Over the past few weeks, there has been an intensified publicity of the campaign for the breakaway of the Yoruba people from Nigeria. The proponents of this agitation want an independent republic of the Yoruba nation or as they put it — Oduduwa Republic. And over a week ago, the agitation has taken a step further with a recent press conference led by Sunday Igboho and Professor Banji Akintoye. At the press conference, the duo had pronounced into existence the Yoruba nation and forthwith, advised all persons of Yoruba descent living in the Northern region of Nigeria to return to the South-West, even as the duo warned of a looming ethnic war. In a show of seriousness for their agitation, a proposed currency for the Oduduwa Republic was afterward circulated on social media and publicized by the mainstream media. The currency was named “Fadaka” — a Yoruba word for Silver.
It should be noted that the demand for an independent nation of the Yoruba people did not just start this year. Such demands and agitations had been like a song on the lips of quite a number of persons over the past years.
An earlier call for Oduduwa Republic precipitated the announcement of a march which was scheduled for October 1, 2020. While the Nigerian government’s supposed ban on protests forced the Oduduwa Republic agitators into a cowardly capitulation, it was however impossible for the government to put a halt to the agitation due to the increasing socio-economic injustice within the country.
Needless to say, the renewed and intensified calls for a republic of the Yoruba people began with the rising cases of kidnappings and banditry in South-West Nigeria. While Northern Nigeria had suffered the worst cases of insecurity, terrorism, kidnappings, and banditry, most parts of the South-West, especially Oyo, Ogun, Ondo, and Ekiti states were also beginning to deal with similar threats but of lesser magnitude when compared to the horrors in the northern region, where women, men, girls, and boys have become easy prey in the fiery dens of bandits and terrorists. The fact that schools in Kaduna had to be closed by the state government is a testament to how much the insecurity in the North has taken a ridiculous turn of very embarrassing magnitude.
Of much deeper embarrassment is how powerless and utterly incapacitated the Nigerian government appears in the face of such insecurity that has consumed thousands of lives, rendered thousands homeless, made many fatherless, scores motherless, and more innocent children orphans. It is conditions such as this that gave rise to Sunday Igboho and his team who volunteered themselves to rid Yorubaland of insecurity by raising arms against the forces of banditry. While their aim expressed an intention to fight kidnappings and banditry, their methods of engagement and slogans are that of unfair ethnoreligious stereotyping against the Fulani people who are known for herding cattle.
Although the majority of the cattle herders are Fulani, it is evident that not all Fulani cattle herders are criminals, and definitely, not all Fulanis are bandits. Worthy of note is the fact that despite producing more Nigerian Presidents and Heads of State, Northern Nigeria ranks worse in the regional economic indices of the country. The Fulani people however are at the top of that ladder, with millions of poor people who could barely afford chickens, let alone cattle. While there may be a handful of Fulanis who own cattle in the South-West, most of the cattle being herded by poor Fulani herders are owned by some Southern elites who are into animal husbandry. In the event that some Fulani herders protect cattle with Ak-47 rifles, one can almost be certain that those weapons were provided by the Southern and Northern elites who own those cattle herded and protected by the poor Fulanis in the South-West. This makes it clear that the “ethnicization” of insecurity within the South-Western region of Nigeria is as unnecessary as ethnicizing terrorism in the Northern region of Nigeria. Ritual killings in Ijebu-Ode, child/street cultism in Lagos and street/campus cultism, and the age-long kidnapping in the South-South region of the country are pointers to the fact that insecurity is not synonymous with a particular ethnic group.
Furthermore, the regime of General Muhammadu Buhari in talks, actions, and inactions has not only proven to be completely incompetent, clueless, and largely anti-people, its demeanor, nepotism, and ethnoreligious favoritism have also helped water the seeds of ethnic strife within the country. It is in the light of these that what begun as a Sunday Igboho-led resistance against killer herdsmen had suddenly metamorphosed into a Yoruba self-determination agitation.
However, what most ethnic agitators fail to understand is that despite Buhari’s nepotism and ethnocentric politics or “Fulanization agenda” as some secessionists would call it, the millions of the average Fulani people have not benefited from this so-called “Fulanization agenda”, they have in fact become worse of, much further than they ever were even under regimes headed by Nigerians from the Southern region like Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan. On the contrary, the “Fulanization agenda” has only benefited and further empowered Buhari’s rich and powerful friends. In like manner, a “Southernization agenda” would most likely not be of any benefit to the average Southerner but for the rich and powerful Southern elites. Just the same way Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan’s led governments have only benefited their Southern friends and Northern cronies. The same way our respective state governors and legislators from the Southern region have only represented the interests of their rich friends and not the average Southerner.
