PERSPECTIVE

A letter to Fani-Kayode

Mohammed Haruna

Sometimes in April, you will recall, you phone me. As you know very well, except for articles and interviews in newspapers, I had never met you. Those newspaper articles and interviews were always as virulently anti-Islamic and anti-North as any article could be. Because I had never met you and because you seems to represent the very opposite of what I believed in, I was somewhat surprised and must have sounded impassive at …call.

As if sensing my surprise and impassiveness, you quickly established your bone fides. You were calling, you said, to invite me to a colloquium organised by the Yoruba National Front, on the subject of whether Nigeria was still a viable proposition. The YNF, you explained, was a group of upward mobile professionals who believed it was time the Yoruba nation ended its decades of insular politics vis-à-vis other ethnic groups in the country.

My first instinct was to say no, thank you very much. However, I resisted the instinct and accepted in principle. First, I thought it was a challenge to talk about the subject before an audience that has harboured serious doubts about the viability of Nigeria. Second, I said to myself, although I try to be measured and civil in my language even when I severely criticise others, for all I know many in the audience may have the belief that I am against even their most legitimate interests. I thought the invitation was an opportunity to bring down the stereo-type walls that has kept some of us apart from each other.

Though I had accepted the invitation in principle, in the end I could not make it to the colloquium because of a clash with a previous engagement; at the time of my acceptance date for the event had not been fixed. Following my inability to honour the invitation, myself and the organizers of the event agreed that I should still send my paper, which I did.

The paper has since been published by a number of newspapers including the New Nigerian, the Weekly Trust and The Comet. This piece is not about my article for the colloquium, nor about the event itself. Rather, it is about your brand of politics, to the extent that you symbolizes a strain of Yoruba politics which still refuses to learn the apparent lessons of the fates of the late Chief Bola Ige and Chief Ayo Opadokun in building their political careers on the politics of hate and exclusion.

Chief Ige’s cold blooded murder in his Ibadan home has been a great tragedy for Nigeria; the greater the tragedy because nearly eight months after his murder, no one, not the police, nor the OPC, which had vowed to unearth the murderers in next to no time, has made any significant progress in solving the murder mystery. However, without prejudice to on-going investigations, there is little doubt that ultimately his murder may have some linkage with his decision to reform Afenifere’s cult-like politics, following his surprising defeat in the 1998 presidential primaries of the Alliance for Democracy, at the hands of the far less fancied Chief Olu Falae.

On several occasions, Ige had espoused on what he felt was a need to reform Afenifere. One such occasion was his interview with Tell in April last year. “They (the younger ones)” he told Tell (April 30, 2001), “want a restructuring of Afenifere, which I support whole heartedly, 100 per cent. But I think we will have to be a little more patient because there are those who think the younger ones and I are moving too fast. If we are asking for the restructuring of Nigeria, then there is nothing wrong with s\restructuring of Afenifere… Afenifere must be truly representative and democratic”.

Coming from someone who was the deputy leader of Afenifere this was a most definitive evidence of the unrepresentative and undemocratic nature of Afenifere. Such an admission could hardly endear Ige to his Afenifere compatriots, and it did not. To make matters worse for Ige, he was widely regarded as the brain and the hand behind the creation of the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE(, seen by many as a counterweight to Afenifere and his boss’es (i.e. President Obasanjo) Trojan Horse for breaching the high wall that Afenifere had built right round Yorubaland.

The result of all this, as you probably know more than I do, was the intensification of an internal civil, but cold, war within Afenifere which inevitably spilled into the Alliance for Democracy and led to its factionalization in November 2000, a factionalization which led Afenifere leader, Chief Abraham Adesanya to lay a curse on whoever was responsible. “Woe unto him”, Adesanya old one newspaper, “from whom this thing has come. It would have been better if the authors of the confusion in the party had not been born in the first place. If the hand of the government is in it, those who sow the wind, will definitely reap the whirlwind. If we cast our mind back and see those who betrayed the cause of the Yoruba, what has been their lot? Such people should think twice”.

Adesanya named no names, but his insinuations about government’s involvement was a thinly veiled reference to Ige as the minister of justice and the suspected brain and hand behind INEC’s alleged role in breaking up AD.

Such strong languages from Adesanya and from other Afenifere chieftains who never linked Ige to begin with must have created the atmosphere of hatred against Ige which, among other things, led to his humiliation in the very presence of the Ooni of Ife, when some hoodlums removed his cap and eye glasses and generally abused him. This same atmosphere of hatred must have created the impression that Ige was fair game for any criminally minded person. In any case, it came as little surprise to many that there was not much shedding of tears in Afenifere circles after Ige was cold-bloodedly murdered during last year’s season of goodwill.

Ige, obviously, was paying the price of trying to change gear towards the tail end of a political career which had been built on the demonisation of the so-called enemy.

Ige is apparently not the only casualty of Afenifere’s cold civil war. Of recent, Chief Opadokun, until recently, the Secretary General of Afenifere, has joined Ige as another casualty. As we all know his career spanning nearly 15 years of espousing Yoruba xenophobia came to an abrupt and somewhat scandalous end when he was sacked as Afenifere’s spokesman, on allegations that he was double dealing – or was it triple dealing? – with Alhaji Mohammed Lawal, the governor of Kwara State, who belongs to APP, and with General Ibrahim Babangida, Afenifere’s pet hate, next to, if not more than General Sani Abacha.

Opadokun has obviously been luckier than Ige because the price he (Opadokun) has ….to pay was not the ultimate price that Ige paid . Opadokun’s rather ignominious seek may in the end only mean the end of his political career, at worst. If he is lucky, the sack may only mean a temporary set-back in his political fortunes.

Whatever the case, Opadokun – and Ige – as casualties of the Afenifere civil war are abject lessons of the moral injunction that it is unwise, if not self-destructive, to be extreme in whatever one does or believes in. The reason is simple. Extremism makes it difficult, if not impossible, for one to retrace one’s step in case the need arises. Ige died probably because he tried to retrace his steps away from Yoruba xenophobia. His death, ironically, may have saved him from the humiliation of having to eat crow in broad daylight instead of somewhat surreptitiously as he was already doing.

Opadokun is lucky to still be alive, but he has since been forced to eat crow in a most humiliating manner.” “He has in effect, been telling every one who cares to listen, that all these 15 years he never believed all the things he had been saying, and doing on behalf of Afenifere and the Yoruba. He has said it to The Guardian and to The Comet, among several publications. “I am” he told The Comet (July 31), for example, “completely liberated from all shackles. I am now free to pursue a nationwide broad-based political agenda”.

You will forgive me, my dear Femi, for taking you through this somewhat longish, if not boring, description of Ige’s and Opadokun’s fates, but I thought it was a necessary background to my advice, unsolicited as it is, that the fates of these two Afenifere chieftains teaches us in absolutely no uncertain terms and moderation in politics, as in anything we do or so, is the surest key to success.

So far the things you have said in the press suggest that as a young and upward mobile politician – you are merely trying to re-invent the wheel that Ige and Opadokun and others of the same ilk had invented, but which they had found necessary to discard very late in their lives. Your most recent interview with the Sunday Vanguard (July 21) suggests that you have not learnt anything from the fates of these two.

In that interview you said so many terrible things about the North and Islam, most of them absolutely untrue. You have indeed said worse things before, but those were before the murder of Ige and the sack of Opadokun.

One of the things you said in that interview was that the regime of General Abdulsalami Abubakar, which handed over to President Obasanjo, had fixed an Islamic symbol on top of the National Assembly. “When Obasanjo came to