₦airaland Forum

Egbe Omo Oduduwa endorses the recent call by the hunters in Borno calling on Nigeria’s military to allow them become part of the war against Boko Haram terrorism, bringing into focus the need for a review of Nigeria’s security and defense architecture. Acceding to the hunters’ request will no doubt be of a fundamental significance, not only in terms of intelligence and reconnaissance, two vital elements of military operations but also underscores the Regional imperatives of security and defense in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-national Nation State.
It is instructive to note that part of the reasons adduced by the hunters for making this request was precisely to avoid what they called “idleness” on their part as Boko Haram’s activities had rendered them helpless in pursuit of their hunting profession, a situation the hunters say can be mitigated by their knowledge of the terrain. Furthermore, by seeking to be absorbed into the military, the hunters’ idleness will be taken care of by their becoming gainfully employed as part of the military, two specific areas of primary interest to the Buhari administration: employment and security, while also enabling the military’s professionalism and competence through embedding the hunters knowledge or experience into training, policy and doctrine of the military itself.
Beyond this immediacy however, is the role of the Armed Forces of the post-colonial state especially when geo-political considerations determine the effectiveness or otherwise of a military structure, hence, absorbing “hunters” into the military in fighting Boko Haram must also be viewed within the context of the current revving up of the Sunni/Shia contradiction, especially when the conflict has now formally reared its head in Nigeria with the recent confrontation between Nigeria’s military and the Shia movement.
There is no doubt that the Western World is backing Sunni Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on both the Shia as well as rebellious Sunni inside her territory following on the heels of her intervention against the Houthi(Shia) in Yemen, an intervention which would not have progressed without express support from her major arms supplier, the United States, whose conditionalities include how and where such armaments are to be used; both of these being viewed alongside attempts at containing Shia Iran in spite of Iran’s nuclear weapons deal with the West.
Africa’s anti-terror wars are being waged principally by weak Nation States, almost all exclusively internally unstable, even if engendered by global power plays resulting in the ineffectiveness or collapse of the Nation State, where recent “Dasukigate” confessions in Nigeria point to how easily the State can be turned into a plaything of whoever is in power or the complete dependence of the Nation State on “international” forces, as shown in Chad, Niger and Mali, such instability resulting from activities of terrorist groups which had been active in one form or the other for a very long time; with the State being sustained mostly by a heavy dose of Western(European) intervention coupled with US’s AFRICOM with its operational and command centers in these fragile Nation States unlike Saudi Arabia and Iran with their authoritarian States couched and sustained within the Sunni/Shia paradigm which also allows them to intervene massively in the on-going crisis in the Middle East.
Libya’s experiences are too recent to be forgotten, with the proliferation of arms from the Gaddafi regime fueling all sorts of Islamic fundamentalist insurgencies across Africa with Libya itself in political turmoil, with two governments pretending to run one country enabled by, as well as enabling of, all categories of armed militias. To all intents and purposes therefore, the African Nation State as it currently is cannot withstand the pressures imposed by terrorism in addition to its complete economic dependence on the former colonial powers, unless it is redesigned to suit its own historical purposes and carve out its own destiny in human affairs.
Nigeria will be able to avoid this scenario only if her security architecture becomes less dependent on "traditional" post-colonial security formation where such security is based on the abstraction of the Nation-State whose reality is manifested only through the denial of the "Peoples” as prime movers of their destinies--which is what the Sunni/Shia historical confrontation boils down to and where the hunters’ call become relevant.
The same Western forces backing Saudi Arabia and discreetly fighting Iran are the backbone of Nigeria’s anti-Boko Haram initiatives and going by the recent experiences, there is no guarantee as to the West’s ability to sustain the stability of the Nigerian Nation State, especially with Iran’s direct intervention, which had been previously hidden but which will now become open.
It is thus incumbent on the Buhari Administration to pursue the transformation of the Nigerian post-colonial Nation State into a Peoples’ Federal Republic as the only guarantee against instability occasioned by the struggle for the soul of the Middle East transported into Africa.
We recall the recurring issue of Federalism in both Iraq and Libya, even as also being suggested for Syria, as a way of resolving the political quagmire; in addition to the Kurdish Question which will necessarily translate into a re-formation of the Nation State in the Middle East, hence, the lesson for Nigeria is that we do not have to embark on a preventable dislocation of the Nation State before utilizing such a preferred solution.
A Peoples’ Federal Republic is a recognition of the diversity of the geo-political territory where issues about citizenship are mediated by her cultures thus making it possible to design a State capable of withstanding economic and cultural imperatives inimical to their destinies; a “Peoples’ Armed Forces”(or an Armed Forces of the Peoples) being a necessary component where, in this instance, existing and potential professionalism is aligned with the hunters’ expertise and would translate into a formidable political, economic and cultural force able to sustain itself against any onslaught.
Such a Peoples’ Federal Republic will be able to undermine any potential economic basis for terrorist expansion since terrorist expansion aims at, and thrives on political instability of the Nation State, allowing all sorts of political adventurers and cold-calculating apparatchiks of the West and its humanitarian businesses to have a field day; while for Nigeria, it will afford us the opportunity to redesign the post-colonial State in favor of the Peoples that make up the country, in consonance with the various Regional sensibilities.
This translates onto the socio-economic terrain whereby the current unnecessarily expensive Presidential System will give way to a System with a single-chamber National Legislature partnering with a National Council of State; the Council comprising those elected from each of the Federating Regions/Peoples, with equal representation from the Regions, regardless of size, among whom the President or Prime Minister will be chosen. Whoever is elected President or Prime Minster will attempt to give meaning to whatever platform that leads to his/her being elected, first from the Federating Peoples/Regions into the National Council of State and second from the National Council of State as the President or Prime Minister thus giving meaning to the Peoples’ Republic.
This will not create any chaos since most of the economic and social issues would reside with the Federating Regions/Peoples and the Federal Government will be a joint function of the National Council of State and National Legislature where this Government will only moderate its international interactions and obligations. Of course, all of these will translate into much less expensive elections thus reducing incidence of economic heavy weights dominating the electoral process while at the same time reducing corruption of the entire system itself, both being part of the center-piece of the Buhari Administration.
Such a Peoples’ Republic, and of course, its Peoples’ Armed Forces, will become the barrier to terrorism in its current form, infuse an urgency into development hence making the Nation State economically viable and culturally conscious thus limiting the possibilities of its being a terrorist playground as well as an asterisk in history which now appears to be the case for most African post-colonial States and Peoples.
Shenge Rahman Akanbi, Femi Odedeyi
For and on behalf of Egbe Omo Oduduwa
(egbeomooduduwa1945@gmail.com)

