Nigeria may bury its head in the sand, but self-determination is the issue of our time. Events are moving fast. The crowd pulling stunt by Sunday Igboho in Akure, Governor Rotimi Akeredolu’s response, and the self-promoting “Southwest” APC summit in Lagos show that self-determination has become the key issue for the Yoruba. No matter the pretence, no leader worth his or her name can ignore it. Those who are seeking to blunt its edges have no sense of history. To the Yoruba, self-determination has propelled thought and action in western Nigeria since the treaty that ended the civil war among the Yoruba. After the war, the Yoruba established its federal ethos long before the creation of Nigeria. The Kiriji war treaty was unambiguous; interaction in Yoruba land will be on the basis of a federal arrangement, the constituents will have a hold on their resources and pay from that, to maintain security at the centre. The Yoruba people have at no time repudiated that treaty and it is reflected in the 1951 MacPherson constitution, which devolved power and formally constituted a regional arrangement. Chief Obafemi Awolowo propagated this position in his landmark works and thoughts on the constitution.
The Yoruba thinking is also reflected in the administration of Lagos; that the hitherto Lagos colony should be part of an Oduduwa formation, as against the divisiveness of the self-serving “Gedegbe l’Eko Wa”. Badagry, Ikorodu and Epe divisions were incorporated into the Western Region, which itself ended at Fadeyi bus stop. Notable that these areas were developed by the Western Region, as evident in Ilupeju industrial layout. At the time, tax evaders who were running from the law often sought refuge after Fadeyi. That is one of the pertinent reasons why we must repudiate the arrant nonsense that Lagos, pre-1966, was developed by the centre.
It must be recognised that the Western Region was faithful to the Kiriji treaty by INSISTING on an opt-out clause, a treaty of secession at the Lancaster House constitutional conference. The refusal of the East to go along with the West and the North robbed us of that opportunity. Even after the abrogation of the Republican constitution in 1966, and deliberate balkanisation through state creation, the Yoruba have remained resolute in the support of a federal arrangement and resource control.
To those who are not interested in a just and an amicable solution; history tells us that struggle and adversity define the Yoruba. When challenged, the Yoruba would often marshal robust response to adversarial stimuli. Contemporary struggles of the Yoruba date back to the West African Students Union (WASU) founded by Yoruba nationalists – Ladipo Solanke and Herbert Bankole-Bright in 1925. WASU mopped up a whole generation of students from the 1930s into the firmament of the independence struggle. Virtually every student of that era went through WASU. The organisation was more of a Yoruba, Gold Coast (Ghana), and Saro (Sierra Leone) preserve than anything else. Like the Indian students in British universities in an earlier era, they had a vision, not just for independence but for a post-colonial society based on progressive social democracy and the sort of federal arrangement in Australia, Canada, etc.
There is nothing subversive about self-determination. “The post-colonial state can pretend it is absolute, it is not. People are transcending it, bypassing it, subverting it and renegotiating their existence in it or their exit. The most enduring is the ethnonational model of contestation.” Switzerland has a clause of secession. Vladimir Illich Lenin in “On The National Question” did not see the newly created USSR lasting for more than sixty years. Milovan Dilas as the Deputy Prime Minister of Yugoslavia sought a confederation to avoid a bloody cataclysm. Josip Broz Tito responded by jailing the brilliant lawyer, one of the best minds of a generation, for eighteen years. Dilas lived long enough to see the bloody disintegration of the Balkans. The lesson therein is that the National Question cannot be wished away. It is a fools errand to do so.
I cannot end this without addressing the Trojan horses of division among the Yoruba. A united front cannot be forged with cryptofascists on one hand; that is, empire builders who have subordinated the superstructure of the state to their interests and fifth columnists and agent provocateurs like Muric on another. All these people are working against the ethos of the Kiriji treaty.
What Is To Be Done?
The immediate solution is to make the following demands:
1. A special Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)-type special legislative session to take out 55 items from the Exclusive Legislative List in Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution. Any legislator from the South-West who does not sign up must be recalled.
2. A new revenue allocation formula reflecting resource control, as reflected in the 1960 Independence and 1963 Republican constitutions. The 1963 constitution was backed by a plebiscite, which has not been repudiated.
Failure to do these will amount to buying time while the bomb ticks. May God guide us to light, justice and peace.
Credit: Bamidele Ademola-Olateju