Presidency: It’s Yoruba Turn in 2003 and 2007

By

Banji Ayiloge

banjiayiloge@comcast.net

 

A common development in Nigeria these days is for politicians who are currently benefiting from Obasanjo’s largess, to roll out the drumbeat among Yoruba to vote for him this time around. The campaign is appealing to the primordial feelings of this ethnic group that they must support General Obasanjo because his is Yoruba. The politically astute Yoruba people are been deceived into believing that their interests are better served by voting for Obasanjo come 2003.  Of course, we know this not true.   We shall explore why this is not so in this piece.

Another obsession in the country at large is for those from other regions, particularly the Igbos to clamor for their ethnic groups to produce the next president of Nigeria. The wrong premise is that like the Yoruba, they must produce the president to feel fulfilled and have a sense of belonging within the comity of ethic groups that make up Nigeria. Somehow, I feel that they know that this is a baseless argument. Their strongest point is that Obasanjo became the president because it was conceded to the Yoruba as a result of the June 12 debacle. If the presidency were conceded to the Yoruba, Olu Falae would have been the president. The Yoruba people over whelming voted for him in the last election.  We shall come to that point later.

The North is another case defying all logical reasoning. This region has through the perennial military incursion into power, ruled Nigeria for most of the years after independence. Yet, the clamor for power shift seems to be loudest from that region lately, particularly from some northern politicians who were left out in the cold by the current administra­tion. This group prefers power to shift to their own geographical zone, not so much for any program to develop the nation, but to partake in government patronage that they feel has eluded them. To realize their objective, they must infuse in the nation, a sense of crisis by boiling the political waters. Furthermore, Obasanjo’s administration is being portrayed as inept, as if to say that we are not the only people in the country capable of producing presidents or heads of state without talents. To these people, Obasanjo’s ineptitude is portrayed as that of the Yoruba. By so doing, these political jobbers hope to encourage, power to shift to their own region hoping to have more access to power. The irony is that Yoruba people did not help make Obasanjo president as they rejected him during the 1999 elections.

The final group in this analysis, and the group to which this writer belongs, is the group of democrats who fought Abacha and the military on purely ideological grounds. They believed the real TRANSITION TO CIVILIAN ADMINISTRAION began with the current Obasanjo transition government. 2003 must therefore witness the return to civilian administration in Nigeria. For this reason, many democrats sat out the Abubakar-inspired transition and the sham elections that followed. The current administration is the transition administration. It has all the traits of a transition administration.  The military handed over to a military general that would not rock the boat, and who is known to defer to his military colleagues especially on the need to maintain the status quo. Let us take the points above one by one with a view to finding any merits in the general assumptions.

If the Yoruba people vote overwhelmingly for Obasanjo this time around, history will ask its leaders and the generality of the people what has changed?  We knew Obasanjo more than any other sections of the country and we rejected him at the polls. True, Obasanjo hails from the same town as Moshood Abiola, so was Earnest Sonekan.  The most powerful tribe in Nigeria – the military, yes it is the military, imposed both Sonekan and Obasanjo.  To those who may still be in doubt, Was IBB not rumored to be Obasanjo’s most ardent supporter in 1999?  The bond that Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida shared was not cemented on the street of Abeokuta or at the Yoruba political capital of Ibadan. It was noctured in the barracks. The military again, imposed General Obasanjo leaving the Yoruba out. The Yoruba people must then be allowed to pick the next president so as to compensate them for the persecution and exclusion of the past.  Yoruba must then be given a free hand in picking its candidate and we must all vote for that candidate. Do I sound like a tribal jingoist? Well, everyone else sounds like that these days.

The Yoruba Agenda that I have taken part in championing for almost a decade is national in scope and pragmatic in design and conception. It is the best route for moving the country forward.  A national conference of equal representation of all the nationalities that make up Nigeria can hardly be called an ethnic agenda. Substantial political and economic control of our immediate surrounding is a goal embraced by all free people all over the world. A whittled down fashion of the current bloated federal government would do everyone good by allowing the states and local governments to receive a sizeable portion of the revenues. The Yoruba as a group is in a hurry to develop. It feels that as long as substantive power is concentrated in the hands of the federal government to the detriment of all the federating units, its development will only be a mirage.  When a Yoruba leader talks of restructuring the country’s polity, He or she is talking about the issues mentioned above.  When Obasanjo says States or Local governments police would happen over his dead body, or that those who are advocating for a conference of all the Nigerian nationalities wanted to break up this country, was the president, a Yoruba, a product of the mainstream Yoruba political thought? Of course not. How come that some people are claiming that he is using our slot? We are yet to take our slot