www.ooduapathfinder.com
By adminadmin on January 2, 2016



It is customary to felicitate with one another when a New Year rolls in, but we are of the view that such felicitation must be based on truth for it to have any meaning, otherwise it becomes another ritual in a long series of the usual where we, as Peoples of Nigeria, had been experiencing our own alienation from the post-colonial State.
What should ordinarily make the New Year a happy occasion, as a People, is our relationship with our existential reality, our historical truth without which we cannot comfortably engage the limitations of our present hence unable to create a fulfilling future. Therefore in pursuit of our intended future, we must interrogate not only our historical past but also our present. This is not about any form of justification, especially when we know that facts about our past and present can be used for either negative or positive purposes; however, these facts must be made known before any positive or negative use can be made of them.
Such a negative use of a fact is exemplified by the current agitation now presumably anchored by a Customary Government of INDIGENOUS People of Biafra, headed by a retired High Court Judge; yet the Igbo say that the result of their forcible re-integration into Nigeria as a result of the Nigeria-Biafra war is their marginalization, the redress of which, according to them, rest on elevating “common citizenship” over and above Indigeneity in the process of which Indigeneity is denied to others while at the same time having no qualms rallying behind Indigenous People of either the Customary Government or the Radio Biafra variety thus raising the question as to whether Indigeneity is applicable to only the Igbo? For if they have, or are an indigenous people, others must surely have or be, hence they cannot at the same time promote the negation of Indigeneity in favor of “common citizenship” in non-Igbo areas, while pursuing their own aims as an Indigenous people, a situation which had also led to attempts by the Igbo to deny Yoruba indigeneity in Yorubaland, as if the Yoruba are not indigenous to their own land, leading to attempts by the Igbo to create their own rival traditional institutions in Yorubaland, for example, or making spurious claims about ownership of parts of Yorubaland as a consequence of their Nigerian citizenship.
While it is true that the quest for self-determination need not be engendered through a formulaic process, it is also true that it must be able to make its case outside the context of what other nationalities do or do not do; in other words, the Igbo case must be able to stand on its own existential foundation, especially when all African Peoples are already alienated from the post-colonial state thus making self-determination a matter of post-colonial necessity for everyone. Their inability to proceed on this line can only mean that what is being pursued is not self-determination.
There is a historical consistency in this narrative; the same forces that alleged “carpet-crossing” were also responsible for creating political crisis in the Western Region in 1962 through the imposition of an illegal State of Emergency and organized the coups that truncated Nigeria’s Independence Federalism, the product of addressing issues on self-determination and are now denying Indigeneity of others while making full use of it for themselves.
The Igbo, through the NCNC, actively participated as a major partner in the unholy alliance that saw to the gradual transition of the Federalism of First Republic into the centralized State Nigeria currently is, even as such participation boomeranged on the Igbo at some point when the attempt was being made. This will not, however, acquit the Igbo of any responsibility in bringing such a situation into fruition, which will of course, vitiate their marginalization claim.
“ooduapathfinder” had published the results of the 1951 Western Nigeria Regional Elections which debunked the lies perpetrated to the effect that the Action Group started Nigeria’s descent into “tribalism” through the “carpet-crossing” that took place in the Parliament of the Region. That they had not been able to dispute the results at any point in time show that the allegation against the Action Group was actually part of a master plan to politically decimate the Western Region for the obvious benefit of the East and which is now finding another platform in the cry of marginalization being proffered against the rest of Nigeria.
The East(NCNC), in an unholy alliance with the North(NPC), used the AG crisis as its point of intervention, with the resultant effect of carrying out an illegality with the declaration of the State of Emergency even when the Western House of Assembly was unable to sit, which was why it was possible for the Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa to declare that the State of Emergency that was supposed to come into effect on May 29, 1962 had already been in force as at March 28, 1962.
Furthermore, this alliance rubbished the ruling of the Privy Council which, under the 1960 Independence Constitution, nullified Akintola’s premiership in the West via rushing a “Republican” Constitution into being, thus removing, by a stroke of the pen, Nigeria from the Privy Council’s jurisdiction and placing it firmly under the wings of the alliance. Even if it can be argued that such was necessary for an independent, sovereign state, the question is, why, at that particular time, if not for an ulterior motive, which eventually played out in 1966 at the time of the coups in January of that year where the line of succession in the “Republican” Constitution favored the East, with the Igbo occupying the offices of the President, Senate president and Army Chief, with the senate president acting on behalf of the president thus making it easy for power to be handed over to one of them by one of them.
Chief Obafemi Awolowo, in his “Adventures in Power, Book Two” recorded the disposition of the major Leaders of the unholy alliance in their attempt to overwhelm the West through the State of Emergency which cannot, under any circumstances be ascribed to promoting self-determination, either of the Igbo or the Yoruba.
He wrote thus: “The Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Premier of Northern Region of Nigeria, and Dr. Michael Okpara, Premier of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, were in the Chamber of Nigeria’s House of Representatives in Lagos to witness what may well be described as a tragic drama which was staged there on 29th May, 1962, from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm, and from 3:00pm to 3:32 pm. They were both gorgeously dressed. They sat in the Official Box-flanked on the right side by Sir Kerr Bovell, then Inspector-General of Police, and on the left by another high-ranking Police Officer.
It was an unusually cool morning—indeed, the rest of the day turned out to be equally cool. The Sardauna looked very regal in his big and high turban, as well as in his flowing gown. Dr. Okpara, alias, M.I. Power, exhibited a no-nonsense countenance; and in his right hand, he held a huge and beautiful fan which, together with his elegant attire, gave him a superlative appearance. There was an air of complete self-satisfaction, and of triumph about both of them. They had come to the House, so they must have thought at the time, to watch the total eclipse, and the first stage in the eventual extinction, of a formidable and irrepressible opponent. It could not have crossed the mind of either of them at the close of it that they had only watched the first scene of a multi-scene drama. Other scenes—more tragic and more harrowing—were to follow: the disastrous termination of the first Republic; the barbarous killings of the I(g)bo in the northern parts of the country; and the waging of a dreadful war by Nigerians against Nigerians in which unnumbered lives were lost.
The security in and around the Chamber of the House was tight. Every movable object in the Chamber was removed. Everyone was thoroughly searched before being allowed to enter the Chamber. Some plain-clothes non-members of the House stood along the passages round the rear of Members’ seats. Of course, as was already mentioned, the Inspector-General and another high-ranking Police Officer were there, in their complete awesomeness. All of these contrasted unfairly with what happened in the Chamber of the Western House, on 25th May, where no security was provided at all during the first meeting, and where, when a pretense to security was made during the second meeting in the afternoon, it was withdrawn immediately it was noticed that the meeting might succeed; and the members were once again chased out of the Chamber with tear-gas.
I suspected that some NPC/NCNC Members were allowed, in spite of the search, to carry some kind of weapons in to the Chamber. Hon. Mbazulike Amechi was a back-bencher. But on this day, he sat on the front bench directly opposite me. He wore an Agbada, the front pocket of which was bulged. I had no doubt in my mind that some people on the NPC/NCNC side had been assigned to mark me in particular. If there had been any scuffle at all in the place, I might have been killed, and that with impunity. After all, those of Akintola’s supporters who employed violence against AG Members in the Western House of Assembly, four days earlier, went scot-free.
The atmosphere in the Chamber of the House of Representatives was tense and grave. That sitting of the House was the most sober and the most somber that I had witnessed: there was no loud applause; no jeering; no heckling; interruptions were minimal, meaningful and devoid of frivolity. It was one of the best-attended meetings of the House. Undoubtedly, most Members on the Government side had attended the sitting on command, without having the faintest idea of what it was all about. The public and press galleries were unusually packed. The Prime Minister himself bore a very lugubrious look. He appeared to have lost something of his well-known calm and placidness. He was fidgety. When we, on the Opposition bench, pressed for a division at the end of the debate, and the lobby was cleared for members to go and cast their votes, it took Sir Abubakar more than two minutes to rise from his seat. When he finally did, he looked to his right, to his left, and to his back. He then paused for a few seconds, and stepped forward towards the lobby, only after Okotie-Eboh and Mbazulike Amechi rose to accompany him……..”

Now that the National Assembly has once again constituted an Ad-hoc Committee to review the1999 Constitution, Egbe Omo Oduduwa strongly contends that a new pathway be charted lest the entire exercise become more of the same, if not worse than previous attempts.
The fact that the Deputy Senate President is statutorily the Chairman of the Constitution Review Committee is not lost on us. His recent categorization of Nigeria as practicing “feeding bottle” Federalism in which the supposed “Federating units” are totally dependent on the center coupled with his prominent role in a recent Igbo demand for “True Federalism” as their response to the on-going agitation for Biafra is indeed significant. Yet it is also true that he became Deputy Senate President vide an illegal conspiracy .This and his status in the PDP yesterday and today places a moral and ethical question not only on his person, but also on the entire exercise itself. Egbe Omo Oduduwa therefore calls for VIGILANCE on the part of the Yoruba and other peoples of Nigeria on this fundamental issue.
All of the previous exercises in reviewing the Constitution either in the form of political or national Conferences organized by any sitting government or by the National Assembly itself under the chairmanship of the deputy Senate President had always utilized “public sittings” as a legitimization device to create a false image of a democratic and inclusive participation without any real input by the people , which can only be exercised through a Referendum by the people themselves.
We are mindful of what these “public debates” have done to our body politic in legitimizing doubtful socio-political legacies – IMF debates, Political Bureau, Niki Tobi’s Constitutional review, Abubakar, Obasanjo and Jonathan’s consultations and conferences. In each of these instances, it was a case of working to the answer, where, at the end, a pre-determined position emerged which vitiated the struggle for ethno-national autonomy and/or True Federalism.
Furthermore, the Constitution itself is based on a false premise, to wit, “We, The People” when “We, The People” had no hand in its making, directly or indirectly, as it was a product of military fiat which was not acting and did not act on behalf of “We, The People”, even as it unwittingly affirms the Peoples’ sovereignty by so doing.
To avoid another “working to the answer”, the parameters of engagement must change as we cannot afford to be going back and forth on any “consultations” especially with the moral and ethical issues at play. That the National Assembly has now, for whatever reason, deemed it fit to embark on another Constitutional Review journey places the burden on us, as the “People” to inject our aspirations into the process as we cannot embark on this journey through the same worn-out processes that led us to nowhere. In pursuit of this, Egbe Omo Oduduwa proposes the following:
(1) The Yoruba Nation must, as a matter of necessity, convene a Yoruba Constituent Assembly(YCA) to deliberate, modify and ratify the proposal already on ground, to wit, the Draft Yoruba Constitution, arrived at through a Constituent Assembly in 2002 with the active participation of various Yoruba interest groups, professionals, academia, co-operative societies etc etc.(the Draft is attached below)
(2) The Egbe Omo Oduduwa will set into motion the process for Convening this Assembly.
(3) The YCA would generate a fully formed Yoruba Constitution to be approved or rejected in a Yes/No Referendum organized jointly by the Governments of Yorubaland, hence there would be no initial need for elections into the YCA.
(4) The YCA will confirm the fact that all the issues about Nigerian Constitutional Review are settled, in large part, among the Yoruba in spite of attempts to negate these by some political forces in the land through the instrumentality of powers of the center, the last attempt being those who subscribed to the Jonathan Conference and its recommendations being the worst attempt to truncate Yoruba demand for True Federalism.
(5) Our current governments came to power on a platform of CHANGE; their Party’s Manifesto included a return to True Federalism hence they can be properly engaged on this subject.
(6) Egbe Omo Oduduwa also canvasses a similar procedure among other Peoples of Nigeria; especially when indigene/settler conflicts strike at the heart of citizenship. This process will allow for such issues to be resolved; all the more so when, for example, the Igbo are already torn between outright secession and True Federalism while other Nationalities in the former Eastern region had demonstrated their unwillingness to be part of Biafran secession. The only way to determine their wish would be through a Referendum among the various peoples concerned
(7) The outcome of the various Referendums will form the basis for negotiating a new Federal Structure for Nigeria at which point a new Nigerian Constitution will not need to be subjected to another Referendum since its foundation had already been determined through that process.
Shenge Rahman Akanbi; Femi Odedeyi
for and on behalf of Egbe Omo Oduduwa
(egbeomooduduwa1945@gmail.com)

