PEOPLE & POLITICS

The Yoruba Elders Council, Obasanjo and Nigeria’s Future

Mohammed Haruna

Last week, in the opening sentence of this column, I quoted the popular expression about history repeating itself first as a farce and then as a tragedy, as a result of people refusing to learn from it. It has since come to my attention that I misquoted the expression by reversing the sequence of how history is said to repeat itself. The history of twenty years ago, I said, was about to skip the farcical stage and repeat itself as a tragedy because we seem not to have learnt the lessons of the attempt by the then ruling party, the National Party of Nigeria, NPN, to rig the general elections of 1983 and to try and cow Nigerians into silence over its self-imposition.

Whatever the sequence of the way history repeats itself, there can hardly be much doubt that the attempt by the ruling party, this time the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, to impose itself on Nigerians, like it or not, can only end in a tragedy – at best in the shape of an unstable and divided country and at worse in a messy and bloody break-up. But whichever shape the tragedy takes, it will probably contain some elements of the farcical – thanks essentially to the philosophical outlook of those who appear to be President Obasanjo’s closest advisers, most notably the Yoruba Elders Council led by the septuagenarian Pa Alayande and its Secretary-General, the gerontocratic retired Justice Adewale Thompson.

Last week Justice Thompson’s anonymous but popular Wednesday column in The Tribune, Mega Force, gave us an insight into what is probably President Obasanjo’s political agenda for the next four years. As far as demagogues go, the retired judge is probably among the worst variety. Any regular reader of his column will not fail to notice his racist and rabid hatred for anyone who is not Yoruba, most especially anyone who is a so-called Hausa-Fulani. Last week, Justice Thompson actually exceeded even himself.

In an article titled “The dawn of a new era”, Thompson first told his readers how the YCE was solely responsible for dragging Obasanjo, kicking and screaming, to seek for a second term. This suggests an unwillingness on the president’s part to go for the second term – a suggestion which, however, can hardly be accurate because long before the YCE first met with Obasanjo, the president’s fixer-in-chief, Chief Tony Anenih, had told Nigerians that there was no vacancy in Aso Villa for the 2003 presidential elections. But this was just by the way.

The substantive issues here really were (1) what, according to Thompson, the members of the YCE thought of politics and politicians, and (2) what agenda they had in store for Obasanjo’s second term. YCE, said Thompson, was a non-partisan socio-cultural organisation “consisting of well meaning people TOO REFINED to engage in the cloak and dagger contest of Nigerian politics”. (Emphasis mine). Politics, in other words, was for thugs and Obasanjo was their best bet for the job at hand of political thuggery. This, it seems to me, is hardly complimentary of Obasanjo’s political character.

Having settled on Obasanjo to do the nasty political job at hand, YCE then proceeded to define the job in clear and unmistakable terms. The members of the YCE, said Thompson “saw how Nigeria has been mismanaged by the cohorts of non-Yoruba rulers, Buhari, Babangida and Abacha who looted the treasury, cannibalized the Railway system, the Nigeria Airways and the Nigerian Shipping Company. We cannot cry over spilt milk. IT IS A QUESTION OF CULTURE. THESE MEN BY THEIR CULTURE CANNOT PRESERVE MONEY. THEY CAN ONLY SPEND, WITH THE RESULT THAT THE NON-THIEVISH YORUBAS BECAME TOTALLY IMPOVERISHED AND ARE NOW ATTEMPTING TO RECOVER. TO ALLOW THESE PEOPLE TO TAKE OVER AGAIN AFTER OBASANJO’S FOUR YEARS, WILL AMOUNT TO SUICIDE. It is therefore, the dawn of a new era in which Yorubas are called upon, either in or out of government, to show the light to Nigerians so that the people could find the way”. (Emphasis mine).

In even plainer English, what the honourable and learned judge is saying is that every other Nigerian must do everything possible to ensure that no so-called Hausa-Fulani ever rules Nigeria again. The most charitable thing one can say about these remarks is that they are arguably the most racist and demagogic rubbish anyone has ever peddled on the pages of any respectable newspaper like the Tribune.

Thompson, is, of course, not alone in believing such blatant rubbish. Anyone with even the most casual eye on the media is unlikely to have missed a similar rubbish Chief Richard Akinjide, a former attorney-general and minister of Justice of the federation, said in The News of September 18, 2000. In an interview in that edition of the magazine, Akinjide said, among other things, that “A lot of Northerners cannot separate public treasury from private treasury. They believe the two are synonymous, but in the South, the public treasury is sacred. I mean it is unthinkable. If you look at the history of corruption in Nigeria, it is this attitude at the Northern regional level that is transferred to the centre”.

