From: africa today <africatoday80@gmail.com>
Date: 2 August 2010 04:00
Subject: NIDOA | YORUBA REPUBLIC - PHILADELPHIA (OWAMBE) DECLARATION - NO CONTACT AND NOT SIGNED - NA WAOO
To: All Nigerians In Diaspora <NIDOA@yahoogroups.com>
In the absence of a coherent strategy for further political and economic development of our people both the leaders and the led of the southwest frequently resort to pointless nostalgia and empty braggadocio to convince (deceive is a better word) ourselves that all is well. We are children of the great Oduduwa. So what? The first Yoruba lawyer was called to the English bar in 1886. The Yoruba never bowed down to anybody. Yeah? Iraqis ruled the world too, but today America appoints their presidents.
Now more than ever that the real multinational nature of Nigeria is coming to the fore (with the clear possibility of an Ijaw president for the next eight years), it is time to start looking at the different ethnic profiles that need to be burnished if the whole of Nigeria is to shine. Nationalism turned into a bad word in Nigeria because of the Fulani, the Igbo and the Yoruba. They it is who, with varying degrees of success, subsumed whole nations within their regions to achieve pan-Hausa, Pan-Igbo and Pan-Yoruba political blocs respectively, while at the same time accusing one another of wanting to dominate the rest. I chose to start with Yoruba because charity ought to begin from home.
What is known as the Yoruba nation today is actually a political bloc of different nations, with diverse origins and history, but which are now united under a common lingua franca—Yoruba language. Amalgamation of these nations into a single voting bloc by Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his Action Group is a remarkable achievement in itself, comparable only to the way Fulani leaders created a northern political bloc of Hausa speakers. There were casualties, the most prominent being rearrangement of hierarchies and degradation of some Oba in the West, a few of whom never forgave Awolowo for sacrificing their status on the altar of his pan-Yoruba dream. However, Chief Awolowo's government policies were highly visionary in outlook—looking up, looking ahead, and looking around.
Looking up, as in deciding to create a modern Western region, using the best brains available from Yoruba sons and daughters and others scattered around the globe. Looking ahead, as in educated planning, as opposed to myopic incompetent leadership. Looking around, as in people-oriented policies that actually improve the individual's quality of life, as opposed to white elephant projects encouraged by colonialists in many developing countries.
The relatively smooth achievement of Awolowo's pan-Yoruba vision probably encouraged him to think the same process could be replicated for the whole of Nigeria. It is perhaps the only possible explanation for his dogged but failed ambition to be president of Nigeria.
Looking around Yorubaland today though, you would be hard-pressed to believe these are the same people that gave Nigeria that compendium of firsts. To say Yorubaland has stagnated is less than the truth. The reality is that the Yoruba have regressed. So how did a people so modern and so liberated come to be so degraded? The answer: the Yoruba became victim of their own success.
First is the Awolowo factor. With notable competition from the likes of Samuel Ajayi Crowther and Herbert Macaulay, Obafemi Awolowo is easily the greatest Yoruba that ever lived. Men are great, not by their achievements, but by their legacies. The excellence of his legacies induces the Yoruba to embrace Awolowo's [true] apostles like Bola Ige and Lateef Jakande, just as it stimulated other regions' leaders to emulate his policies.
However, this same excellence inures the Yoruba to emergent visionaries like Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola who, imperfect he might be, is beginning to transform Lagos. Fashola planned an epochal and long needed rail mass transportation system for Lagos, the only masses-friendly of their many projects, but which now seems lost (I may be wrong) in his fight for survival. In the old West, Fashola's political detractors would be pariahs in their local governments. The Yoruba no longer know for whom and when to call out the troops. Awolowo is Yoruba's first love, but there is no reason he must be the last.
Next is the representation factor (as distinct from leadership). The AG's policies created a Yoruba nation of middle-class professionals and business people. However, whereas the middle class may be socially conscious, change by mass action is not their substance. Street protests are only for their children while in university but as soon as these kids graduate and settle into white-collar family life, self-preservation becomes their primary goal. Thereby the Yoruba earned a reputation of being cowardly, loving the easy life, and fickle.