ANNEXTURE:
DRAFT OF THE OODUA REGION YORUBA CONSTITUTION

In order to secure the dual ends of good government for, as well as peaceable living among ourselves and between us and other Nationalities in Nigeria, we, the OODUA Yoruba people do commission and give consent to the following as the Constitution of the Yoruba Nation:
THE OODUA NATION
ARTICLE 1
SECTIONS:
1. YORUBALAND, existing as an AUTONOMOUS nation in a UNION OF NIGERIAN CONSTITUENT NATIONALITIES, shall be known and styled as “ODUDUWA REGION”.
2. The Central government of the Union shall have no power to interfere nor intervene in the affairs of the ODUDUWA REGION, save as shall be agreed to by three quarters of the members of the Region’s Parliament.
3. The land description of the Oodua Yoruba Nation corresponds to the present states of Ekiti, Eko, Ogun, Ondo, Osun, Oyo and all Oodua lands in Kwara, Kogi, Edo and Delta States.
4. There shall be a Division of the Federal Armed Forces in the Region, 90% of which personnel shall be indigenes of the Region. The Divisional commander shall be an indigene of Oduduwa Region.
THE GOVERNMENT
ARTICLE ll
SECTIONS:
1. Oduduwa Region shall be a Federation consisting of a Regional government, provinces (Ipinle) and Localities (Ibile). The Region as well as each Province and Local Council shall have a capital city which shall be the seat of Government.
2. ODUDUWA Region shall adopt a parliamentary system of government.
3. All legislative powers shall be vested in PARLIAMENT of the Region, without prejudice to the rights of provinces and local Councils to enact laws and ordinances, relating to their provinces and local councils.
4. Any elected Member of Parliament, Provincial and Local Assembly who wishes to join another party must first resign his/her parliamentary seat and re-contest election if he/she so wishes on the platform of his/her new party.
THE REGIONAL GOVERNMENT
ARTICLE lll
SECTIONS:
1. The parliament shall be composed of members elected every 4 years by the people of the region.
2. Such persons shall be elected on the platform of the political party they represent or as independent candidates. There shall be no restriction on the number of political parties.
3. The Proceedings of Parliament shall be directed by the Speaker who shall be elected from among the members.
4. Elections into Parliament shall be held on June 12 of the election year, while the swearing in of elected representatives shall be the 8th day of August and annual opening session of Parliament shall be 23rd day of September (to commemorate the peace treaty that ended Kiriji war on September 23, 1886) of the same year.
5. The members of Parliament shall be remunerated for their services, as shall be determined by law.
6. Parliament shall enact all laws for raising revenue. No money shall be drawn from the treasury except through an Appropriation Act.
7. Parliament shall have the power to make laws governing taxes, duties, excise, payment of debt, etc. It shall have the power to make laws governing the sourcing of funds on behalf of the region and to regulate commerce with the co-prosperity spheres within the Union of Nigeria.
8. Taxes are to be collected at regional, provincial and local levels for promotion of the general welfare of the people.
9. Parliament shall have the power to make provisions for the general welfare security and prosperity of the Region. It shall set the standards for economic, educational, social and cultural advancement of Oodua people.
10. Parliament shall have the power to establish Regional Police Service with responsibility to
investigate Regional crimes. This Police Service shall have no superintending control over the Provincial and Council Police service, but shall coordinate activities at the regional, provincial and local council levels.
11. There shall be a Regional Prosecutors’ office responsible for the prosecution of cases as investigated by the Regional police. The Regional Prosecutor shall be elected by popular vote and shall not be a registered member of any political party.
12. Recognizing that the Oduduwa Nation is multi-religious society, the citizens shall have the
right to freedom of worship.
13. Parliament shall make no retroactive law. Nor shall it abridge the freedom of speech or the right of peaceful assembly. It shall not abridge the right of citizens to petition government for redress. The privilege of the writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended. Parliament shall not make any law abridging the fundamental rights, freedoms and liberty of the citizens. All Oodua persons resident in any of the provinces of the Region shall be entitled to the same privileges and immunities.
14. The powers not delegated to the Parliament or the Provincial/Local Assemblies by this Constitution are reserved in the people, which may be invoked by a simple majority of voters through a referendum in the region, province or locality as the case may be.
EXECUTIVE OF THE REGIONAL GOVERNMENT
ARTICLE lV
SECTIONS:
1. A Head of State/Aare shall be elected for a period of 5 years of not more than 2 terms. The Aare shall not belong to any political party, and must not be less than 60 years. The Aare must be a person whose parents belong to a community indigenous to Oodua Nation. The Aare shall declare open the parliamentary Session, represent the Region on ceremonial matters, announce the dissolution of Parliament and all such matters.
2. The Aare shall be elected from an electoral college composed of selected leaders from the provinces. The provincial representative could be traditional rulers or statesmen and women.
3. Executive power at the Regional level shall reside in the Premier-in-Council (PM) elected for a period of 4 years. The leader of the majority party in parliament shall be PM and shall be vested with the power to appoint Cabinet Ministers. The PM must be a person whose parents belong to a community indigenous to Oodua Nation.
4. The Parliament shall stand dissolved at the expiration of its 4-year term. In the event of a motion of no confidence passed on the government by not less than three-quarters of members of Parliament, the PM and the government shall resign forthwith. Thereafter, the Aare shall call on the leader of the party which appears able to form a government that will enjoy majority support in Parliament to fulfil the term of the current Parliament or new election held within 30 days of dissolution of Parliament.
5. The Council of Chiefs and Obas. There shall be a Regional House of Chiefs and a Traditional Council of Obas and Chiefs at the Provincial and Local Council levels.
JUDICIARY
ARTICLE V
SECTIONS:
1. The Judicial power of the Region shall be vested in the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court, Customary Court and Other lower courts as the Parliament may establish.
2. There shall be a Court of Appeal in each of the provinces.
3. There shall be, in each province, a High Court from which appeals shall lie to the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court.
4. There shall be a CONSTITUTIONAL COURT of not more than 7 persons. Members of this court shall not be less than 60 years old. The court shall determines cases of serious Constitutional issues among Local, Province and Regional Governments, and between individuals and government. Members shall be nominated by the Body of Benchers in each provinces; subject to ratification by Parliament. Membership of this court is for life, subject to soundness of body and mind.
5. FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS: All Oodua persons shall be protected by the various international treaties passed in the Bill of Rights of the UN and various regional Bills of Rights such as the African Human and People’s Rights.
LAND AND MINERAL RESOURCES
ARTILCE Vl
SECTION:
1. Oodua Customary forms of land ownership shall be respected. Exploitation of mineral resources shall be the prerogative of the host community without prejudice to the right of the Local, Provincial and Regional Governments to levy appropriate taxes for the welfare of the people of Oodua land and without prejudice to the right of the Federal Government to levy taxes.
THE PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT
ARTICLE Vll
SECTIONS:
1. There shall be established a PROVICIAL ASSEMBLY in each of the provinces of the Region.
2. Provisions of ARTICLES ONE and TWO in this Constitution as applied to the Parliament of the Region, shall apply to the PROVINCIAL ASSEMBLY except that the tenure of the Assembly shall be 3 years.

3. The Executive Power of the Province shall reside in the PROVINCIAL GOVERNOR-IN-COUNCIL, who must be an elected member of the Assembly and vested with the power to appoint members of the Provincial Government. The size of the provincial cabinet shall be determined by consideration for the financial resources of the province.
4. The Assembly shall make provision for the establishment of a Provincial Police Service, which shall be empowered to maintain law and order in the Province and investigate crimes within its jurisdiction. The Provincial Police shall be responsible to the Provincial Governor.
5. There shall be a Provincial Prosecutor’s Office responsible for the prosecution of cases as
investigated by the Provincial Police. The Provincial Prosecuting Officer shall be elected by popular vote, and shall not be a registered member of any political party.
THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT
ARTICLE Vlll
SECTIONS:
1. There shall be established a LOCAL ASSEMBLY in each of the Local Councils of the Region.
2. Provision of ARTICLE ONE and TWO in this Constitution as applied to the Parliament of the Region, shall apply to the LOCAL ASSEMBLY except that the tenure of the Assembly shall be 3 years.
3. The Executive Power of the Local Council shall reside in the LOCAL ASSEMBLY CHAIRMAN-IN-COUNCIL, who must be an elected member of the Assembly and vested with the power to appoint members of the local government. The size of the Local Government cabinet shall be determined by consideration of the financial resources of the local council. The electorate shall have a say in the remuneration of elected members of the Councils.
4. The Assembly shall make provision for the establishment of a Local Council Police Service, which shall be empowered to maintain law and order in the Local Council, investigate crimes within its jurisdiction. The Council Police Service shall be responsible to the Local Assembly. There shall be Council Prosecutor’s Office responsible for the prosecution of cases as investigated by the Local Police Service. The Council Prosecutor shall be elected by popular vote in the Local Council and shall not be a registered member of any political party.
THE OODUA PERSON
ARTICLE lX
SECTION:
1. All persons either of whose parents or grandparents belong or belonged to a community indigenous to Oodua land. All persons in the Diaspora, of African decent who claim Oduduwa/Yoruba ancestry, either through cultural affiliation or genealogical connection.

www.ooduapathfinder.com
By adminadmin on December 26, 2015



A Language dies when it is not an intrinsic part of the production and reproduction of knowledge, where the Language problematic leads to a crisis in the educational system. Language defines the culture and character of a people; without it, there will be no social relations hence no culture. Part of colonialism’s after-effects was the dispersal of African languages through the creation of artificial national boundaries splitting the same Language into different geo-political territories as well as subjugating the Languages within the same territory to colonialist Language suzerainty.
This feat allowed unfettered colonial access to the mind of the African, hence to his/her thought processes and because colonialism would not have succeeded without the total subjugation of the person, it became an impossibility for the African to think his/her way through the underdevelopment foisted on the colony. Which is why all of Africa’s developmental models lack any depth, stuck on being an appendage of colonial paradigms with the much-vaunted need for “patriotism” always falling far short of its intended purposes; for Language produces the internal necessity and consciousness in a people that enables the transformation of the environment/society; it is Language that ties the individual to both whatever the professional path is chosen as well as to the society itself.
The multiplicity of Languages in Nigeria, instead of being the pathway to development, have become the albatross where all attempts at development were subsets of the thought processes of the “mother country”, hence the gradual descent into an import-dependent economy since the denigration of the Language led to what becomes of the society it represents, even when some of the former colonies or semi-colonies like Singapore, India, China were able to overcome this Language problematic to become major global economic and political entities.
That some other under-developed countries were unable to overcome this problematic, in spite of their Language consciousness, only point to the limitations of their ruling entities, compared to what obtained in the Western Region where the Egbe Omo Oduduwa at inception, placed a lot of emphasis on Language, especially the development and promotion of the Yoruba Language through its Literature Committee, whose mandate included the development of Yoruba Language, research into Yoruba History, philosophy, art, science and herbal medicine, with its political expression in the Action Group Government’s setting up of a committee to explore possibilities of writing scientific books in the Yoruba Language, a precursor to the acknowledgement of science being directly tied to any form of development. This is besides promoting Literature-in-Yoruba Language through various writers, foremost of whom was D.O Fagunwa. All of these, and more, formed part of the totality of Yoruba Language’s contributions to the educational and developmental programs and policies of both the Egbe Omo Oduduwa and the Action Group, both becoming an integral part of the “free education” paradigm, the flagship of Yoruba development.