With gerontocrats like Thompson and Akinjide being members of Obasanjo’s kitchen cabinet, there is every reason to believe that President Obasanjo’s pre-occupation in his second term will be not how to revive the nation’s ailing economy and an infrastructure gone to pot but how to destroy the North in general and the so-called Hausa-Fulani in particular, as a credible political force in the country.

Some of the president’s own words, of course, suggests otherwise. “You have”, he told Nigerians during his thanks giving service of May 30 in celebration of his return, “a brand new president”. His second term, he promised Nigerians “would be better because most of the things we learnt in the last four years would be brought to practice in the new term”.

The question is, has the president really learnt anything from his first term? If he has, does he have the will to bring those lessons to bear on his second term? We will deal with those questions presently but before then let us return to the rubbish peddled by the likes of Thompson and Akinjide that the so-called Hausa-Fulani (Thompson) or the Northerner (Akinjide) is by nature corrupt, whereas the Yoruba, in particular, and the Southerner, in general, is, to use Thompson’s funny expression, “non-thieving”.

For the Thompsons and the Akinjides of this world to see how racist, ridiculous and untenable their views of the cultural source of corruption are, I will simply refer them to one of the best pieces anyone has ever written in our newspapers about the true character of the Yorubas as a people. This was an article by Femi Osofisan, who, if I am not mistaken, is a professor in the arts or social sciences in either Ibadan or Lagos university. Writing under the title “Yorubaland as a riddle” in The Comet of December 17, 2000, Osofisan argued correctly that the Yoruba, like any ethnic group in Nigeria – and for that matter any group in the world – is a mixed bag of the good, the bad and the ugly. No summary of Osofisan’s excellent piece can do justice to the accuracy of the fairly elaborate portrait he painted of the Yoruba. Suffice it, however, to say his conclusions couldn’t be more correct. “The Yoruba”, he said, “are really no better nor worse in their virtues and vices than any other ethnic group. Just as they give birth to cowards, so do they father intrepid men. Like others they have their heros, just as inevitably as they nurture villains. And the question as to which of these two conflicting sides truly represents the Yoruba people, the answer can only be – both! However much we may like to deceive ourselves and glorify our differences, each of our tribes is in the end essentially the same as the other in its blending of good and evil men”.

If, after reading Osofisan, Thompson and Akinjide still harbour any doubts that no tribe in the world has a monopoly of vice or virtue and if they think the Yoruba are all virtue and no vice, can they please explain to the world who stole the National Bank of the old Western region blind and ran it aground? Can they explain to the world who stole all the money of the Federal Government owned Cocoa Fund? Can they swear on their Holy Bibles that no Southerner had anything to do with how OMPADEC, which was supposed to develop the oil producing Delta region, actually impoverished it?

And all those statutory allocations to the Yoruba states during and before Buhari, Babangida and Abacha, were the Hausa-Fulanis responsible for the waste and corruption in the use of those funds such that the brutish and nasty lives of the ordinary Yoruba hardly changed at all?

Last but by no means the least, if Northerners are by nature a thieving and corrupt lot, how come, as I once pointed out in these pages, none of the first generation Northern leaders like Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Malam Aminu Kano and Mr. Joseph Tarka matched their Southern counterparts like Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Chief S.L. Akintola and Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh in terms of their personal wealth?

No, whatever the likes of Thompson and Akinjide may chose to believe, the truth is that no tribe has a monopoly either of vice or virtue. To repeat Osofisan’s truism, every tribe or group has its fair share of the good, the bad and the ugly.

Having disposed of the arguments of Thompson and Akinjide for the meaningless rubbish that they are, we may now return to the more important question of whether Obasanjo has learnt any lessons from his first term and will, accordingly, ignore the YCE’s advice on what should be his agenda for his second term.

There are not a few political analysts and intellectuals from the South including the Yoruba, who believe Obasanjo has either learnt no lessons, or he is simply incapable of learning any. One such analyst is Ike Okonta who writes a column for Thisday. Writing in the paper’s edition of Sunday June 1 under the title “Prepare for the Worst, Fellow Nigerians,” he argued that Obasanjo’s second term would prove as disastrous as the first. “Let’s not mince words Lere”, he said, “Obasanjo’s second term will prove as disastrous as his first”. This, he reasoned, was because there does not appear to be a creative, credible and determined opposition in sight to check a president who believes he knows it all.