The fact that Yoruba rejected Sonekan and Obasanjo was commendable. Having become president, Obasanjo selected a few of his friends in Yoruba land to be in government with him. The rest of the Yoruba continue in the country as underdogs. Our children can still win the presidency and their election victory be annulled; we still continue to labor under an oppressive central government that mops up all our resources only to return a pittance of it as federal grants. We cannot maintain a secure environment for our children because we must depend on Abuja to send a few ill-equipped, and ill- trained police that extort funds from our people. The list goes on and on.  The next President, if we go by conventional wisdom in the country, must then be a Yoruba and he should not be General Obasanjo.

This will mean that the Igbos must fold their cannon and stop their clamour for what they themselves have termed “Igbo President” It is not yet their turn.  The Yoruba are yet to be pacified. So the Igbos should wait.  For the Igbos to appreciate what the Yoruba are saying, let us use the Igbos political terrain as our point of reference. Suppose that the whole of Nigeria decided to concede the presidency to the Igbos.  The Igbos have Ekwueme and Ojukwu in mind. Since they must choose one, the Igbos back Ojukwu but powerful interests out of Igbo land such as General Gowon decided that Arthur Nzeribe should be the president. Notwithstanding that General Yakubu Gowon and his fellow coup plotters abruptly, and violently ended the reign of General Aguiyi Ironsi, an Igbo illustrious son. Would the Igbo be happy? We all know the answer to that question. Let the Igbos meet their Yoruba counterpart to back a credible, qualified and authentic Yoruba presidential candidate for 2003. The rest of the country should do the same.

The North as stated above continues to be a mystery. It continues to exhibit what is known as cognitive dissonance. They wanted Obasanjo after their military leaders persuaded them to support him, yet they still wonder if their lots would not have been better served by supporting another candidate, preferably one of their own. President Obasanjo was their candidate and they should learn to live with it. Indeed, it can be said that General Obasanjo, with the North’s blessing is occupying the Northern slot if there is anything like that.

Finally the country’s retinue of political activists during the Abacha regime was divided as usual during the so-called transition in 1999. Those who wanted to participate in politics at that time and those who insisted that the country’s polity must be restructured for the nation to move forward.  Those who were in politics before the military regime, argued that participation were the only way to move forward.   Without mincing words, I must accept that those of us, who abstained from party politics on the principle that our society must address the crisis of nationality that has been its bane since its inception, may have been too principled in a society full of opportunists and charlatans. What our abstentions did was to leave the coast clear for those who acquired large sum of money under Abacha to commandeer the machinery of government. In the West, the citadel of progressive politics, what we found is that our abstention created a vacuum of leadership that reflected in the appalling quality of our representation at all levels of government.  In the post 1999 politics of Nigeria, we can say that the military, formed an unholy alliance with those who served Abacha to capture political power. The response of these two groups to the cry for reformation of the nation’s polity is an unconvincing appeal to patriotism. Only the Obasanjos of Nigeria would rather emphasize superficial nationalism in the face of glaring evidence that society progresses better when its component parts are able to confront their fears - Be it that of magnetization, impartial revenue formula, or political representation.

Some have blamed the remnant of the democrats both at home and abroad for shirking their responsibili­ties for not participating in party politics during the Abubarkar transition. The argument is that some of us could have remained as the voices of reason within a rogue sys­tem. These well-meaning people are not impressed by the “we would rather preserve ourselves for the inevitable collapse of the rouge sys­tem” to rescue it posture. What if, in the case of Nigeria, it merely perpetuates itself? What if, rather than find a lasting solution to the ills of our society, we merely post­pone the evil days? How many years would we continue to remain a poten­tially great country because the brightest among our people view pol­itics with scorn and prefer to be mere critics?

There is no doubt that the Obasanjo second ascension to power has provided a well-deserved interlude to the mad years of military dictatorship, which reached its most pervasive period during Abacha. If this second coming con­tinues until 2003 without resorting to any of the Abachaic tactics, then we can just thank our stars and move beyond that by voting in a competent civilian administration to deal with economic and socio-political issues. All democrats must throw their hats in the ring for the benefit of our people. It is a task that has to be done.

Banji Ayiloge, a Journalist and Political Economist, was a Leader of the democratic movement abroad. He has since returned home and he is running for a senate seat from Ondo Central Senatorial District.