In these times, Yoruba scholars have discovered that Yoruba Language can play a decisive role in this process of scientific development. At a Lecture held in honor of the late Aremu Majolagbe Laosebikan, Professor Adebisi Afolayan viewed Yoruba Language as the most effective means of achieving true literacy and that contrary to popular belief, Yoruba and not English is the Language by which Yoruba children can acquire literacy permanently, functionally, creatively and prophetically, adding, “Yoruba language enhances understanding of contemporary mathematics issues and problems confronting the world.“ According to Professor Afolayan, “Laosebikan was able to assert in his life time that future Yoruba children would achieve modern science and technology development by learning mathematics through the medium of Yoruba language.”
J. Fakinlede, author of “Yoruba-Modern Practical Dictionary” says that it is better to teach a child any subject in the native Language; a position confirmed by the experience of the Ife Model School where all subjects were taught to two sets of students in Yoruba and English Languages resulting in better academic and test performance by those taught in Yoruba Language. He further posits that a ten-year old Yoruba child has already acquired enough Yoruba Language skills to learn science and mathematics probably to the university level; that the same child would probably not have the proficiency in English language, at that age, to go beyond the early grades in a secondary school. Hence, such a child learning science and mathematics in Yoruba therefore can have close to ten years advantage over his counterpart who may be learning the same subject matter in English.
However, if an English speaking child were to learn Yoruba well and continue to be taught science and mathematics in Yoruba Language, he also could conceivably do better than when he is being taught the subject matter in English thus making Yoruba a better Language to use to teach science and mathematics than English language.
He goes on to use, as an example, the human body wherein a Yoruba can name most parts of the human body in Yoruba at the age of nine by mere assimilation, although there are many internal organs with which he may not be familiar, but if he has the opportunity to see and be taught the names of those parts in Yoruba, it may take him less than three months to master most of them. It would take the same Yoruba child probably another six years to reach the level of proficiency in English that would make him perform that task.
The nature of the two languages is the reason why it is easier for a Yoruba to use it in science and mathematics; Yoruba Language being what could be called an additive language, which makes it more organized, and therefore, more scientific whereas English is a Language borne out of turbulence. In leaning Yoruba, a child needs to learn the phonemes that constitute the words, he can then form, or understand other words based on the mastery of these phonemes. Thus, even if a Yoruba person has never heard a word before, he can, by analysis, atupale, come to a good understanding of it; meaning that, in most instances, the meaning of a Yoruba word can be found within the word itself.

On the other hand, an English word has to be learnt in its entirety. A person cannot conclude that since he knows the meanings of the words stand and under, he can arrive at the meaning of the word[b] understand[/b], which is why it is almost superfluous to create a Yoruba – Yoruba dictionary, while English – English dictionaries proliferate. J.Fakinlede is of course not inferring that Yoruba should immediately be substituted for English in teaching science and mathematics in our schools. He is just stating that the problem of teaching science and mathematics in Yoruba Language does not lie with the Language itself but elsewhere.

This “elsewhere” is precisely in the separation of the study of Yoruba Language only as an academic subject and not as the Language of Instruction in all of our educational institutions. Using it as the Language of Instruction will entail a complete overhaul of our educational system from its current haphazard nature into its consolidation as a Regional System thereby maximizing the training and retraining of teachers of and in the Language with the additional benefit of having translators and researchers and production of text-books hence becoming an economic powerhouse in itself.
The combination of all of these will engender the necessary “spirit of development” needed to re-order the economic and cultural life of Yoruba people, more so in a global sense, where, with the scope of the researches done about Yoruba culture and society, especially in Western academic circles, gives fillip to its application.

The “ Yoruba Diaspora Triad”, the “first” being those transplanted due to the slave trade and who had found their niche in the new world, especially in the West Indies and South America, the second being those especially in West Africa being wholly Yoruba but for colonial geo-political manipulation and the third being the recent, mostly economic, migrants to the Western World, whose offspring are always conflicted as to their cultural identities, are daily confronted with this Language problematic with the implication of this Diaspora not manifesting itself properly within the global mix. Yet, this can be corrected only if the Language does not go into extinction either by itself or becoming assimilated into some “global” imperative or substituted by new amalgam of languages. Avoiding this possibility makes it necessary for its transformation into the Language of Instruction in the production and reproduction of our knowledge base thus becoming a complementary Language for our Diaspora and an advantage in all of our developmental processes.

www.ooduapathfinder.com
By adminadmin on December 20, 2015



[b]The recent intervention on Biafran protests by some leaders from the East, led by the deputy Senate president,Ike Ekweremadu, brings into focus the need to formally address the issue of marginalization being touted as one of the main reasons for the agitations. Marginalization had been the Eastern Mantra in her affairs within Nigeria and more often than not, it is based on a falsehood as their roles in all Nigerian administrations, both civilian and military, the most recent being the Jonathan Administration, proved otherwise. They also predicate their demand on a quest for justice; yet justice without truth is itself an injustice hence when falsehood become the foundation of a claim, the question to be asked is why, especially when such falsehoods can easily be identified. So, why do the Igbo persist in perpetuating a falsehood as a basis for their demand for justice?
Since this is not the first time where such a falsehood will become a foundation for a demand, it is necessary to interrogate this aspect of their praxis as it appears it forms part of their political coming into being, since the anti-colonial period, anchored on Zik’s proclamation as to the Igbo being destined by the gods of Africa to liberate Africans from the barbarism of the ages. Part of this predestination was the attempt by Zik himself to perpetuate a falsehood for his own political purposes, a prime example of which was his claim that he or his party the NCNC won the 1951 elections into the Western Regional House of Assembly. It was a falsehood carried over by his associates and followers, including Chinua Achebe who claimed to have been an eye-witness to the “carpet crossing” and others like Mathew Mbu and K.O Mbadiwe. As part of “ooduapathfinder’s” efforts to address some of these falsehoods, we begin with the 1951 Western Regional Elections where a veteran journalist, Felix Adenaike was able to put the elections in perspective, in a detailed manner, hence the following report whose background facts can also be found in “Awo or Zik—Who won the 1951 Western Nigeria Elections”, a book by Alhaji Ganiyu Dawodu(available at Amazon.com).[/b]

“Dr. Mbu said of that election held on 24 September 1951 that: “Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe was betrayed by the Western Region of Nigeria, not by the electorate, but by the leaders. The NCNC won the election against the Action Group (led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo), but the Action Group introduced what was unknown to Nigerian history”, namely, “carpet crossing. They Action Group bought members of the NCNC to join the Action Group after these people had won election on the platform of the NCNC. Zik, the leader of a majority party in the Western Region became the Leader of Opposition overnight”.
Reminded by the interviewer that the late Chief AMA Akinloye had maintained in his lifetime that he and his group had contested the election on a neutral platform from the NCNC, Dr. Mbu said: “That is his version… He is entitled to say what he wants to say. I don’t want to say ill of the dead.. He knew he was NCNC and his group was NCNC. Adelabu remained NCNC. He stuck on to NCNC till he died”.

The late Dr. Kingsley Ozumba Mbadiwe said in his autobiography, “Rebirth of a nation”, among others that: “But in pursuance of the policy of creating a political climate healthy enough to make one a citizen wherever he lived, Dr. Azikiwe contested and won the general elections in 1951 into the Western House of Assembly. To stultify this policy of one Nigeria in favor of his tribally-based philosophy, Chief Awolowo got some elected members to cross carpet from the NCNC to his AG side. Zik the victor lost. And Awolowo’s party was able to form the government of the Western Region.”
At a news conference in Lagos on 20 September 1989, more than two years after Chief Awolowo’s death, Dr. Mbadiwe returned to the topic saying: “Dr. Azikiwe and his party won the majority of seats in the Western House of Assembly. He was due to be elected the Leader of Government Business, when overnight, the Action Group introduced the notorious carpet-crossing. By this manipulation, members who won under the NCNC crossed over to the Action Group building it to become the majority party in the West. As a result of this, Chief Awolowo was elected Leader of Government Business and Dr. Azikiwe had to resign.”