Another analyst, Professor Adebayo Williams, was even less sparing of Obasanjo. “The most elegant and patriotic solution” he said in Thisday of May 18, “would have been for President Obasanjo to do a Mandela or a George Washington and resist the temptation of turning himself into a democratic monarch in a multi-national nation. But haunted by crass failures of his first term and convinced that this was due to his inability to wield maximum autocratic power Obasanjo, by sheer and spectacular force of will, has returned”. Having forced his way back for the wrong reasons, concluded Adebayo, Obasanjo is unlikely to inspire Nigerians to give of their creative and productive best. Instead, Nigerians, he said, should prepare themselves for an unstable and violent future.

Harsher still than Williams in his assessment of Obasanjo’s record and the prognosis of his second term was one Dr. Wale Adebanwi, a political science lecturer in University of Ibadan, “Obasanjo”, he argued, “has blown up the myth of Yoruba administrative competence”. For this reason, he added, unless the Yorubas re-think their political strategy, they will “find themselves as a reactive people than a pro-active one at the expiration of a culturally embarrassing presidency that Obasanjo’s constitutes”.

Adebanwi appears to be somewhat confused about who is responsible for imposing Obasanjo on Nigerians. In one breadth he says that “the mainstream Yoruba leadership ought to and can claim that this was not the kind of man they have been pushing to lead Nigeria”. The responsibility for Obasanjo’s presidency, he says, must fall fairly and squarely on the shoulders of Generals Babangida, Abdulsalami Abubakar, Aliyu Mohammed Gusau and Vice President Atiku Abubakar. “They were the ones”, he said, “who usurped the collective wisdom of the people by foisting a man who had hardly collected his breadth after escaping from the cage of a bestial terminator and primal rougue, Sani Abacha, on Nigerians. He is their candidate, their president, their burden”.

However, at the same time that he says the Yorubas can rightly denounce Obasanjo as their own, he also says “The Yoruba too, like the quartet, cannot disown Obasanjo”. This is why, he says there are Yorubas who have been making the distinction between Obasanjo, on the one hand, and Babangida and Co, on the other, by saying that unlike the latter group, Obasanjo is “patriotic, detribalised and public spirited”. These distinctions, he said, are merely self-serving rationalisations of what he called “some visible Yoruba buccaneers” who, like the Hausa-Fulani “oligarchy”, are only interested in taking their turn at plundering the Nigerian state.

From the theses of Okonta, William and Adebanwi alone, we can see that not all Southerners or all Yorubas think like Thompson and Akinjide in believing that one section of or group in the country has a monopoly of vice or virtue. Unfortunately, however, unlike Thompson and Akinjide, Okonta and Company do not belong in Obasanjo’s kitchen cabinet and, in any case, are very unlikely to influence his views and deeds as president.

Worse still, from the signs of his words and deeds during the very first days of his second term, it does not seem, to me at least, that we truly have “a brand new president.” First, even before the dust raised by the massive rigging of the general elections has began to settle down, the president flies out to Zimbabwe ostensibly to put out a political firestorm which was less intense than the one in his own very backyard. Then on the very day he assures Nigerians that they now have a brand new president, the man, as The Guardian (June 1) reported, possibly with a bit of mischievous undertone, leaves from the venue of the service straight to France for the G-34 meeting.

For a man who once admitted to Nigerians that he has gone around the world to drum up foreign investment all to no avail, these early trips hardly suggests someone who has learnt any lessons. “From April 1999”, the reader may recall Obasanjo admitting to Nigerians last year, “I went round the countries in Europe twice over, I went to Japan, I went to America, to Canada and got words and no action”.

Second, the same president who says he has learnt his lesson, has since been sacking military officers of northern origin, in general and of the “Hausa-Fulani” in particular, for no worse crime than questioning the credibility of the last elections or of belonging to the wrong section of the country.

Third, the same president who says he has learnt his lessons is already suspected, not without cause, of trying to impose an apparently dubious leadership on the National Assembly, the Senate in particular just like was the case during his first term. The same president has also in effect been telling the National Assembly that this time around any opposition to his way of doing things is simply not on. In what were clearly presumptive words, he told the National Assembly at its joint sitting on June 5, that “I can fully identify with the majority of Nigerians who are hoping this refreshed and renewed National Assembly will move away from actions that are obstructive to effective management of the affairs of the nation”.

All things considered then, it does seem to me that, barring some miracles, Nigerians are in for a repeat of the events of 1983, but this time laced with a bit of the farce of septuagenarians like Thompson and Akinjide trying to impose their old racist ideas on a nation that already suffers from enough divisions among its people.