Dr. Abejide Olusegun
It is very difficult not to get emotional over the arrogance of some people at this time in our history as a nation. For too long, the boorish behavior of a set of people has been what most Nigerians think about their country. The Fulani political class, aided at intervals by their opportunistic Igbo collaborators, has for decades made a killing by trampling on others, mocking the Yoruba, and turning the Omoluabi values of humility and patience into a cudgel with which to beat the Yoruba custodians of those values. But now, with Bola Ahmed Tinubu finally in Aso Rock as Nigeria’s first genuine Yoruba president in our history, the old arrogance has decided to rear its head again. And this time, the most egregiously arrogant voice on that score is the voice of Buba Galadima, whose words smell of entitlement and whose threats read as nothing but a reminder of how Nigeria’s union is holding by a very thin thread.
When Galadima spoke the words he spoke, when he said that there would be civil war if the president tried to replace the current INEC chairman with a retired Court of Appeal judge, it was not a statement of reasonableness to be expected from a political insider. It was not the well-informed pondering of a seasoned commentator. It was an insult: an insult to the intelligence of Nigerians and an insult to our unity. Galadima is a northern man. He was one of those who said and did whatever they could to stifle this democracy as it was being born.
In our long national history, the northern elite, in the 60s and the 80s, had perfected the art of undermining every development that threatened to unbalance the constitutionally amplified voice they enjoyed under military rule. They spoke of Nigeria as if it were northern property. They complained loudly and refused to compromise if they thought anything touched them. That was their politics, and Galadima is a product of it. What he forgot is that this is not the Nigeria of the 60s or the 80s. This is a bruised and battered country of the 2000s: a country that has endured years of misrule, a country in which the Yoruba have been subjected to a deafening silence and to insults that no one would wish on any group, and a country in which the patience of the Yoruba people has finally run out.
The history of the Yoruba and their silence over moments of great unfairness is there for all to read. The response of the West to the killing of Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, Col Adekunle Fajuyi, and others in 1966 was one of despondency compared to the Northern bile that came out in the murder of Sir Ahmadu Bello and Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa. The North rebelled and killed to force back General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi’s injudicious unitary decree, but the Yoruba bore the insult with a patience that would surprise today’s millennials.
The Yoruba kept quiet when Chief Bola Ige was killed in his bedroom, when Chief Moshood Kashimawo Abiola was denied the presidency and even killed after winning the June 12 election, when Sunday Igboho’s home was invaded with the use of deadly force, and innocent lives were lost. The Yoruba have shown restraint, but in the analysis of that restraint, it has been termed civility, Omoluabi values, and political calculation. But when the same northern elite speak, it has been reframed as cowardice and an admission of the effeminacy of the Yoruba. The lack of an Izz-Al Din Qassim on our soil has been spoken of with barely concealed scorn. It is that analysis of our forbearance as cowardice that has brought us to the brink of a nation today.
Galadima’s arrogance has to be shouted down not only for its face value but also for its symbolism. Northern leaders of Nigeria have wielded their years of power to milk the constitution, redraw the map, manipulate census results, rig elections, and turn the institutional corners of this nation to their favor. No southerner ever talked of civil war then. No Yoruba leader said in the 70s and the 1980s that the cronyism of northern military heads and civilian presidents was unacceptable at the pain of bloodshed. Instead, the Yoruba leaders submitted themselves to the hard slog of institution building, educational development, the struggle for free speech, and the long, difficult politics of our place in this federation. For all of our toil, we were rewarded with suspicion, contempt, and the rewriting of our history. Now that a Yoruba son has finally been allowed into Aso Rock, the same northern voices who did not bat an eyelid at the excesses of military heads of state or the moribund and bloodletting of the Buhari Presidency think it is their birthright to call for war. Hypocrisy. Arrogance. Blind to the reality of the center of gravity of this nation.
The fact is simple, and the truth is clear. Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a different type of Nigerian president. He is the first Yoruba man to have become president in a country in which his people had long laid the claim to being kingmakers in Nigeria’s body politic, but not king. Tinubu is the closing of a circle that has long been open to Yoruba collective pride. From Awolowo to MKO Abiola, from finesse to sacrifice, the Yoruba have provided Nigeria with an unmatched wealth of political class and political talent, but were never allowed to see the highest office in the land. That deprivation has had its cost. It has bred suspicion; it has soured patience; it has eroded faith in the federation and created fissures that healing silence cannot heal. It is only with Tinubu in the presidency that the Yoruba at least have an opportunity to exact their price for that long silence. And that price is, at minimum, the chance to allow him to govern without an unceasing barrage of systematic sabotage from those who think Nigeria is their personal birthright.
Sabotage is the business of Galadima and his cabal. Tinubu’s modest achievements in his first two years in office are turning out to be a bridge too far for the old guard. The stabilization of the naira, the recovery of oil production to levels beyond OPEC quota, the reduction of oil theft and bunkering, the bounce back of foreign reserves, the rally to all-time highs of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), the achievement of the first annual revenue target in the first year of office, and the first signs of price stabilization in food costs have all triggered the violent id of men for whom Nigeria is an open grazing reserve and who have chosen a president from the rest of Nigeria to hold on to their fading political privileges. Their response to Tinubu’s early economic performance has been the usual Northern Paradox of pretending that everything is normal while threatening to set the country on fire.