Neither Dr. Mbu nor Dr. Mbadiwe named the members of the NCNC who contested the election on the party’s platform and later joined the Action Group to enable Chief Awolowo form the government to the exclusion of Dr. Azikiwe. These are weighty allegations such that they would have assisted their readers to clear the issues rather just repeat their own version of the events at that time in the hope that such repetitions would turn falsehood into facts.
To avert conflicting claims over candidates, Mr. Harold Cooper, the Government Public Relations Officer, wrote to the parties to furnish a list of the candidates contesting election on their platforms. Only the Action Group complied with this request and its list of candidates was as follows: Ijebu Remo Division – Obafemi Awolowo and M.S. Sowole; Ijebu Ode Division – S.O. Awokoya, Rev. S.A. Banjo and V.D. Phillips; Oyo Division – Chief Bode Thomas, Abiodun Akerele, A.B.P. Martins, T.A. Amao and SB Eyitayo; Osun Division – SL Akintola, JO Adigun, JO Oroge, S.I. Ogunwale, I…A. Adejare, J.A. Ogunmuyiwa and S.O. Ola; Ondo Division – P.A. Ladapo and G.A. Deko; Okitipupa Division – Dr. L.B. Lebi, CA Tewe and SO Tubo; Epe Division – SL Edu, AB Gbajumo, Obafemi Ajayi and C.A. Williams; Ikeja Division – O. Akeredolu-Ale, SO Gbadamosi and FO Okuntola; Badagry Division – Chief CD Akran, Akinyemi Amosu and Rev. GM Fisher; Egba Division – J.F. Odunjo, Alhaji A.T. Ahmed, CPA Cole, Rev S.A. Daramola, Akintoye Tejuoso, SB Sobande, IO Delano and A Adedamola.

The others were as follows: Egbado Division – J.A.O. Odebiyi, D.A. Fafunmi, Adebiyi Adejumo, A. Akin Illo and P.O. Otegbeye; Ife Division – Rev S.A. Adeyefa, D.A. Ademiluyi, J.O. Opadina, and S.O. Olagbaju; Ekiti Division – E.A. Babalola, Rev. J Ade Ajayi, S.K. Familoni, S.A. Okeya and D Atolagbe; Owo Division – Michael Adekunle Ajasin, A.O. Ogedengbe, JA Agunloye, LO Omojola and R.A. Olusa; Western Ijaw Division – Pere EH Sapre-Obi and MF Agidee; Ishan Division – Anthony Enahoro; Urhobo Division – WE Mowarin, J.B. Ohwinbiri and JD Ifode; Warri Division – Arthur Prest and O. Otere, and Kukuruku Division – D.J.I. Igenuma.
Of the names on the list, only MA Ajasin from Owo Division, which comprised Akoko then, did not run because of party solidarity and unity in Owo. He stood down for A.O. Ogedengbe and R.A. Olusa to contest two of the three seats, which they won, while D.K. Olumofin won the third for the NCNC. Three secretaries of the Action Group, who ran as independents and won were: Alhaji D.S. Adegbenro, Egba Division; J.O. Osuntokun, Ekiti Division and S.O. Hassan, Epe Division.

At the close of polls on 24 September 1951, the Action Group had won 38 of the 72 seats in contention in the Regional Assembly. There were a total of 80 seats. Lagos had five seats in the West Regional Assembly all won by the NCNC in the election of 20 November 1951, while Benin had three won by Otu Edo candidates in the election of 6 December 1951. The poll had been postponed in Lagos and Benin following security concerns. Of the 68 candidates on the list furnished by the Action Group to the Government PR Department, 38 of the elected AG members were from that list. And they were as follows: Ijebu Remo – Obafemi Awolowo and M.S. Sowole; Ijebu Ode – Rev. SA Banjo and S.O. Awokoya; Oyo – Bode Thomas, Abiodun Akerele, ABP Thomas, TA Amao and SB Eyitayo; Osun – S.L. Akintola, J.O. Adigun, JA Oroge, S.I. Ogunwale, I.A. Adejare, J.A. Ogunmuyiwa and S.O. Ola.
Other elected AG members from the list were: Egba – J.F. Odunjo, Alhaji AT Ahmed, Rev. S.A. Daramola and Prince Adedamola; Egbado (now Yewa) – J.A.O. Odebiyi, D.A. Fafunmi and A. Akin Illo; Ekiti – E.A. Babalola and Rev. J. Ade-Ajayi; Badagry – Chief CD Akran and Rev. G.M. Fisher; Ikeja – SO Gbadamosi and O Akeredolu-Ale; Ife – Rev. SA Adeyefa and SO Olagbaju; Owo – AO Ogedengbe and RA Olusa; Epe – Safi Lawal Edu; Okitipupa – C.A. Tewe; Western Ijaw – M.F. Agidee; Ishan – Anthony Enahoro, and Warri – Arthur Prest.

In addition to the Action Group and the NCNC, there were local/divisional parties such as the Ibadan People’s Party (IPP), led by Chief AMA Akinloye; Ondo Improvement League, and Otu Edo of Benin. At the end of poll, the standing of the parties was as follows: Action Group 38; NCNC/Independents 25; IPP 6 and Ondo Improvement League 2. Otu Edo candidates won the three Benin seats, namely, Chief SO Ighodaro, Chief Humphrey Omo-Osagie and Chief Chike Ekwuyasi. Chief Ighodaro opted for the AG, while the latter two went to the NCNC. And of the six IPP elected members, only Adegoke Adelabu joined the NCNC. The rest of them: AMA Akinloye, Chief DT Akinbiyi (who later became the Olubadan of Ibadan), Chief SO Lanlehin, Moyosore Aboderin and SA Akinyemi, opted for the Action Group. The NCNC National Secretary, the late Chief Kola Balogun had sent declaration forms to the IPP assemblymen asking them to declare for the NCNC but Chief Akinloye returned all the forms uncompleted.
The three AG secretaries who had run as independents – Adegbenro, Osuntokun and Hassan, five IPP members, one Etu Edo, and one Ondo Improvement League, Chief F.O. Awosika; and Chief Timothy Adeola Odutola (Independent, Ijebu Ode) had swollen the number of the AG elected members. All the transactions had taken place before the inauguration of the Regional Assembly on 7 January 1952. These were not known members of the NCNC, nor did the party publish their names on the list of its candidates, but claimed them as its “members, supporters or sympathizers” , according to inimitable Zik in his “My Odyssey”. It takes more than speculation to claim a person as a member of your political party. You cannot just be under the “impression” as Zik had claimed that they were and go ahead to field them as electoral candidates. For over a half century, the NCNC is yet to provide evidence to back its claim that it had won the West Regional election in 1951.

Mr Cooper absolved his department of responsibility for the controversy generated by the NCNC after the election. At a post election news conference in Lagos he said that “Of the winning candidates, the names of 38 were on the list sent to me by the Action Group. The six successful candidates at Ibadan were all among those who had been identified to me as representing the Ibadan People’s Party. No claim of any kind had reached us about the party affiliation of the remaining successful candidates.” Why did the NCNC not send a list of its candidates for the poll to the Government PR Department before that poll? And why have Dr. Mbu and the others not published the list of NCNC candidates to substantiate their electoral victory claim in over 50 years but merely kept reaping false claims? The records of the poll conducted in the West and all over Nigeria by the colonial administration are available at the National Archives and can be accessed by any honest researcher. In this matter, it is facts that speak, not what some political/ethnic partisan said or did not say.

Dr Azikiwe’s frustration was not only in losing the regional election, he also lost the election to the House of Representatives held on 10 January 1951 at the House of Assembly, Ibadan, among NCNC members. The total tally for the 1951 poll in the 80-member Western Regional Assembly was as follows: Action Group 38; Independent/ AG 15; NCNC 24; Independent/ NCNC 3. Three members of the NCNC who had been elected to the House changed party allegiance that day ahead of the House of Representatives vote. They were: Chief SY Kesington-Momoh, JG Ako, and Awodi Orisaremi, from Urhobo and Kukuruku Divisions. They were running for the House of Representatives and wanted Action Group votes. Kesington-Momoh and Ako were elected, but Orisaremi went back to the NCNC. That was all the carpet-crossing that took place on 10 January 1952, namely, three at first to the AG and one back to the NCNC.

From the vote tally, it is clear that the NCNC and the Independent /NCNC totalling 27 seats altogether out of 80 seats could not have formed the Government of Western Nigeria. Even if the local/divisional parties had chosen the NCNC, it would still be some seats short of 41 required to form the government. The Action Group won 38 seats; its independent candidates – Adegbenro, Osuntokun, Hassan and Odutola won four seats making a total of 42 seats. The AG could have formed the government without the support of the other small parties. It did not have to “bribe” anybody to join it to form the government. Since politics is a game of number, only few principled politicians would not be disposed to joining the winning party, in this case, the AG.
Dr. Mbadiwe also claimed in his book: “Successful NCNC men who were not Yoruba were scared away. Dr. Azikiwe who won a seat to the Western House (of) Assembly from a Lagos constituency decided to resign. Since membership of the House of Representatives was by an electoral college in the regional house, no NCNC from the West came to the House of Representatives in Lagos”. This is blatantly false. Zik resigned because he lost election to the federal house from the West, while Prince Adeleke Adedoyin, Dr. Ibiyinka Olorun-Nimbe, Chief Frank Oputa-Otutu, Chief Denis Osadebey and Sir Odeleye Fadahunsi were elected from Ibadan to Lagos. Whoever scared non-Yoruba NCNC people from the West? Chief Denis Osadebey succeeded Adegoke Adelabu as Opposition Leader in the West and the likes of Humphrey Omo-Osagie, Festus Okotie-Eboh, Chike Ekwuyasi, Fidelis H Utomi, Obi Osagie, Yamu Numa, GO Oweh and GB Ometan were non-Yoruba NCNC in that Assembly. “

