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By adminadmin on July 22, 2015



Yinka Odumakin, Afenifere’s publicity secretary as well as the general spokesperson for the coalition of Yoruba anti-federalists comprising Yoruba PDP, OPC (1 &2) and sundry groupings now parading as “Osun Summit” primarily aimed at confronting the APC Government of Osun State as a prelude to a general onslaught against the SW APC, in continuation of their anti-APC praxis, and couched under a “Yoruba/Federalist” umbrella, wants us to believe what he stated in his most recent interview, to wit:
“[b]The Ila Chief(referencing Chief Bisi Akande-ed) said a lot of things in his letter but what caught my fancy most was his declaration that the outright demolition of the ACN tendency within the party. “a large section of the South-west see the rebellion as a conspiracy of the north against the Yoruba”. I ordinarily would have ignored this were it not coming from the only one who should know better among the “leadership” of APC South west with no sense of history, ideological clarity and intellectual depth to navigate the Nigerian polity.
I’m sure Chief Akande must have read most of Awo’s books because I know his capacity to read and write good stuff in the days that we saw him as a possible rallying point for the Yoruba nation. He should have come across Awo’s account of how no place could be found for him to sit at the dinner marking Nigeria’s independence in 1960 except among the ex-servicemen in a dingy corner. A departing colonial officer had to flash his torch at his face to be sure it was Obafemi Awolowo whose party moved the motion for independence in 1953 that was now among those whose services are no longer needed by those who opposed the move for independence.
If there was good scholarship to their politicking, the South west APC should not have thrown away the Yoruba cutting edge (true Federalism) before parting with the 25% from one of the three zones of the south without which a candidate from the North cannot be validly elected even with 100% of northern votes.”[/b]
“ooduapathfinder” says the above is a distortion of history, our most recent history and in a self-serving manner. Out of all of the manifestations of the real ideological and political struggle in Nigeria between the conservative forces led by its northern fraction with the Yoruba mainstreamers in tow and the progressives led most times by the SW fraction as had happened since the Action Group era, the only example Yinka Odumakin could allude to is a dinner organized by the same Northern fraction of the conservative forces aided and abetted by their Eastern allies to show his own sense of history. This reductionism is the outcome of the volte-face made by Afenifere, an organization which was once counted among the progressives but which has turned its back against the very ideas and ideals it had formerly championed.
Yinka Odumakin made it appear as if there exist a Manichean division between the North and the rest of us; even as Awo himself pursued a unity of purpose between the northern and southern progressives. This is beside the fact that Yinka Odumakin was the media/public face of Muhammadu Buhari when he ran and failed for the President in 2011, yet castigating the SW APC leadership making a success of Buhari in 2015 as lacking in “intellectual depth and ideological clarity”.
His characterization of True Federalism as Yoruba’s “cutting edge” demands an interrogation of all the impediments against it as this is the only yardstick to impute intellectual depth and ideological clarity to the quest. The “ACN tendency” in the APC—which we would rather see as the Federalist Tendency, since the ACN was also not simply a SW/Yoruba Affair—-succeeded in ensuring True Federalism a place in APC’s Manifesto and we know this will engender a struggle of opposites, since the achievement of True Federalism is not simply a matter of “reasoning out” to be handed to us on a platter of gold but an intense struggle which will call into service all of the strategies and tactics available; a manifestation of which is already playing out in the current struggle for dominance in the National Assembly.
In 2010/2011, Yinka Odumakin was promoting the notion that the quest to achieve “True Federalism” should be kept in abeyance until the issue of corruption is resolved. This was when the then ACN Speaker of the Lagos Assembly was undergoing interrogation on some corruption charges (charges which were later dismissed).