That is, of course, where this arrogance begins to get stupid. Nigeria is not a country where one region can threaten the rest with war and have it taken seriously, nor can it simply remain silent. The South, especially the Yoruba, has had enough doses of the “keep quiet or we kill you” medicine. They have had enough of the notion that patience earns respect. They have had enough of the view that Omoluabi values are a luxury they can afford and a political strategy only to be deployed in the face of Fulani aggression. They have had enough of Nigeria. More importantly, they have had enough of humiliation. If Galadima and his fellow travelers continue to see Tinubu’s presidency as a threat, they should be prepared for the fact that silence is no longer a Yoruba response. Yoruba patience should not be mistaken for weakness. The last insult the Yoruba can endure before the Yoruba breaks is not known. But we should be warned. If Galadima and his group continue on this path, the veiled threats of civil war and counter-coup are no longer the fulcrum that will hold the federation together, but the centrifugal forces that can pull Nigeria to pieces. If the North wants war, the North may just have it. The Yoruba will not be caught unawares.
One of the more fatuous expressions of northern arrogance is the notion that the North fears the break-up of Nigeria more than the South does. History, of course, tells us otherwise. The North has had no problem holding on to Nigeria because it has had more to gain by doing so – politically, economically, and demographically. But for the skewed federalism foisted on Nigeria by colonial and the Northern military despots, the South, and indeed, the Yoruba, have far more to lose by continued union than they have to gain. The South subsidizes Northern infrastructure and Northern education, pays for Northern energy, imports Northern banditry and ethnic cleansing, and votes Northern military dictators into power while the North leaves the South in political and economic debt.
And when the South is expected to make good on debts it did not take out, the North leads the charge with the threat of disintegration. The question for northern warmongers is this: If Nigeria breaks, who is likely to be more stranded than the other? The Yoruba, who have no choice other than to live within any Nigerian derivative that may emerge post-break, or the Fulani political class whose Northern Nigeria will be completely defanged and dried up by the sudden absence of oil and gas, political revenue, and an educated workforce? For the North to threaten the break-up of Nigeria is to threaten its own political survival. And for Galadima to come out with such naked northern political arithmetic while pretending to speak for the North is to demonstrate such suicidal hubris as to verge on the insane.
Let it be known for the record: Tinubu will be the last president of a united Nigeria. Not because I want it so, or I think the Yoruba rule of Nigeria should start now, or because I have a death wish for Nigeria. No. Tinubu will be the last president of Nigeria because the pressures tearing the federation apart are already too powerful for the weakest of national glue to hold. From the move to de-dollarize international trade to the BRICS new world order and the international recognition of local currencies, to the separatist agitations of the Middle Belt and Niger Delta, to Igbo disenchantment and the Yoruba youth’s push for autonomy, to climate change economics and the renewable revolution, to population and age structure dissonance, Nigeria is unsustainable in its present form. Tinubu’s presidency, which unites the Southern presidency with the Northern political class, may be the last chance to arrest the dissolution of Nigeria’s 1st republic into its natural clusters and cadres. And if it is not seized, if it is sabotaged and made a failure by northern political stupidity, then the inevitable will come one day, perhaps soon. And if it does, none should be surprised that in the march to their collective sovereignty, the Yoruba will not be on the bridge for a president not of their number.
I am not calling for recklessness here. I am not calling for tribal supremacy. I am only stating a simple reality of the times we are passing through. The Yoruba have been insulted too often; the Yoruba have seen their leaders assassinated too often; the Yoruba have been victimized, their democratic mandates stolen too often. And, as Yoruba of Omoluabi tradition, we have chosen to be patient, for up to a point. Sunday Igboho’s treatment was a warning. The killing of Bola Ige was a warning. The annulment of Abiola’s mandate and his death were a warning. Each time, Yoruba silence has been misconstrued for cowardice. Each time, Yoruba dignity was read as weakness. And each time, Yoruba Omoluabi values were brought into public ridicule. But Yoruba dignity is not weakness. Yoruba patience is not cowardice. Yoruba silence is no longer acceptable. If the Yoruba are pushed too far, they will rise. And when they rise, it will not be to beg for inclusion.
Men like Galadima would do well to think hard about the path they are helping to lay. When they threaten civil war, they push Nigeria faster towards it. When they sabotage Tinubu’s presidency, they give Yoruba nationalism a fresh lease of life. When they mistake Yoruba patience for weakness, they inspire a new generation that will not believe in silence anymore. And when that generation decides to act, they will tear up the map of Nigeria and scatter its pieces to the winds.
The Yoruba do not want war. The Yoruba want respect. The Yoruba want to be taken seriously. The Yoruba want to be allowed to build a nation where they can live as they choose to live, and where their hard work will be rewarded. But if war comes, they will not run from it. They will not fight as slaves fighting for their masters, but as Mandinka. They will fight as a people who have been mocked, belittled, and enslaved for too long. And when they fight, they will have long memories.
Long memories. Long and very sharp. They will not forget the arrogance of a Nasir El Rufai daring to describe Tinubu as a man with no tribe, no nation, no ethnic group to belong to. Only in Nigeria could a foreigner express such thoughts directly to the indigenous people! The Yorubas will not forget the sadistic glee with which Igbo politicians mocked Yoruba patience. They will not forget the open contempt of Fulani elites who mistook Omoluabi dignity for craven cowardice. Every insult will be inscribed on the pages of remembrance. And when the time of reckoning comes, every page of that book will be read aloud.
Nigeria can still choose the better part of the road: respect, dialogue, unify, compromise, conversation. But if it does not—if arrogance, sabotage, and disintegration are the choices men like Buba Galadima and his kind insist upon—let them be prepared for the consequences. Because the Yoruba of Nigeria are tired of playing the passive bystander. They are tired of letting others decide their fate for them. They are more than ready to take their lives into their own hands. The end has come. The age of arrogance is over. The future, be it within or without Nigeria, belongs to those who respect dignity, not to those who think they can get away with mocking it.
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