Our attention has been drawn to a statement issued by a coalition of 21 Yoruba self-determination groups declaring their support for the current agitation for Biafran independence. We find the declaration of support dubious in the sense that it distorted not only the history of self-determination in Nigeria in general but also the role of the Yoruba in particular.
We deem it necessary to issue this statement because many of the issues addressed by the coalition are in the public sphere and we wonder why in spite of this, they went ahead to distort history, knowing full well that their conclusions cannot stand scrutiny. If that is so, why then would they proceed on this journey? We will not pretend to know the answer to these but we will endeavor to always put the records straight so that such distortions will not lead our people into a cul-de-sac, always the end product of a-historical engagements.
We will now proceed to rebut, one by one, the positions canvassed by the coalition.
(1) The coalition stated that they “shall mobilize against a repeat of what happened in 1966 when the Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani north aligned to confront the Igbo”. This conclusion can only be valid if it corresponded with what actually happened in 1966, otherwise, it would amount to a deliberate distortion of history. Up till August 1966, the Yoruba were at the receiving end of the crisis engendered by the January 1966 coup led by first, Nzeogwu and Ifeajuna, both Igbo and later by Ironsi, another Igbo, who had been handed power in an illegal manner by the then Igbo senate president, Nwafor Orizu. Claims by the Nzeogwu group that their intention was to release Awo from jail and either force him to rule or they will rule in his name is easily debunked by the fact that they would not go about killing all non-Igbo political and military heavyweights at that time; for the import of this would be that Awo would be held hostage by the Igbo military and political elite, once his own had been decimated. Hence, up till his release by Gowon in August 1966, the Yoruba were as much victims of the January coup as the north. The Yoruba were not participants in the aftermath of the July 1966 counter-coup resulting in the pogroms against the Igbo in the north, rather the Yoruba people in the West ensured the safety of the Igbo as much as they could and acted as their property caretakers while the Igbo were away. The West actively participated in all the ad hoc conferences aimed at resolving the ensuing crisis, all the way to May 1967 when Awo led a delegation to the East only to be rebuffed. A Decree 8 was promulgated by Gowon, which, for all practical purposes, provided legal backbone for the Aburi Accords agreed upon in January 1967. Ojukwu rejected the Decree and declared Biafra, upon which Gowon declared a state of emergency and divided Nigeria into Twelve States; after which Awo was invited to join his Government. With this background, how did this coalition of Yoruba self-determination groups arrive at the conclusion that the Yoruba aligned with the north to confront the Igbo in 1966?
(2) In their pandering to the Igbo, the coalition was of the opinion that the Yoruba would be “making a grave mistake to assume that having the position of the Vice President and some juicy ministerial positions will heal long standing scars and future perils occasioned by the lopsided structure of the Nigerian Federation”. The implication of what the coalition is promoting is that the quest to remove the PDP from power was useless otherwise the coalition would not state that the positions occupied do not matter; for once the PDP was defeated, positions have to be occupied. The alternative to APC’s victory is continuation of PDP rule, which was not only anti-Yoruba in all ramifications, but as it is now being shown was engaged in full scale plunder of the country. What then are the implications of these positions? The first statement in the APC Manifesto stated that the Party will restructure the country into a True Federal System and imbibe a Federal Spirit. Hence, the Party already committed itself to restructuring. Moreover, the state of affairs in Yorubaland, today, ensures a sure-footed approach towards restructuring in the sense that the political atmosphere is now conducive, both in Nigeria and Yorubaland, a fact attested to by the statement credited to the new Ooni of Ife, during his coronation, to the effect that he had consulted with the various crowns in Yorubaland before his coronation and they had all agreed to work towards peace and unity in the land. Coming from such a young person with a major crown, the Yoruba saying, to wit, “omode gbon, agba gbon, l’afi da Ile Ife” has come into play. His youth and the wisdom of the elders will transform the land. These would have been impossible if the PDP had continued to control the land for our experience in their hands when they held sway was completely negative. Even if we assume, without conceding, that the Fulani are up to their usual tricks of palliatives, such that the “juicy ministerial positions” would be tantamount to baiting the Yoruba, the fact is that there is a “consciousness” permeating the entire landscape, not only in terms of the party itself but also of the political atmosphere where it is certain that Nigeria cannot be run in the usual manner. For the coalition to deny the opportunities inherent in this mix would point to their own lack of political wisdom.
(3) Both of the above would dovetail into our understanding of right to self-determination. Limiting ourselves to the period up to the Biafran war, we do know that, historically, the West/Yoruba, through the AG pursued this right while being constantly opposed by the East, through the NCNC. The AG was in the forefront of creating more Regions, totally opposed by the NCNC except when it thought it would be favored by the creation of the Mid West while opposing the creation of COR and the Middle Belt; Biafra invaded and occupied the Mid-West and West, even when both Regions had declared their neutrality; yet, in the Mid-West, only the Igbo-speaking areas were taken into “confidence” and the Biafra-appointed Igbo Governor embarked upon wholesale massacres and oppression of the local populace; the invasion of the West was anchored on the order given to the effect that all political, military, economic and administrative decisions regarding the West would be taken in Enugu, capital of Biafra. In other words, the West would be under complete and total occupation.
History is the basis for the quest for self-determination, for it brings into focus the cumulative experience of a people thus leading to the demand and sustaining it, hence coming to terms with it must be a given. Did this coalition ever ask Biafrans whether they have come to terms with these issues? If not, this coalition cannot even pretend to speak on behalf of Yoruba people. The right to self-determination is not pursued by self-immolation.

Shenge Rahman Akanbi; Femi Odedeyi
For and on behalf of Egbe Omo Oduduwa(egbeomooduduwa1945@gmail.com)

www.ooduapathfinder.com
By adminadmin on December 13, 2015



We, at “ooduapathfinder” are writing you this Letter in response to your intervention on the current agitation for Biafra. Being a credible participant in the events of those years, including spending time in prison for your support for the Eastern Region, you cannot be said to be unaware of the causes of the problems, then and now, as well as the various solutions that were suggested, including those ignored by the convening authorities.
We are however obliged to interrogate your conclusions, to wit: “once an idea has taken hold, you cannot destroy that idea…You may destroy the people that carry the idea on the battlefield, but, ultimately, it is not the end of the story…..So, let us sit down, let us talk once again about restructuring the nation in a way that no one will want to leave. The agitations, for me, are not surprising. It was expected that it would happen sooner or later……So, I am referring to a genuine and authentic National Conference. Not like the one that former President Olusegun Obasanjo called which was meant to try to perpetuate himself in office……The one under Jonathan was extensive; it covered lots and lots of ground. It proposed some far-reaching changes, not far-reaching for me, but far-reaching. It is about time we went back to efforts like that; genuine ones like that…”
Since you are referencing the agitation for Biafra as the “idea that has taken hold…”, we are of the view that as far as Nigeria is concerned, Biafra is not the only idea that has taken hold; and it cannot be, in any case, unless the rest of us has been consigned into non-ideational entities, lacking the capacity to generate an “idea” and hold on to it, the only condition for its being able to withstand destruction.

Even if we limit ourselves to issues about self-determination, the agitation for Biafra was a latter-day experience, unless it is being said that Biafra was and is what was proposed by Nnamidi Azikiwe during the anti-colonial period. If not, what is now regarded as the reason for Biafra was the “idea” behind the proposals for Federalism in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-national country like Nigeria right from the anti-colonial days.
That Biafra is an agitation for independence from Nigeria does not vitiate any other solution outside the confines of independence; independence would be a valid option not only for Biafra but for any other Nationality, the main reason for the Action Group’s insistence on a Secession Clause in the negotiations that led to Independence which the East was vehemently opposed to, at the time.

Current Biafran agitation is hinged on the ability of Nigeria to address the issues they perceive as germane to their continued existence in Nigeria; one of which is having one more State for the East, which, incidentally, other Nationalities are also demanding. Hence, if Biafran self-determination is an idea that cannot be destroyed, it cannot obviously be limited to only Biafra when there are many Nationalities in Nigeria, silently or openly agitating for redress to whatever they perceive as their grievances.
Thus, when Biafra demands for another state as part of her quest for justice, the Gwari, for example, would even be more justified, in that they were scattered among several states and without any formal state of their own whereas Biafra is demanding for an additional state. What Biafra thus considers as injustice in terms of lack of equitable number of states, is worse for the Gwari with not even a single state of their own. If another state is good for Biafra, certainly a single state would be good for the Gwari, if they choose to want one; the question being how this choice will be made if not by a referendum or plebiscite among the Gwari? Which brings into focus your call for a “genuine National Conference”; for this question is in the nature of the call itself: how is a “genuine National Conference” defined or how will it be arrived at?
To answer this, we start from the premise that it is not Biafra or its agitation that is an idea that cannot be destroyed but what you stated as “sitting down and talking about restructuring the nation in a way that no one will want to leave”; the very reason why every Government in Nigeria, military or civil, always create room for some type of Conference to address this particular issue.
The inability of these Conferences to arrive at such a solution is the only reason for all sorts of agitation, including Biafra or any other agitation for self-determination and the solutions from these Conferences always end up negating the Federalist solution proposed during the anti-colonial period as necessary for a multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-National entity like Nigeria.
When you proposed an “authentic National Conference”, the question as to its possibility arises, especially since you stated that previous military and civilian Conferences had been self-serving and Jonathan’s Conference was not far-reaching enough. We posit that these Conferences were “add-ons” to governance hence cannot but be self-serving. The central Government, as the convening authority of these Conferences was able to separate their own “day-to-day” governance from the context of the Conference itself which was also possible because those Conferences lacked the participation of the Nationalities in and of themselves, since they were not considered the subjects(Federating Units) of such Conferences hence, for a “genuine National Conference” to succeed, the parameters for the Conference must change as to representation where, hitherto, the absence of a platform prevents an engagement between the Nationalities, as subjects-cum-Federating Units and the central government, with this lack of input into how the issues are addressed becoming the reason for Nigeria’s recurring problems in one form or the other.
A “genuine National Conference” that will “restructure in such a way that no one would want to leave”, would mean the central government is able to state what it is offering; none of the previous Governments did that; even when they say the unity of Nigeria is non-negotiable, they always fail to tell us the parameters for such non-negotiablity, that is, what Nigeria is offering to the Nationalities which needs no negotiation; even though getting to this point would mean Nigeria must be symbolized, which role falls on the Government of the day.
Nigeria, with or without Biafran agitation, calls for a “sitting down”, especially with the current crisis where the Buhari Government has hinged its own solution on the three-pronged issues of employment, security and the fight against corruption. Although these arose from an electoral promise, they cannot be limited to simple fulfillment of such promises for they strike at the heart of the problem with Nigeria, especially with what we are being inundated with as having happened in the last six years whose solution must entail a restructuring of the political and economic system in place. In which case, they could be said to be the informal offerings of this Central Government .
While the Buhari Administration is engaged in retrieving as much of the stolen monies as possible and creating a new paradigm for governance, Nigeria’s historical experience has shown the fragility of the Nigerian State, capable of being manipulated at will, with inter-Nationality contradiction as its lever which can only be stopped by our “sitting down”.
On the other hand, structural solutions to these particular problems had been variously canvassed at previous Conferences, which solutions center on redefining the State as a vehicle for social, economic and cultural progress via Derivation, as opposed to “Allocation”, with its impact on political bureaucracy thus making it a more permanent solution to the anti-corruption fight as well as a major contributory factor to resolving unemployment issues directly translating into the security arena where, for example, the security architecture would be transformed by absorbing civilians and “hunters” permanently into the armed services thus creating another layer of employment especially considering the roles attributed to the “hunters” in the current war against Boko Haram.
The general template for engaging the central government on a “genuine National Conference” thus already exist, from the solution offered by the administration itself, which, coupled with representation by the Nationalities for and by themselves, would prevent the dissonance associated with previous Conferences. Of course, any Nationality that is not comfortable with those options would be free to leave, which would determine the indestructibility or otherwise of any idea.

