If the Yoruba thought self-determination would be a walk in the park, they had better think again. The controversy and struggle for Yoruba leadership surrounding the person of Professor Banji Akintoye in the Yoruba World Congress (YWC) has suddenly made the various national quests of the Yoruba very problematic. Though they are generally cautious about voicing their desire to be independent, sometimes waffling about regional autonomy within Nigeria, they have left the radical side of their independence story to fringe groups in the Southwest. They do not give the impression they would be averse to independence if it came to that, but they have been careful not to be too forward about their desire. But given the acerbic exchange between some of their leaders and groups in recent days over the control of some of their umbrella groups such as the YWC, they will be even more careful now about the subject of self-determination. The issue of unity of purpose, they have started to understand, is not as easy to practicalise as it is easy to theorise.
The YWC was conceived between late 2018 and early 2019 but launched in August 2019 as an umbrella group of the Yoruba people all over the world. Prof Akintoye became interim leader. However, some 60 or 70 Yoruba groups came together last year in Ibadan, Oyo State, to elect the eminent professor as Yoruba leader in the mould of the late Abraham Adesanya. Since then, disagreements as to the YWC’s modus operandi and ideology have led to unease within the group. These disagreements culminated in an open falling out between the leaders, prompting Prof Akintoye to claim he had dissolved the group’s executive committee, and in turn causing the leaders of the YWC to also claim they had removed the eminent historian. At the bottom of the disagreements was probably the issue of style, with Prof Akintoye favouring an eclectic but radical and informal leadership instead of the more global, formal and restrained style embraced by the other leaders of the umbrella group. It had been thought that the continuing weakening of the other more well-known Yoruba group, the Afenifere, would lead the YWC to fill the gap, not replace its precursor, and help the Southwest to forge ahead in one form or the other in its quest for autonomy or even self-determination. This quest is now turning into a chimera.
While the Sani Abacha military government gave the Yoruba reason to unite and fight, using the annulled 1993 presidential election won by MKO Abiola as a launchpad, and the Afenifere pan-Yoruba socio-cultural and political group helped to anchor and channel those campaigns through political participation in the early years of the Fourth Republic, it has since then been a difficult and exasperating task uniting them behind any common cause beyond the idealistic. But with the deterioration of the Nigerian ethos and the divisiveness promoted by the Buhari presidency, Yoruba self-determination suddenly became attractive once again. That attraction had simmered for years, perceptibly under the Goodluck Jonathan presidency, and rising to a crescendo under the Buhari presidency. Now, considering the difficulty in uniting the Southwest behind a common and existential goal, the attraction for self-determination will likely continue for the foreseeable future.
Even when Afenifere held sway in the Southwest, the campaign for regional autonomy or self-determination was at best ambivalent. Split among Nigeria’s competing political parties, all of them propagating different ideologies and worldviews, the Yoruba were unable to transcend their partisan differences for a common cause. As a political and cultural force, Afenifere has ebbed, largely reduced in number and influence, and struggling to find a rallying cause and influence. It will take celestial intervention to return them to the politics and primacy of the past, probably when their race or ideology comes under relentless attack. Even then, it is increasingly doubtful whether they can find persons and leaders within the socio-cultural and political group who possess the temperament, selflessness and experience to rally the region. Though there is no discernible and urgent cause yet, the region still feels betrayed and shackled by a debilitating and limiting national consensus, and a culture of mediocrity.
Prof Akintoye was thought to be that man who, despite the absence of an urgent regional cause, possessed the political morality and personal virtues to rally the region. But in the words of his fellow leaders in the YWC, the eminent professor, while possessing the integrity and requisite intellect needed by the Yoruba to advance their common interest, lacks the temperament and methodicalness to rally the region and promote its ennobling ideas and cause. As one of the YWC leaders put it, when Prof Akintoye was removed as protem leader of the group, “We removed him because we found out he will not lead us anywhere with his leadership style.” While the respected historian remains Yoruba leader in the eyes of the more than 60 groups who elected him into that position, it is unlikely that the entire region will rally behind him or the ideas he might advocate from time to time. Indeed, as one of the YWC leaders argued, the Yoruba are still the only group who insist on rallying behind the antiquated notion of a single leader for the region, rather than rallying behind a powerful existential cause.
For a region so destructively regicidal, the current face-off in the YWC, the sometimes irrational interventions of many fiery Yoruba self-determination groups, and the difficulties experienced by Prof Akintoye in rallying the region around a cause and at a consensual speed, the idea of a patrician leader in the mould of Obafemi Awolowo, Adekunle Ajasin and Abraham Adesanya, may be a relic of the past. They may now find it increasingly tempting to crystallise, espouse and promote a common cause and ideology for the region. That unity of purpose seems, however, far off, for a people who gloat about possessing the most advanced civilisation in Nigeria. More realistically, not only are they limited in drawing the right lessons from the frenzied manoeuvres of other ethnic groups in the country, particularly the heterogeneous North, they are also more likely to promote internecine wars among themselves and, worse, place obstacles in the path of their best chances for national leadership. Their internal dissension, as their history shows copiously, often blinds them to the existential threats that confront them. Despite the challenges confronting a changing world, and in particular a country morphing dangerously into deathly competition for land, resources and even supremacy, the fairly homogenous Southwest is inured to the ethnic apocalypse looming over their region and ideology.
A sense of disillusionment may be settling over the region, for the reality of a different and complex Nigeria may be vitiating their formulaic approach to leadership. As the struggle within the YWC is also showing, opinion moulders of the Southwest are unlikely to adapt as quickly as the threats facing their region require. They are paralysed by history and culture from responding to the more nimble challenges and sinister manoeuvres of the other regions, challenges exemplified by last month’s burning of Lagos which they colluded in or at best connived at. They derive more satisfaction in humiliating internal regional opposition, despite its general harmlessness, than confronting and neutralising external opposition, which in full flight can be relentless, brutal, unsparing and even genocidal. There is a sense in which the YWC understands this considerably nuanced threat, but they are unable to effectively communicate this problem Southwest-wide, while their private animosities stand in the way of the consensus building and placation needed to promote regional peace and stability as well as advance their common interests. And if they cannot even manage their differences at the micro level of YWC leadership, how can they hope to pursue self-determination in the absence of an irresistible and unbearable national provocation?