern Regional government under Dr. Azikiwe, and his image was tarnished. The political party that he led was then penetrated and divided, and significant leaders of the party, such as Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, were manipulated and bribed to become closer to the Northern leaders than to Dr. Azikiwe. After that, the Eastern Region was easier to be made to play ball as the controllers of Nigeria directed. After the pre-independence election of 1959, therefore, the leaders of the Eastern Region were quite easily made to join with the Northern Region’s leaders in the federal government. But it did not take long to see, after independence, that the strong, confident and independent-minded Western Region alone was still more than capable to stand in the way of the British neo-colonial plans and the Northern schemes of domination. And so, maneuvers were embarked upon to employ federal power to destabilize the Western Region and pulverize its leadership, The outcome was that in 1962 a crisis was instigated in our Region, our elected government was suspended by federal authority, a sole administrator was appointed to rule over us, and our Region was then broken up. However, in the remaining portion of the Western Region, in the new Western Region that was entirely Yoruba, the controllers of Nigeria soon over-reached themselves by introducing their election rigging manipulations. Rigging our elections was too big an assault on our political culture, and we the youths of the Region revolted. In the highest circles of our youth revolt, we used to say among ourselves that we were ready to go on fighting for ever, and that we would never never surrender the self-respect and dignity of the Yoruba Nation to anybody or anything. In different shapes and forms, the fight has been going on ever since. And it is going on today. I urge you my brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of Oodua, open your eyes clearly and see what is happening to us as a people, and to the Nigerian country to which we belong. This is not just a question of building Nigeria. If it were just a matter of building Nigeria, we Yoruba people are able to make some of the best contributions, and every other nationality in Nigeria is very able to make notable contributions too. What is happening here is a gradual working of a long-term plan whose ultimate intention is to have one of the nationalities of Nigeria standing triumphant over the ruins of the other nationalities of Nigeria. No educated person among us can claim ignorance or doubt about this fact. Even Sir Ahmadu Bello, the foremost Hausa-Fulani leader of our times, left us in no doubt. On October 12, 1960, that is only eleven days after independence, he was reported in Kaduna as saying as follows: “This new country called Nigeria should be an extension of the estate of our great-grand-father Othman dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We must use the peoples of the Middle Belt as willing tools, and the South as conquered peoples; and never let them rule over us, and never let them control their own future. Fortunately also, some British Colonial Papers of the 1950s have now been made public, and some British colonial administrators in the Nigeria of the time have written their memoirs. And, taking advantage of these materials, some eminent Nigerians, notably Prof. Omo Omruyi and Sir Olaniwun Ajayi (to mention only a few), have laid a lot of things bare with their researches and writings. Moreover, it is no longer any secret that the Hausa-Fulani political elite are constantly strategizing about how to manipulate the rest of Nigeria in order to achieve their objectives of perpetual domination. The need for us, the Yoruba people and the other peoples of Nigeria, to put more energy into the fight is great. Between 1962 and now, under military dictatorships created and led by the Northern boys planted in the armed forces, or civilian governments controlled by so-called political parties owned and directed by the Hausa-Fulani leadership of the North, we Yoruba have lost far too much of the things that should be beautifying our lives as a people, things that we planned, authored and worked for. Now (in the first years of the 21st century), the masses of Yoruba people are experiencing more poverty than they did in the 1950s – indeed more than at any other time in our recorded history since the late 19th century. The corruption and the endless federal manipulations through agencies like the Central Bank dampen the spirit of enterprise, and create titanic problems and uncertainties for our genuine entrepreneurs and business people. Our Oduduwa Investment Corporation has been deliberately and gradually broken up by federal policies and directives and forced to sell much of its assets, with the result that a lot of those assets now belong to people from other parts of Nigeria. Nigeria’s systems of distorted federalism and revenue allocation put most of the country’s revenue in the hands of the federal government and leave the states to skimp and suffer – and the huge financial resources in the hands of the federal government are mostly looted or wasted or used for manipulating people and for subverting the leaderships of other Nigerian nationalities. With development thus generally interrupted and slowed down in our homeland, educated Yoruba youths regularly represent the largest group among the huge mass of unemployed youths of Nigeria. The Yoruba dedication to educating their children remains unshaken, but under the impact of prevailing circumstances in Nigeria, our schools have suffered generalized neglect and have fallen drastically in physical quality and educational value. Frustrated by the situation, widely denied acceptable environments and appropriate tools for their work, often uncertain if and when their monthly wages will be paid, and sometimes going for months without pay, most of our teachers have given up on striving for any quality in their duties as teachers. And as a result, most of our children are learning little or nothing at school, very many graduates of our schools are hardly literate at all, and the performance of our students in the West African School Certificate examinations has fallen disastrously. Our university at Ife, built at great expense to us, and with unparalleled patriotic dedication, has been taken over and devastated by federal authority. The Yoruba states have continued