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By adminadmin on December 5, 2015



That Oloye Obafemi Awolowo was the foremost proponent of True Federalism as the primary structure for a multi-lingual, multi-cultural Nation State as well as the anchor for his political praxis is not debatable in spite of his ideas being the focus of attacks from all sorts of political tendencies such that the immediate post-independence period was characterized by efforts to silence him and make him politically irrelevant through various forms of illegalities and Constitutional infractions by the political coalition in control of central power in the First Republic. Since then, Nigeria’s political trajectory had been based on a centralization of all political responsibilities culminating in haphazard creation of states as administrative centers which are no more than glorified entities completely dependent on the center for their continuous existence. Yet it is now becoming more and more apparent that the only way out of Nigeria’s dilemma is exactly a return to the Federalism Awo preached.
The alarm by the Governors as to their impending inability to maintain the minimum wage imposed on them just as the Finance Minister was, at the same time, saying that “ the nation’s recurrent expenditure completely dwarfs capital expenditure by a ratio of 84/16, this includes non-wage related overhead expenditure such as travel costs, entertainment, events, printing, IT consumables, stationeries etc. As at September 2015, the entire capital expenditure was just N194bn while overhead expenditure was N272bn. This scenario is considered unsustainable and at variance with the current administration’s resolve to reform the economy and reduce the cost of governance” makes it increasingly clear that the current unitarist structure built on extractive commodity sales is unsustainable. Aiming to address this issue by diversifying the economy outside of its political foundation will yield the same results; for, proceeds from diversification, either in terms of employment, increased revenue base etc will only go towards fueling the extant political infra and superstructure thus getting us back to where we started, which, as the Finance Minister stated, runs on the high ratio of government recurrent expenditure to capital development. Even when it is conceded that current efforts by the Buhari regime to get Nigeria back on its feet are very necessary, it is equally important to ensure that Nigeria’s human and material developmental goals are not separated from the totality of her existence.
It is within the above context that “ooduapathfinder” [/b]adopts Awo’s August 4, 1966 Speech at the first Press Conference held at Ikenne after his release from prison as the Editorial for this week. Even though the circumstances are very different, the fundamentals remain the same, and such fundamentals provide the grounds for the solution. 1966 was a period of fundamental change in Nigeria; 2015 is no different, given the wholesale cannibalization of the economy and all structures of State under Goodluck Jonathan’s watch whose results are now apparent in Nigeria’s economic and political gridlock.

[b]ONLY A TRULY FEDERAL CONSTITUTION CAN UNITE NIGERIA

The political crisis which started in Western Nigeria in May 1962 has acted on the entire Republic of Nigeria like a fairly big stone dropped in a big calm lake. It has produced a series of ever-widening circles of ripples. In the event, the violence and killings which commenced in the West had extended their infernal and poignant visitations to all parts of the Federation.

We have nothing to be ashamed of in all that has happened, as our detractors would wish. But we do need to have remorse in and demonstrate our shock at what had happened as well as express our profound grief and sympathy for the dead, the maimed and dispossessed, in all parts of Nigeria, and to whatever political camps they previously belonged.
Those who may be tempted to rejoice at the awful fate that has befallen some of our countrymen, especially during the past nine months, should be reminded of this dreadful warning of Jesus Christ:
‘At that very time there were some people present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. He answered them: “Do you imagine that, because these Galileans suffered this fate, they must have been greater sinners than anyone else in Galilee? I tell you they were not; but unless you repent, you will all of you come to the same end. Or the eighteen people who were killed when the tower fell on them at Siloam – do you imagine they were more guilty than all the other people living in Jerusalem? I tell you they were not; but unless you repent, you will all of you come to the same end”’
My conscientious appeal to all Nigerians is that instead of mocking the dead and fallen; instead of scheming vengeance against those who had wronged or harmed us, we should strive to see what lessons we can usefully learn from the historic, though calamitous and tragic, events of the past four years.
As far as I am concerned, it is to the future— a future which we can make great and glorious by our united action, and invincible benevolence towards one another — that I have dedicated the rest of my life. Under no circumstances will I be drawn into any sterile recriminations about the past which, in any case is gone, irretrievable and irremediable.
During the past two years I have devoted my full time in gaol to an earnest search for solutions to Nigeria’s multitudinous and tantalizing problems. One of my books entitled ‘Thoughts On Nigerian Constitution’, which is devoted to a consideration of our constitutional problems will be published by the Oxford University Press during the first week of October. In approaching our constitutional problems, I had taken pains to study and analyze the constitutional evolution of every country in the world.
I make bold to say — and this will be substantiated by the contents of the book when published — that I did embark on my research with complete scientific objectivity. At the end of it, I was surprised — though pleasantly because of my previous stand in the matter — to be faced with the rationally and scientifically unassailable conclusion that only a truly federal constitution can unite Nigeria and generate harmony amongst its diverse racial and linguistic groups.
Unfortunately, it is not, recognized by the bulk of our people, including the intelligentsia and even some intellectuals, that the making of a constitution is applied political science. At this adolescent stage in the evolution of homo sapiens, it is no longer necessary for political scientists or enlightened constitutional lawyers to grope in the dark in the search of a constitutional formula suitable for our country — or any country for that matter, or apply the rule of thumb to the making of a constitution.
My own study and analysis have led me to the enunciation of certain laws or principles which must be observed in drawing up the constitution of any given country. I express the laws in the following terms:
(1) If a country is unilingual and uni-national, the constitution must be unitary.
(2) If a country is unilingual or bilingual or multilingual, and also consists of communities which, over a period of years, have developed divergent nationalities, the constitution must be federal, and the constituent states must be organized on the dual basis of language and nationality.
(3) If a country is bilingual or multilingual, the constitution must be federal, and the constituent states must be organized on linguistic basis.
(4) Any experiment with a unitary constitution in a bilingual or multilingual or multinational country must fail, in the long run.

I readily, concede that the former constitution had many defects. But federalism is certainly not one of them. It follows, therefore, that a step in the right direction is first of all to recognize the exact ailments of our nation. Once this is done, it should not be too difficult for us to devise appropriate remedies for them. But we must realize above all things else that in approaching our problems, at this juncture in our history, we must eschew any kind of partisanship — be it political or ethnical, and allow our thinking and reasoning to be guided by complete objectivity and rationality. Our hearts too must be ruled by unconquerable goodwill and irrepressible earnestness for Nigeria’s continued oneness. And our aspirations must be unflinchingly directed towards normative social objectives which are scientifically orientated.

In concrete terms, it is my firm belief that until we provide: employment, free education from primary to university level, and health services, for all our citizens, the problem of unity will continue to plague us. And in this connection I hasten to predict that the breaking up of Nigeria into a number of sovereign states will not only do permanent damage to the reputation of contemporary Nigerian leaders, but will usher in terrible disasters which will bedevil us and many generations to come. Fortunately, with truly scientific and illuminated planning, all these social objectives can be ours in the immediate future. My appeal in this connection, therefore, is for unity and scientific planning.

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By adminadmin on November 28, 2015



Aokoya is presumably a Yoruba self-determination group by which definition will be assumed is a promoter of peoples’ right to self-determination. In doing so, it must be able to situate such rights within an existential paradigm of the peoples, in this instance, the Yoruba and Igbo peoples of Nigeria. The Igbo have been demonstrating for the restoration of Biafra, albeit couched under the auspices of having Radio Biafra’s director, Nnamidi Kanu released from detention, while papering over the contents of his radio broadcasts reeking with hate speeches against the Yoruba(and Fulani) as well as advocating war against the Nigerian State; even as the government embarked on a judicial process to prove his innocence or guilt as to any charges leveled against him, these play no part in the demonstrators’ demand for his unconditional release, having dubbed him their own freedom fighter.
Aokoya on its own part, hinged its support for the agitation by saying “ In 1966, Yoruba people were used as canon-fodders in the subjugation of the Igbo people”; this is nothing more than an attempt at befuddling Nigeria’s, hence Yoruba history under the cover of “self-determination” anchored on a complete denial of Yoruba experience thus also calling into question Aokoya’s credibility as a self-determination group. Any quest for self-determination that cannot stand on its own reality is false, all the more so when such a reality negates the quest ab initio, as in the case of the Igbo who have been active contributors to the Nigerian debacle.