On July 12, 2015, retired Colonel Tony Nyiam gave an interview, on the relationship between Asiwaju Tinubu and Goodluck Jonathan, after the 2011 election, where he says: “After Asiwaju rendered all this help, he was paid back in a way that was not befitting of the assistance he gave. It was not the fault of ex-president Jonathan; it was the fault of his aides. The key aide who was supposed to facilitate some of the things to pay back did not do it….” [/b]When asked if this payback was financial, Nyiam responded thus: “[b]Not so much financial. I would like to leave it at that. Instead, rumors were being peddled that Asiwaju was paid back with some money, which wasn’t true. The person who was supposed to do certain things did not do so. I had in a lecture I delivered in the East warned that the way the South west was being treated by Jonathan’s regime would not help his government.”
It was the Odumakin tendency that promoted the notion that Asiwaju Tinubu collected a certain amount of money from Jonathan. “ooduapathfinder” can also confirm that the then ACN submitted a memo on True Federalism to Jonathan which he(or the aide referred to by Tony Nyiam) ignored.
The run up to the 2015 elections saw the Odumakin tendency ally with Goodluck Jonathan to promote what it says is “True Federalism” via the recommendations of Jonathan’s National Conference. The “ACN Tendency” rejected the conference through Asiwaju Tinubu which Yinka Odumakin derided as the rantings of “someone who is not on ground” because the Asiwaju just arrived from London at the time, as if there was no way he could have communicated with his associates “on ground” as to what position to take. Even so, the SW State Governments formally presented their positions in favor of a Parliamentary System as well as Derivation and Resource Control—the fundamentals of the “Yoruba cutting edge” of True Federalism clearly stated in both the Yoruba Agenda as well as the Draft Yoruba Constitution.
What did the Odumakin tendency recommend? That there should be 18 more states, with marginal changes in the allocation formula(from 52% to 48% for the center, which would be no different from the existing formula); the center would continue to control the Local Governments through its control of their funding; and states already economically overburdened should have their own police force to be funded via the same allocation system whose negation is fundamental to the “Yoruba cutting edge” and a “hybrid” of presidential and parliamentary systems, in total opposition to the Yoruba Agenda and the Draft Yoruba Constitution.
The various elections pre-2015 found the Odumakin tendency in the most anti-Federalist side of Yoruba politics, which had been derisively dismissed by the Yoruba as “mainstreaming”—a political process whereby some Yoruba political formations would ally with the conservative party at the Center in order to allow such conservative center to control Yorubaland, which started manifesting itself through the Akintola-led rebellion of the sixties followed by the NPN and now the PDP such that even when Jonathan neutralized the Obasanjo tendency in the PDP, the Odumakin tendency simply jumped in and filled the space.
The Ondo State 2012 Governorship election campaign saw the Odumakin tendency promoting the notion that Yoruba not resident in Ondo State are “foreigners” hence should not interfere in that election—which, by the way, they are now introducing to other Yoruba States, thus pitting the Yoruba against each other. Indeed, according to them, the Saraki/Dogara perfidy is acceptable since it denied “Lagos” the control of National Assembly.
Ekiti 2014 found them supporting not only Ayo Fayose’s thuggery but also the electoral heist that was the hall mark of that election(Ekitigate). The worst manifestation of this anti-Federalist tendency was Osun 2014, where not only none in the tendency had ever promoted the idea of True Federalism, but were decidedly in favor of imposing Jonathan’s PDP by any means necessary; including the “invitation” of Ijaw mercenaries into Osun State in order to intimidate the voters; execution of violent tactics as well as promoting the notion that domination by the Ijaw is preferable to domination by the Fulani( as if one domination is preferable to the other). These were states whose APC governments had formally and openly presented their preference for the most important factors of the “Yoruba cutting edge” yet the Odumakin tendency would ally with “actual foreigners” to try to remove them from power while proclaiming their fidelity to the Yoruba “cutting edge”.
All of these(and many more) show that Yinka Odumakin’s political tendency is anchored simply on an anti-ACN/APC paradigm ,again now manifesting in the State of Osun and his profession of True Federalism, when made, is situational; it is not an end in and for itself; hence opportunistic, for they cannot even pass as political expediency; and cannot, in any fashion, be deemed as having any “intellectual depth and ideological clarity”.

Trash


Odumakin is amongst the true federalists in Yoruba land.