Yoruba leader in post-Obasanjo Nigeria

The passage, a few weeks back, of Chief Abraham Adesanya, the second leader of the Yoruba people since Obafemi Awolowo, has thrown the race into a quandary yet again about his successor, and reveals two things about the people: failure to equip self for tomorrow and the lip-service paid by its leaders to the collective interest of the people. A few decades ago, the latter was served with a fanatic obligation, so much so that Yoruba became the object of envy among other ethnic nationalities.

I hope that, by dwelling on the Yoruba this week, I am not considered to be inflicting a people’s aspirations on the Nigerian collective? Because, events have proven the interconnectedness of our pains. It was in this mould that some narrow-minded people felt that the bickering in the West during the First Republic was domesticated among the ngbati people alone. When its corrosive tinder spread round the nation, it was too late to recant.

First, I rejoice with every Yoruba for the life and times of Adesanya. In a Nigeria where the following turn apostate of the collective dream, where leaders collapse by the feet of Mammon, we had a leader who stood ramrod till the end of his allotted time on mother earth. I am convinced that, having joined other recent ancestors of the Yoruba like Awolowo himself, Adekunle Ajasin, Bola Ige and a few others, their preoccupation right now would be to guide over their children who are navigating a perilous post-Obasanjo Nigeria.

Even as we mourn Adesanya, there is the need to discuss who takes over the baton of leadership from where he deposited it, and I am told that in this regard, the race has provoked a stampede; from the laughable to the grotesque. Who should pilot the affairs of the Yoruba at this peculiar time?

The Yoruba are right at the critical juncture where they were in 1945, the race’s hitherto supreme position seriously threatened, which necessitated the London law student, Obafemi, to found the Egbe Omo Oduduwa. Today, mutual recriminations and self condemnation dominate Yoruba relationship. We witness collapses in and have been worsted in everything we used to hold dear: morality, self esteem, lore and mores, Yoruba language, our social and political institutions, values that have gone to the swine and a virtual absence of national and cultural identities. While the Yoruba still enjoy supremacy in commerce, politically, the race has suffered a recent self-immolation of having one of its sons, in the person of Olusegun Obasanjo, coming out of an eight-year presidency that has severely worsted the race in the estimation of the rest of Nigeria. But for the fact that Yoruba leaders have, from time immemorial, declaimed Obasanjo as antithetical to the son-ship of Oduduwa, the barbs that come his way today would have vicariously been Yoruba’s.

This is why the need to get the Yoruba leadership right becomes imperative. Even though today, Nnamdi Azikiwe is not alive battling to dismember “the Fascist Organization of Sir Adeyemo” and “its leaders at home and abroad, up hill and down dale in the streets of Nigeria and in the residences of its advocates” (West African Pilot: September 8, 1948), and Mbonu Ojike’s Weekend Catechism is not on hand to throw darts at the decision of a Yoruba nation to take its destiny in its hands, the Yoruba are confronted by existential battles that threaten to overrun the nation.

What we are about to do is no child’s play. The person we are looking for is the representative of the conscience of the people, an individual with legitimacy, the kind that Awolowo commanded throughout his lifespan, especially between 1950 and the time of his departure in 1987. Of Ali Mazrui’s five leadership type, the person is the mobilization leader, who uses the weapon of ideology and charisma to mobilize a wide canvass of the people for social and political action. He is the single individual who will become the symbol of a whole people’s struggle, representing their weakness or strength and giving the people force of actualization that is required for their existence. Indeed, that person, as the representative, would symbolize the identity or qualities of the Yoruba people. A German sociologist, Burckhardt, even referred to him as that person who “alone can be considered unique and irreplaceable who possesses an abnormal degree of intellectual and moral force, whose energies are focused on a universal goal.”

Such individuals are, most times, endowed with very exceptional creative gifts. This was also talked about by Prof Akin Mabogunje (2002), while searching for the rationale behind a people surrendering their destiny into the hands of a leader. While exploring the Weberian (Max Weber) classification of leadership, he agreed that a charismatic leadership, like that of Awolowo, brings about an almost religious or even fanatic respect for, faith in or reverence for the particular kind of leadership who in turn is reputed with a string of qualities that are not only exceptional but one that holds a populace spellbound. The populace thus gives him an essentially mystical or irrational respect and adoration. Such a person, in the words of Lancine Sylla, embodies the hope of a saviour or a hero, he is the “great teacher,” who is bound to restore the shattered and perforated cultural identity of his people and who, ultimately, establishes a new political order.

