There is a clear problem when the millipede is heard calling crocodile a multi-legged animal. This is what my people describe as ‘isokuso”. I don’t know how to translate that. When a man uses his own inadequacy as the standard, he risks losing all claims to respect. This is exactly what I feel in ex-Senator Shehu Sani’s position on the controversial comment of cerebral Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, spokesman to the Northern Elders Forum, NEF, on the entire South over the 2023 presidency. Sani on social media on Monday described the insult from Baba-Ahmed as speaking “uncomfortable and inconvenient truth to those allergic to it.” The erstwhile human rights activist added that tracing Baba-Ahmed’s roots to Mauritania is not an issue. Hear him: “He is not alone whose parents or grandparents or ancestors come from somewhere.” Let me quickly ask Shehu Sani to help Nigeria by naming all others who are one leg in one leg out of our country. It is statements like this that tell southerners that the 1914 Amalgamation of the Southern and Northern protectorates was and is, a huge mistake.
What do I mean? In my native Yoruba culture, every man has what is called “oriki orile”- family panegyrics. That is what shows every man’s descent – his history. My own family panegyric shows clearly that I am an aboriginal Yoruba- Nigerian. In Yorubaland, whoever does not have an “oriki orile”, is not regarded as one of us. Even our distant cousins in Benin Republic, Sierra Leone and other places, have their own panegyrics. But unlike Sani’s North and his friend, Baba-Ahmed, we don’t allow our distant cousins to come and appropriate Nigeria because the laws of the land do not support that. Shehu Sani saying that southerners hate the truth is like the case of the millipede calling the crocodile a multi-legged animal. The norm is trite in our Yoruba tradition that a visitor must not fart in the mouth of his host. Can Shehu Sani tell us his own roots? That Baba-Ahmed is from Mauritania, as now confirmed by Sani, goes to lend credence to our belief that the majority of the troublers of the land, Nigeria, are UFOs – ‘Unidentifiable Foreign Objects’. If Baba-Ahmed’s insults on his hosts, the South, as part of the entity called Nigeria, is what Sani labelled as “uncomfortable and inconvenient truth,” then we have a real problem in our hands.
Let us now examine the “uncomfortable truth” of Sani and Baba-Ahmed. I must confess; I write this piece with a very heavy heart because I am more than convinced that the South of Nigeria in particular, should not be where it is today. Whatever misfortune: political, economic or otherwise, we are suffering today is as a result of the burden the mistake of 1914 Amalgamation imposed on us. The inability of the south to stand up to the North politically, is the greatest burden any advanced region can impose on itself. When a Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, therefore opens his buccal cavity and emits insults on a region without deference to its cosmopolitan configuration, it becomes expedient for Southern Nigeria to look inward and ask probing questions about how our destinies got entangled with the destinies of the race, which this Fulani hegemonist represents.
We southerners have put ourselves in a position that makes it possible for characters like Baba-Ahmed to bounce us around like a mere football and for Sani to approve such despicable act. I must also quickly point out that, ordinarily, nobody should be moved again by whatever the NEF mouthpiece says or fails to say. We have now realised that the only thing that gives Baba-Ahmed his daily rush of adrenalin is to insult the sensibility of the South. That, in itself, is normal and very understandable, especially, when you have sophisticated people like we are down South, who are unequally yoked with not so fantastic elements like Baba-Ahmed with his daily vituperations.
In all honesty, Baba-Ahmed and the group he speaks for are not to be blamed for whatever is the lot of the South in the present political predicament; and by further extension, what will be the lot of the region when the expected year of the Lord 2023, comes to being. What is happening to us now is akin to the analogy of the man who calls his carved calabash a broken one, only for his neighbours to turn it into a dirt-packing implement. Our cock long ago told the North’s fox that what is on its head is mere flesh and not fire that the fox, ab initio, thought it was. Today, the only delicacy the North’s fox relishes is the crown on the southern cock’s head. This is why, it is possible for a character like Baba-Ahmed to tell us that come 2023, the North will not play second fiddle, because it has the capacity to vie for the first position and win any election. And, sadly enough, they are right! I will explain.