Before the recent calls for an independent State of the Yoruba people, there had been more serious calls for secession by other regions in Nigeria. And in each case, the Nigerian state has met such agitations with untoward violence and repression. The first of which happened during the administration of Major General Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo Man from South-East Nigeria and the Nigerian Head of State as he then was. During the regime of Ironsi, Isaac Boro led several agitations and campaigns for the secession of the people of the Niger Delta majorly domiciled in what is now known as South-South region of Nigeria. The Aguiyi-Ironsi regime crushed the movement with maximum force and subsequently executed Isaac Boro.
The story of Biafra is a more popular one. The Biafran struggle for secession from Nigeria precipitated into over three years of war which led to the death of millions of Nigerians. The Nigerian state did not only crush the Biafra agitation with maximum force, but it also committed one of the worst genocide in the history of mankind. Interestingly, the shadows of the 20th century Biafra war are now upon us in the 21st century with a renewed call for Biafra Republic led by Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB. This is because the socio-economic conditions that led to the struggle for Biafra in 1967 are still prevalent in 2021, but in the worst dimension and in a way that has now attracted an additional campaign for the exit of the Yoruba people.
While the right to self-determination remains a right guaranteed by Local and International Laws of Man and Nature, do we actually need to go the ethnic route in pursuit of freedom and socio-economic justice? Does our problem as a people have anything to do with the ethnicity of persons in power? Already, South-West governors and a number of Monarchs who have done nothing other than stealing from the poor people of Western Nigeria have stated their opposition to the Igboho-led agitation for Oduduwa Republic. It was South-East governors that unanimously announced the proscription of IPOB and have on several occasions supported the killing of IPOB members and innocent Igbo bystanders by the Nigerian Army. Sanwo-Olu, a Yoruba man, was the one who invited the Nigerian Army to shoot at peaceful protesters at Lekki Tollgate during the #EndSARS protest in October 2020.
As President, Obasanjo, a Yoruba man from Ota, Ogun state, could not even erect a decent road in his hometown, Ota, let alone deliver quality governance to the people of Nigeria. Aside from the Legendary corruption, maladministration, and gross ineptitude of President Jonathan, his Hometown, Otuoke, in Bayelsa State, boasts only flooded roads and streets. And as I have previously enumerated, more Presidents and Heads of State had come from Northern Nigeria, but the North is the worst in all socio-economic indices with the highest rate of insecurity, illiteracy, poverty, mortality, poor hygiene, lack of accessibility to clean water and least infrastructure. To be clear, while southern elites have had their fair share in exploiting the poor people of the South and the Nigerian people at large, the North, however, parades the worst of the Nigerian elites. These people enslave their Northern poor counterparts and also prevent them from resistance by denying them education and imposing slavish religious indoctrinations. If the thoughts of objectivity are given a chance, then it’ll be clearer that the poor people across all ethnic groups are exploited by the rich and powerful elites organized across all ethnoreligious clusters across the country.
It is audible to the deaf and visible to the blind that the enemies of the Southern people are first the rich and powerful elites in the South, and then their rich and powerful Northern colleagues. All the governors, House of Representatives members, Senators, and Local government officials of the South are Southerners. They are directly responsible for the oppression and impoverishment of the Southern people before their Northern counterparts. Hence, does it not make sense for the poor people across all ethnoreligious groupings to bond themselves in a revolution against their common oppressors who are also organized and united irrespective of their ethnoreligious differences than to ensnare themselves in a civil war occasioned by ethnic agitations?
Meanwhile, history has proven that a civil war is always inevitable with secessionist agitations. A civil war is a war, funded by rich people but consumes the lives of poor people and destroys their properties and heritage. Here, poor persons of different ethnic backgrounds are the ones led to the slaughter, either as soldiers or innocent and hungry bystanders. Poor people die and fight themselves in a civil war that ends up benefiting in varying proportions, the elites of the different ethnic groups. Although the Nigerian State will respond to a call for revolution with very deadly hostility and violence, the oppressed people can be sure they are “dying” in a fight against their common oppressors, rather than killing themselves in an ethnic war imposed and funded by the rich elites of different ethnic groups.
Although due to better access to education when compared to the imposed illiteracy in the north, and Western civilization, the people of Southern Nigeria appear to be more politically conscious. Shall we then say the apparently more politically conscious South must wait endlessly on the growing consciousness of the oppressed people of the North? Definitely not! For me, I’d rather the oppressed people of the South fight the incompetent and anti-people federal government alongside their corrupt leaders and governors of Southern origin. And while doing this, also encourage and support the struggles of the poor people of the North against their more vicious ruling elites. Even if the Yoruba and Igbo must necessarily secede from Nigeria, it is most important to in the first instance, join hands to defeat the common exploiters of poor people, organized over and across all ethnic groups and regions.
In all, the division of oppressed people along ethnic lines does little or nothing to liberate the poor from the shackles of poverty, hardship, and oppression. On the contrary, it’ll end up strengthening the hold of the rich and powerful few over millions of poor and oppressed Nigerians.