to establish more and more university level institutions, but the general Nigerian official neglect and abuse of higher education have shattered the standards of intellectual work in virtually all Nigerian public universities. From this general educational mess, the only growing relief in the Yoruba parts of Nigeria is that more and more organizations and Yoruba persons are stepping forward to establish good quality schools and universities, and that more and more Yoruba parents are straining to send their children to these. But we do not know when it will suit the objectives of the controllers of Nigeria to seize control of even these private institutions, just as they seized the private schools which our people had established in the 1950s. Flight from the Nigerian situation has produced a large and rapidly growing modern Yoruba Diaspora all over the world – which means, among other things, that much of the heavy Yoruba investment in education is not benefiting Yorubaland and Nigeria but other countries. On a number of instances, in line with the general federal excesses in the use of power, development plans or programs by Yoruba state governments have been countermanded, cancelled or resisted by Nigeria’s federal authorities – adding measurably to frustration of progress in our states. From time to time also, election manipulations by federally directed agencies, and resistance to the rigging, come to disrupt life in our states and to engender losses of lives and property. Also, even though the Yoruba who go out to live and venture in other parts of Nigeria are widely known to be respectful of the cultural sensitivities of their hosts where they live, they have nevertheless often been caught in the religious and other conflicts there, losing many people to the violence. Such losses of lives reached a particularly painful peak in May 2011 when many Yoruba graduates, as well as many from other parts of Southern Nigeria, all serving under the Nigerian Youth Service Corps, were massacred in parts of the North. Poverty, retrogression, suffering and ugliness are thus being forced on us as a people. We do not have to sit there and take these abuses – as if we are a people who have no self-respect, no energy and no fire in our belly. Without necessarily employing the tools used by the Yoruba youths of 1962-66, we need to intensify the fight for our dignity and for the restoration of the constitutional powers by which we were able to establish strong and beautiful foundations for our modern life in the years up to 1962. Our chances for achieving success in the fight are better now than at any time before. Following the 2011 elections in Nigeria, and the considerable changes caused by them, our chances have grown enormously better. What is needed is a restructuring of the Nigerian federation in such a way as to give each of the component peoples or nationalities of Nigeria increased constitutional autonomy, greater control over their own resources, and more power over their own security. This is not a selfish Yoruba program. It is a program that will benefit every single nationality in Nigeria. Carefully, resolutely and tenaciously pursued, this fight can yield the transformation of Nigeria that we need, and give us the freedom to resume our race to progress and prosperity – without any more fears of obstruction and disruption. If we make a success of it, we may even earn the accolades for pointing Nigeria towards the path of rational survival as a country. One thing is certain. This fight will be won some day, either by those who today are still disposed to do it in such a way as to keep Nigeria together, or by a later generation of Yoruba and other Nigerian nationalities who will feel compelled to do it through ripping Nigeria apart. This is why hundreds of our people demonstrated in our state capitals some four weeks ago. Their message is clear. They want our elected rulers, our legislators and governors, the ones whom we chose with our votes in May and whom we trust, to take the lead and to champion us as a people in the fight for the restructuring of the Nigerian federation. They are demanding for a referendum in each of our states, to be organized by our government in each state, in order to ascertain the wishes of our people over the matter of Nigerian restructuring. They say that the plans that our elected rulers are considering for revamping our educational system, for giving our agriculture a big push, and for integrated development in our homeland in the southwest are all welcome. But, they say that again and again in the past, we Yoruba people have embarked confidently on these things and gone a long way in achieving them, only to have the federal government or some federal agency come and disrupt and wreck our achievements. There is no wisdom in continuing to live in a setting in which we as a people are forever inflating and deflating, and always at the mercy of another people. These are the messages of the crowds that demonstrated four weeks ago in our homeland. We all owe it a duty to our nation to rise up and give our support to their message. We Yoruba people have always promoted a rational federal structure for Nigeria, based on respect and autonomy for Nigerian nationalities and the right of each nationality to control its own resources without prejudice to federal right to levy taxes. When the British rulers of Nigeria put forth a constitution in 1949 and asked the Nigerian public to comment on it, it is precisely this rational federalism that our leaders in Egbe Omo Oduduwa proposed. Throughout his life, in book after book and statement after statement, it is the same thing that our foremost leader in modern times, Obafemi Awolowo, proposed. It is exactly the same that the Unity Party of Nigeria proposed in its manifesto in 1979. It is the only way to keep Nigeria together amicably and peacefully; and it is the only way to liberate the innate energies of Nigeria’s various peoples for development, progress and prosperity. We, the Yoruba people of Nigeria have always and consistently proposed and supported this rational federal system for Nigeria. We have a good chance today to get it done. Let us go for it with all the energy that we as a people command. And let us, with respect, urge the other nationalities and peoples of Nigeria to join in the fight. We surely can get it done. I THANK YOU ALL. |
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