That social profile also meant that when Nigeria's leadership was being changed by forceful methods the Yoruba, unlike the other regions, had few foot soldiers, which also encouraged (probably until June 12) other nations of Nigeria to think all they needed to cower the Yoruba into submission was military menace or threat of mob terror. Thus, determination of Yoruba representation gradually became less of the people's preference and more of central power dictation.
The centre, strategically no doubt, went for the rebellious, the thuggish and the mediocre, such that we now have in political representation many uncouth, criminal and semi-illiterate elements. Unfortunately, these misfits have joined the setters of standards in our new society and, as would be expected, those standards have plunged abysmally.
It is impossible to impose a leader on any people for an appreciable length of time, despite what southerners keep alleging of the north, without the active connivance, or at least a passive acquiescence, of the people themselves. Crass elitism went out with mass illiteracy in Yorubaland.
The military reintroduced it. It is time we throw it out again. Also, now that we are beginning to design antidotes to the evil of military rule, the Yoruba must take a stand and make it known that they will never again support a military takeover of government in Nigeria, where leaders are imposed with impunity.
The third factor is societal values and ethos. I disagree with the notion that the problem with Nigeria is a failure of leadership. The real problem with Nigeria is a failure of society. A failed society will produce failed leaders. You do not build from the top. You start from the bottom. The only thing people start from the top is digging a grave.
The success of the Yoruba in the 20th century was not only, and far less, dependent on their relatively early exposure to European technology and philosophy, as on
1) a societal disposition to reject decadent imported culture, while
2) jealously preserving wholesome Yoruba traditions and values,
hence development in Yorubaland grew with probity, integrity and a desire for excellence.
Children knew to prostrate or kneel to greet elders, not call them by name or talk rudely to them. When young people left home to learn or to work, they were warned that the family name was sacrosanct. The society shunned known thieves. Indolent men were treated with scorn. Older women scolded negligent mothers and it did not matter if the errant female held a PhD.
Traditional governance, though aristocratic and elitist, was scrupulous. No prince was considered for a throne unless he was quintessential.
Children of the elite knew they carried a burden of the family name.
Promotion to the upper class was by achievement. Your family name might get you noticed but only your achievements would carry you further. All that also changed with the entry of vagabonds into power.
Names, family names and pedigree that meant so much to the Yoruba started to count for nothing. Now you hear funny names like Mr Olu Ade, Mrs Ola Olu, usually of people whose real [full] names, perhaps a few other aliases and passports, are on police wanted lists from Lagos to Europe to Asia to America.
In addition, the general discipline exemplified by, and which characterised, the West's leadership and personified by Chief Awolowo himself, gave way to reckless living. Lagos, awash with oil money in the early seventies, was the Sodom of Yoruba. A wholesome culture was turned overnight into ostentatious currency notes spraying at vulgar all-night revelries. The Yoruba were nicknamed "s'o wan'be" meaning "is it happening there" referring to a predisposition to search for locations of merriment.
Hard work became a station of last resort. There were quicker ways to riches.
Now we need a moral rearmament. It must be done in homes, schools, churches, mosques, palaces and playgrounds. When society is sound, leadership will be sound.
Next is our education and skills system. The success of education in the old West was because it was comprehensive--covering from nursery to tertiary, with skills centres and colleges. Now we build sub-standard so-called universities while the land lacked good teachers, carpenters, tailors, bricklayers, masons, plasterers, mechanics, electricians, etc. The designation [as universities] would not matter so much if they taught what mattered. The sight of able-bodied youth hanging around highways to go call mechanics to a vehicle broken down so they can share a little of his charge, when they themselves could train to be competent mechanics, is alien to Yoruba culture.
Pretenders to the throne of Yoruba leadership must start to spend less time in intrigue about who the next president of Nigeria should be but give more energy to planning and establishing good education and training or the people.
Fifthly, the Yoruba have slowly let go of many of what they should keep. While a dose of soul-searching from time to time is good for any society, people or race, a lot of the self-criticism by Yoruba people is idiotic. For example, it is common to hear some Yoruba say, in self-deprecation, that the Yoruba needs to follow the example of the Igbo and Hausa whereby if any of the latter two found their kinsman in dispute with a different ethnic, they automatically supported their kinsman. That is stupid. Why would anybody want to descend to such base sentiments?
