The Yoruba traitors
Governor Seyi Makinde did not only, on the face of it, want us to believe that he was doing his party good by convening the summit in Ibadan. He wanted
Governor Seyi Makinde did not only, on the face of it, want us to believe that he was doing his party good by convening the summit in Ibadan. He wanted us to believe Makinde was for mankind because he was for democracy.
What he lost was honour for his people. Just as Shehu Sani tweeted, no northern governor could have hosted a meeting on their soil against a northern president like Muhammadu Buhari. I know that such a gathering would not happen in Igboland. The people will revisit the line in Things Fall Apart about a stranger defecating in your parlour. The Igbo would do what Achebe recommended. A big stick will hound the backs of the violators. In the south-south, imagine a governor doing it under Jonathan. The summiteers would walk into an inferno. They would relearn and relive the firelights of the militant.
It did not only happen, but Makinde, with his froward tongue, invoked history to give it a bad name. His reference to Operation Wetie was a note of defiance on top of another. The interesting thing is that he has commentators and political types who are cutting their bones in his defence. Some are casting him as a nationalist, as a man of destiny and as a corrective to an erring race. It is typical southwest. Outliers can be so noisy that they mistake themselves for the mainstream. As Prof. Babafemi Folorunsho said in our conversation, people should be wary of “retrofitting the past to serve a new god.”
What amuses this essayist in this matter is that it happens again and again. And we have seen it in contemporary history since the day of Awolowo. Mark Twain noted that history does not repeat itself but it rhymes. Not many who have read or watched the script or performance of Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman know that Soyinka reveals this trait of perfidy. The horseman reneges on his vow to go with the king. Life is too full of luxuries for any self-oblation. In invoking Euripides’ lines in the play The Trojan Women, Soyinka highlights the refrain, “not I.” it is how today’s turncoats deceive the world that their doings are based on some higher principle.
Makinde is the newest dramatist of this tale of traitors. His type always say it is based on principle. They invoke the age-old rights of man, the individual impulse against society, and all that high ideal we have read in John Stuart Mill’s classic, On Liberty. Then they say it is because the Yoruba are sophisticated. It is all meretricious folly. It was principle and sophistication when they looked the other way against Awo, when Omoboriowo enacted his about-face, when Tinubu’s associates who ate and played and fought with him suddenly are fraught. From cheek-to-cheek to cheeky. What gives them the audacity that other ethnicities cannot perform in Nigeria? When a man acts the way Akintola did, or Onagoruwa in other tribes or regions, they will find a way back to the graces of the region or tribe, and may even become leaders. Moral niceties do not go so far as to place a wayward in the hangman’s noose. Not so in the southwest. It is because, ingrained in the Yoruba socio-political cosmology, is the republican streak, as Prof. Folorunsho reminds me.
Although the Igbo society is noted for its republican traits, we see in Achebe’s story a cage of civil obeisance. Hence Okonkwo goes on exile but returns as Okonkwo, still grand and respectable. The individual cannot challenge the collective will but when he does, he takes his punishment and is embraced again in the holy of holies. In Yorubaland, the king is subjected to the Oyo Mesi that stands for today’s house of assembly in a rudimentary sense and the Ogboni for senate. The king is as powerful as the institutions make him. There is no authoritarian in the Yoruba world view. It is a coquetry with death. Alafin Aole had no hiding place.
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But that institutional leverage gives the street a voice and a rebellion, but the street must follow what they have called omoluabi. For a want of a better word, it means virtue.
It is this alleyway that some of the clever ones among the elite tend to exploit for selfish reasons. They will then cite the word principle without breaking it down. And they will always have men and women on the fringe to support them. As Lord Byron said, “there is always a market for imposture.” Such people do not care if they desecrate even what is holy by twisting the narrative on the ground of some nebulous principle.
One of such cardinal characters in contemporary history is Olusegun Obasanjo. As I elaborate in my upcoming book, the Alliance for Democracy did not meet the conditions for registration for this republic, but the military under Abdulsalam Abubakar decided that it must be registered as a nod to June 12. But who destroyed that same party of the Yoruba? Olusegun Obasanjo, another Yoruba man. He planted his men there to bifurcate its elites and render it prostrate before INEC.
In the days of Awolowo, it was three close associates who fell into a dark spasm of treachery. They were Ayo Rosiji, Rotimi Williams and, of course, Samuel Akintola. All of them had principles. Akintola, as I stated in an earlier piece, had been abandoned by the NPC folks in the north and the Sardauna and Sir Kashim told him to make peace with his Yoruba brothers because they did not want any trouble with them anymore. It was on the eve of the Nzeogwu coup. The turbulence of the next day ended democracy and relegated Akintola’s battles to a footnote. But Akintola returned and fought with the coup plotters at the door in spite of offers of surrender. It is my view he committed suicide by default. He could not kneel, in his towering pride, to Awo and his AG folks.
This indicates one thing among the quislings of the west. They insist, often to death, their position. A senior advocate of Nigeria told me it is a trait of stubbornness they carry without regard to their ethical positions. It is a distorted sense of pride. The literary critic Killam calls it “insistent fatality.” It was like what Richard Nixon said after many years of the Watergate scandal. “I have said all that can be said on that subject,” the former United States president declared. “Remember Lot’s wife. Never look back.”
It reminds me of the words of Apostle Paul against those who pursue wrong without conscience. Paul wrote that God will “send them strong delusion that they should believe a lie.” And we see some of them today. Like Pharoah against the plodding of Moses.
It is what I see as the Ajax attitude based on Sophocles’ play. Because Ajax, a great soldier, loses out in a contest he thinks he should win for Achille’s armour, he gets paranoid. He goes on a killing spree. Alas, in his delusion, he thinks he is embarking on a mass slaughter of his enemies whereas he on a killing spree of animals. He eventually dies on his sword.
The thing, though, is that those who betray are weeded out in the end. The Yoruba tribe makes its point and triumphs. For all his brilliance, Olu Onagoruwa is in the same hall of infamy as Awolowo’s Brutuses. Jakande, for his pedigree, lost his grandeur among the progressives. So are some alive today. They cannot be rehabilitated. Years ago, in a conversation with Dr. Monday Ubani SAN, he observed that the Yoruba, unlike any other group in Nigeria, never forgive those who fail them. The Yoruba SAN who said they will remain stubborn says they do not really want to come back. Maybe because they know the Yorubas would not embrace even the repentant. This does not apply to small fries but those who rise high enough to carry the emblem of the race, noble enough to be called role models. The overriding principle of the omoluabi is honour. And it is not to be stained.