At the beginning of the present political dispensation, the subsisting political configuration was such that if it had not been tampered with, especially in the South-West sub-region, there is no way a northerner could boast of having the presidency for keeps. We need to ask why we dismantled the defunct Alliance for Democracy, AD, which gave the zone a distinct political colony that, if maintained, would have been the envy of the entire Black Race. Yes, we have the argument of how General Olusegun Obasanjo, as the then president, needed the South-West to win a second term and had to ask AD governors to support him. Silly excuses! Half-truths! Was it Obasanjo that rendered all the leaders of the Yoruba race politically effete? Was it Obasanjo that encouraged the latter-day leaders to ride roughshod over those who had been championing the cause of the South-West right from independence? Who plotted the “political annihilation” of Afenifere leaders and almost rendered them irrelevant? Obasanjo? Tell it to the marines! When the Bola Ahmed Tinubu gang moved and dismantled AD structures across the entire South-West because they needed to make a new Obafemi Awolowo out of Tinubu, was it Obasanjo that bankrolled the enterprise?
Those who are familiar with the structures and inner workings of Afenifere will tell you that the political structures and calculations that later gave birth to the Action Congress, AC, metamorphosed into the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN, and finally to the marriage of inconvenience that produced the current All Progressives Congress, APC, are alien to the political customs, norms and traditions of the Yoruba race. Now that the ambition of a “modern-day Awolowo” has collapsed like a badly arranged pack of cards, we have Baba-Ahmed to tell us to dare the North! And we dare not! Do you disagree? Fine. Ask yourself this: will a northerner sit down at a function and have a Nasir el-Rufai insult someone of Tinubu’s clout from that part of the country the way Ogbeni Raufu Aregbesola sat and watched while el-Rufai cast aspersions on the Asiwaju at a birthday party in honour of Aregbesola only a while ago? But it happened! The North, to a large extent, has come to realise that if they need to finish off a Tinubu or any other Yoruba leader, completely, all they need is Tinubu’s next door neighbour. When the North wanted to kill the June 12, 1993 political victory of the late MKO Abiola, where did they find a willing horse?
Beyond the South-West, if we move to the South-East, who amongst the political players there can be pointed out as having sufficient political pedigree and clout that either Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe or Ikemba Odumegwu Ojukwu had? Who is speaking for the South-East now? Like my people will say: a town that is not up to two does not divide itself into six. A zone of five states has Ohanaeze Ndigbo, Ohanaeze Ndigbo Worldwide, Ohanaeze Ndigbo Youth Wing, Coalition of South-East Youth Leaders, Indigenous People of Biafra, the Eastern Security Network and what have you, speaking for it on the same issue and you call that political or ideological cohesion? Or, would you call Governor David Umahi of Ebonyi State, who asked us to begin a session of fasting and prayer to have a president like General Muhammadu Buhari in 2023 a leader in that zone? Or is it Governor Hope Uzodimma of Imo State, who told his bewildered people that the farmers in the state and the killer herders, raping their women and killing their men, are now in a romance of Memorandum of Understanding that would lead the South-East?
Check out what is happening in Abia, Anambra and Enugu states and you will be shocked at the level of confusion that will play out if there is any flicker of hope that the 2023 presidency will be zoned to that geo-political area. So, why won’t an insouciant rabble- rouser tell us: “We will lead Nigeria the way we have led Nigeria before, whether we are President or Vice President..” The cacophony is the same in the South-South. The first political injury the APC leadership in the Niger Delta inflicted on itself was to play into the hands of the north by replacing the national chairman, Chief John Odigie Oyegun, with Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, his brother from the same Edo State. By the time the injury healed, the North had the chairmanship back, in addition to the Presidency, the Senate Presidency and other “God-given” juicy positions that the region won’t let go of.
The situation is even worse in the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in the zone, where Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State calls the shots and believes that the national party chairmanship position and personnel must be changed like baby diapers. That is why it is convenient for Governor Ben Ayade to plant grasses for the north’s cows while the entire South is talking about curbing the activities of killer herdsmen through the enactment of anti-grazing laws, all in the bid to be “politically correct”. And a Baba-Ahmed is watching; knowing that when the year 2023 eventually draws close, any bone of vice-presidency or senate presidency that is thrown at all the “Mr. Giwa is a Trader” down South, will be descended upon in the most uncivilised manner; and, of course, with zero consideration for the Nigerian masses whose hope is already at its nadir. But it is never too late for us down South to come together and say: if the calabash turns face downward, we open it; if it is difficult to open, we break it!
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On Monday, October 25, 1993, in the heat of June 12 annulment agitations, four Nigerian youngsters, Richard Ajibola Ogunderu, Kabir Adenuga, Benneth Oluwadaisi and Kenny Razak-Lawal, did the unthinkable! They hijacked an Abuja-bound aircraft, the Nigerian Airways airbus A310, and diverted it to Niger Republic. How did they so it? Excerpts…
Credit:Tribune