I quite agree that it is lazy rationalization lamenting the loss of the Awolowo leadership typology each time like this. The fact, however, remains that even if our regression as a people is so pronounced as to not having that leadership type, we should have at least a bad imitation of it. The above were attributes Awolowo possessed which any leader of the Yoruba must attempt to be seen to possess at a time like this. I have heard stories of Bola Tinubu and Gbenga Daniel angling to be Yoruba leader and it sickens me to the bone-marrow. Who will their leadership represent outside the confines of their Lagos and Ogun states respectively? By the fact of their politics, by the reason of their antecedents, they have abysmally narrow confines of representativeness that makes them incapable of carrying the mantle. Since leadership is also about morality and awe for the proposed leader, what both of these two have is money which I doubt the young Awo had by the time he was made the Yoruba leader in 1966.

The leader of the Yoruba must be somebody we can see ourselves in. He does not have to go to the groove to sacrifice five lambs for peace as done by the Yoruba in 1947, nor be bothered by the lamp with the symbolism of the five wickets (atupa oloju marun) and its mystical symbols (cited in S.O. Arifalo’s Egbe Omo Oduduwa); he doesn’t have to know how to recite incantations like Adesanya, but he must be above board in character and morality. He must be ready to bring together the pacifists and the aberrant, find space for prodigals in the wide Yoruba world and move the race backwards (yes!) to the period of the First Republic when Yoruba was the nation to beat.

Mad men as specialists

I hope we all know that that statement by the Inspector General of Police, Mr. Mike Okiro, a few weeks back, that a great number of high-ranking Nigerian police officers have mental challenges, isn’t something we should take with a pinch of salt? Indeed, I am surprised that the House of Representatives committee he gave the scary submission to at a parley hasn’t already called for an inquest into the matter.

It is bad enough that, as a reflection of the collapse that dots virtually every spectrum of Nigerian life, the typical Nigerian policeman would rope his father in a rap and collect bribe from his mother to secure the family breadwinner’s freedom. But when you add mental imbalance to the already frightening misdemeanour of graft, then we can all as well ask to be taken to Uranus to escape the raw wrath of a rampaging force.

Let me confess that I have very scalding disdain for the Nigerian policeman and it has spanned decades; indeed since I could mutter an infant’s cry. Before policemen would seek to crucify me, let me also confess that I was bred with police money (with all it typifies, including, you guess, the self-same wetin-you-carry money!), as my father was a policeman. But I have witnessed, first-hand, enough ounce of an admixture of greed, callousness, graft, cold-bloodedness and allied evils in the barracks to make my stomach churn at the sight of a Nigerian Sheriff.

When an organization symbolises such evil across board, necessitating that you have to scour millions to find an edible one, and you add insanity to an already full baggage, this will cogently explain Dele Udoh, cold-blooded elimination of suspects in cells and blood money circulating in the barracks. You can’t understand if you haven’t fallen victim of police evil.

Lest I forget, what is the latest about the cold-blooded elimination of some Igbo traders in Abuja a couple of years ago, that was branded the Apo Six saga? We are so used to such cruel elimination that my haunch tells me we may have moved on. Where are the police officers involved in the dastard murder? Or, the dead are dead? For the sake of all of us, even a strand of a pollutant should not be left in our rivers. It is like gangrene; it will eat up the whole and we end up losing all.

Fountain of guns

Very soon, somebody will have to apply for a change of cognomen for Ekiti state. It is becoming clear that its leaders of today are so resistant to the peace and comfort that education brings. A fountain of guns, I suggest. The rate at which guns, violence and blood are being poured on the soil of the state today makes me come to this conclusion. Or, perhaps, it is the parody of ‘the more civilization is upon their head, the more foolish they become’?

Generals’ brawn and smile

Each time General Victor Malu bursts in the media about his soldier boss and former Head of State, Olusegun Obasanjo, (like that poet chanting My Song Bursts in Theo Vincent and Senanu’s anthology of poems), his anger and condemnation of the Owu General seem to drag you to the conclusion that Malu has been pencilled to replace Father Tansi for beatification. As if it was not in our very before that he inhumanly refused to obey the court order that vacated his ordered court martial of some 22 injured young soldiers at the war front, almost a decade ago, soldiers whose sin was asking that they be given proper medical treatment.

The good news is however that the present Chief of Army Staff, General Luka Yusuff, has elected, not only to obey the court order reinstating these soldiers into the Army, but has ordered all their entitlements paid.

We may not understand the fact that, as virtually all human institutions undergo reforms, the military, especially the Nigerian military, is still one that has refused to shed all those bestial toga of wicked regimentation and inhumanity, in the name of discipline. Let’s doff our hat to General Yusuff and the Umaru Yar’Adua government. If only for leaving the rigidity of the rule of the brawn to the rule of law, I sense that we are moving forward.