Next is the Yoruba language. With language comes culture. We must make Yoruba compulsory in all schools in Yorubaland. English is compulsory in England. French is compulsory in France. Importation of technology should not mean importation of culture too. Many of Yoruba noble values and rich culture, even jokes, cannot be expressed adequately in English, the foreign language that is becoming the first in many Yoruba homes.
In addition, we must all acknowledge that Nigeria will not go back to regionalism, period. The logic of going back is simply false. The Yoruba probably favour a return to regionalism because the 'republic of Oduduwa' is the only potentially stable one—Yoruba speakers extend from Edo to Sierra Leone—probably the only emergent nation that would not have further clamour for subdivisions. However, it is impossible to have such an oasis of stability in a surrounding environment of agitation and strife. The circumstances that led to regions have changed. It is not impossible that present and emerging circumstances may still lead to a system resembling regional governments it must be a move forward and not a clamour to go back. Unless we do this, the Yoruba might find they have nothing to take to, as some demand, a sovereign national conference. Just like Aburi.
Lastly, the economy. As they say, it is all about the economy, stupid. This overdependence, actually total dependence, on oil has to stop. Military governors and administrators and civilian governors since 1966 not only lacked the competence to forge new economies, they have also been unable to continue from where the Awolowo team left off. Cocoa and rubber industries have collapsed. The economy of cassava for food and industry has stagnated. Manufacturing entrepreneurship has been discouraged to extinction. Much as these are largely a result of central government policies, a visionary leadership would have found answers to such ruinous settings.
A hanker to past glories is usually an indication of a lack of vision and when a society lacks vision, it dies. Thankfully, there is ample time and opportunity to save the progressive Yoruba from becoming a dying breed.
Written By Olaitan Ladipo.
3.
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The ethnic chest beaters are in a time warp.
Nigeria currently depends on crude oil for 90% of her GDP,
a percentage that will only decrease marginally in the foreseeable
future, considering that there has been no meaningful efforts directed
at diversification of the economy.
Those beating the ethnic war drums and looking fondly back to those
glory days when Chief Obafemi Awolowo built a robust economy in the old
Western Region mainly on proceeds from cocoa and other agricultural
products from the region have probably not checked the prices of cocoa,
palm oil and other produce on the world market recently. They are also probably unaware that
the our agricultural industries still employ for the most part the same labor intensive
archaic methods of the 1950s and 1960s. In other words today's southwest Nigeria can not survive
solely on the proceeds from agricultural products..
The simple fact is that there are only two states in Nigeria that are economically
sound enough to survive on their own without recourse to proceeds from Abuja. These are
-Lagos and Kano states, based on the percentage of internally generated
revenues compared to the amounts received from Abuja as their shares of the oil
revenues. Even when we begin to aggregate the states into regions, it is doubtful
to see enough cohesion amongst the states in any of the regions in Nigeria--
that would make a justifiable economic case to embark on another fruitless attempt
to secede from Nigeria.
In the case of the Southwest, those clamoring for an Odua nation are probably under the false assumption
that Lagos state will follow whatever the other states in the Southwest decide to do.
They have probably never heard of this expression--"Gedegbe le'ko wa"--Lagos will do what is
in its best interests, regardless.
Will Lagos state be willing to subsidize resource starved and some almost bankrupt fellow SW states
like Ogun, Oshun, Ekiti etc?
They have also forgotten, so soon, the Awujale's declaration about the place of the Ijebu in the Southwest scheme
of things. Are the Ijebu going to follow?
The same permutations at sub ethnic levels apply in almost every other region of Nigeria!
State creation has let the genies out of the bag. I sincerely doubt if there is going to be enough cohesion in any region of Nigeria,
that would make the citizens of any state in Nigeria decide to surrender its autonomy so it could be part of another entity carved out of Nigeria,
notwithstanding shared languages, cultures and origins. Undoubtedly the citizens and their leaders had some cogent reasons when they agitated
for the creation of their sates? Have those reasons been addressed enough that they no longer want their autonomy?
Bye,
Ola
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