The Igbo contributed in no small measure to Nigeria’s afflictions, having been consistent in sustaining Nigeria’s deconstruction through the 1966 illegal transfer of power to the Igbo Ironsi by the Igbo senate president leading directly to Ironsi’s abolition of the Federal Regions; the rejection of Decree 8 by Ojukwu, a decree which all but made a Confederation out of Nigeria through acquiescence to the Aburi Accord; Igbo electoral positions are always consistent with forces aimed at retaining the manifold corruption of the Nigerian State as expressed via the 1979 electoral college, “June 12”, all the post-military elections where the Igbo are always solidly behind the PDP, a clearly anti-progressive, anti-Federalist platform; while there are reports about the Secretary to the Federal Government in the Jonathan Government, an Igbo, ensuring all important positions in the office being held by the Igbo, while the then president himself, Goodluck Jonathan was adopted by the Igbo.

Prior to these, the NCNC allied with the NPC to illegally declare a State of Emergency in the West in 1962; the coalition ensured the creation of the Mid West Region out of the West with the aim of weakening the AG-controlled Western Region. As necessary as the creation of the Mid West Region was, it must be noted that the AG had always advocated the creation of at least three more Regions: the Mid West; Calabar-Ogoja-Rivers and the Middle Belt, for a more sustainable Federation. The NCNC/NPC coalition rejected the COR and Middle Belt, which happened to be in their respective Regions only to go for the Mid West.

With all of these(and more) how a “self-determination group” would define the current agitation as self-determination and worse, ascribe Igbo subjugation to the Yoruba beats the imagination. To be used as cannon-fodders imply a deliberate assault on the Igbo by other Nationalities in Nigeria, or the Nigerian State itself, with the Yoruba being the foot soldiers of such operations and discarded at will, yet this is not borne out by historical evidence.

Yoruba leaders, led by Awo had visited Ojukwu in order to arrive at a political solution outside of war; the Yoruba had successfully negotiated the repatriation of “northern” soldiers from the West; Igbo properties were left untouched by the Yoruba so much so that many Yoruba acted as property caretakers for the Igbo who were able to collect the arrears of their rents on their return. Ojukwu virtually snubbed the Yoruba delegation while his nocturnal visit to Awo was only to confirm Biafra’s readiness to declare secession, telling Awo that there is nothing anyone could do about it. The position remained unchanged even when Awo requested that he should be given two weeks’ notice before commencing any operations. The Awo delegation hardly arrived at Ibadan before the republic of Biafra was declared. Awo’s statement as to “ omission or commission..” was further manipulated to suit Biafran propaganda purposes while shelving the statement’s identification with self-determination, which is that Nigeria cannot be a country on the basis of expulsion/exclusion of another; it has to be either inclusive or non-existent.
At the commencement of the war itself, Biafra surreptitiously invaded the Mid Wester Region which had already declared its neutrality, and where only Igbo officers were in the know of the invasion and for the West, the invading forces only had a Yoruba at the head with the entire fighting force made up of Biafran soldiers with an order to the effect that all of the political and economic decisions to be made in the administration of the West remain with Biafra, an action which also scuttled the repatriation of northern soldiers. All of these are in the public domain and it is expected that a “self-determination group” worth its salt would be able to base its decisions on verifiable data; which calls into question Aokoya’s motivations as well as its worth as a self-determination group.

If self-determination implies the right of a Nationality to formally express her own existence in her own way, the abridgement of such rights must be clearly visible, one way or the other and as has been shown, Aokoya’s claim is not only false, it did not even show any form of abridgement.
Granted that this alone cannot be an impediment to the Igbo right to self-determination, objectively, none of the “majority” Nationalities, (the Tripod), in Nigeria can make any claim for self-determination from Nigeria, if the definition is based on the lack or denial of political/economic and cultural participation to the “group” which is not the case for the “Tripod”; especially for the Igbo and the Hausa-Fulani.

In this respect, it can only follow that agitation for self-determination by the “Tripod” in Nigeria cannot be isolated but must be applicable to all. This also does not imply that one Nationality must be made to wait for the other or that one Nationality’s actions must have the concurrence of the other in order for the agitation to proceed; which is why, for the Yoruba, the agitation for True Federalism had been continuous and consistent, regardless of what the Nigerian Nation State offers.

What is true of one Nationality is also true of the other; for, in more ways than one, every Nationality has a grouse with the Nigerian Nation State such that if any wants to be free from Nigeria, it cannot approbate and reprobate; and when such a Nationality is conspicuously active in the making of the present status, its quest for self-determination will be bereft of equity, which, by definition, nullifies the quest itself; equity being at the heart of self-determination.
The Igbo cannot solely determine the circumstances for her separation from Nigeria, except though force. Other Nationalities must have a say in defining what Nigeria is, or would/would not be, being that the quest for self-determination is a question of, for and about Nigeria itself, which boils down to the Igbo agitation not being a stand-alone. Such a case for self-determination, to be able to stand alone, must be able to show that its grievances are also stand-alone otherwise, the agitation is aimed at something quite different from self-determination.

The Buhari administration has to battle with a fight back from the losers of the 2015 election, not only as electoral losers but also as beneficiaries of the “unregulated” system of graft permeating the entire fabric of the society which, alongside the economic downturn, the Boko Haram insurgency, possible economic sabotage, judicial corruption as well as legislative opportunism in the National Assembly and now with supporters of Biafra surreptitiously steering the agitation towards revisiting the recommendations of the 2014 national conference organized by the losers, show that the aim of the agitation is not self-determination but bringing down the current government with whatever means at their disposal.

The current regime did state, in its Manifesto, that it will restore the “Federal Spirit” through True Federalism and President Buhari, in his Inaugural address did allude to Nigeria’s founding fathers and their achievements, mentioning them by name and these are none other than those who worked for and achieved the Federalism that ushered in Nigeria’s Independence.
Having said that, nothing stops any Nationality from making a case for not wanting to be part of Nigeria under any circumstances, which is precisely why “ooduapathfinder” says the issue of self-determination by any of the “Tripod”, and by extension, other Nationalities, cannot be made in isolation. Doing otherwise, especially by those responsible for bringing the current state of affairs into being go beyond self-determination and places it squarely within the ambit of bringing down the government of the day.

REGIONALISM
Striking the right balance between the local and the central organs of government is one of the keys to a successful federation. The tribulations of Nigeria can in large measure be traced to the steady accumulation of power and resources at the Centre producing, in the process, a winner-takes-all political philosophy. The MNR believes that we should move away from the practice of concurrent jurisdiction as this leads to unnecessary competition between the local and central organs of government. Instead, the underlying principle of a new constitution should be, putting it coarsely, that everything is residual and therefore for the Regions, except to the extent that a subject has been clearly assigned to the Union government. The new Constitution must therefore clearly and definitively set out the matters for which the Union is to be responsible. The government of a multi-nationality Region should stand in the same relation to its component associated territories as the Union government does in relation to the Regions. Thus, as with the Union Government, the principle should be that only those matters, which necessarily have to be conducted at the Centre, should be managed there.
The MNR recommends that the new constitution should provide for each Region to have its own constitution in which the division of responsibilities between the Regional Government and the lower tier administrations will be spelt out. This is to ensure that subject to a set number of mandatory provisions, the Constitution of each nationality will reflect the particular experience, fears and aspirations of the people of that nationality within its own powers and jurisdiction.
UNION INSTITUTIONS
The underlying principle of any new constitution should be that the Centre belongs to all our nationalities, large and small. To avoid a situation where some nationalities see themselves as more belonging or more equal than others, the MNR recommends that the composition of key Union institutions like the Central Bank, the Supreme Court, the Civil Service Commission, the Auditor General’s Office, the Accountant General’s Office, etc should be organised in a way that will ensure that the interests of each Region will be effectively protected there. This requires collegiate offices in which each Region has a seat rather than singular uncompounded offices, which are merely required to take account of the so-called “federal character”.
The MNR recommends that the new constitution should adopt the parliamentary system of government as a more cost effective and inclusive system of government better suited to our ethnic, sub-ethnic and ethical complexity.

The MNR position is being published in The Case for Return to the Parliamentary System of Government, which I hope some of you will read.
The sheer size and resources of Nigeria make it inevitable that our country should have a major profile in international affairs, however undeserving we may be of it on other grounds. However, the size of the country equally means that the task of managing our domestic affairs is a full time occupation. This in our view buttresses the need to vest the duties of Head of State and Chief Executive in different persons. There may be some concern about such a division of responsibilities between two different persons, probably from two different areas, because of the risk of a power struggle between the two personalities. In our view, the scope for such conflict can be adequately contained if the constitution strictly defines the President’s responsibilities. The constitution should, in our view, also ensure that the President is only indirectly elected so that he cannot claim a competitive mandate direct from the people. Our thinking is that the President, as father of the nation should be elected by an Electoral College consisting of the entire National and Regional legislatures in the country.
Consistent with the parliamentary system of government, the Prime Minister should be the leader of the majority party in Parliament.
The MNR recommends a collegiate executive, again based on the parliamentary system of government, to guard against the over-personalisation of the executive power of the head of the Union government. Such an executive may be called the Council of Ministers and consist of one or two ministers from each Region. In this way, we can ensure that the interests and concerns of all the Regions are expressed and taken into account when the Union government formulates policy or takes action. With such a collegiate executive in place, it will be feasible for the office of Prime Minister to be rotated among the Regions so that all nationalities can feel a sense of belonging and of common ownership.
ALTHOUGH Nigeria has two legislative chambers at present at the national level, there is not any real qualitative difference between the two Houses. Rather than each House making a unique contribution to the representation of the people, the members of the House of Representatives and of the Senate have simply duplicated each other.
It is against this background that the MNR recommends that the Second Chamber should be restructured as a House of Nationalities, to serve as the voice of the nationalities that make up the Union of Nigeria. Each Nationality, regardless of its size, should have an equal number of memberships in the House of Nationalities who will be selected by their nationality legislature. The House of Representatives would be the voice of the people of Nigeria as a whole. This unique triangular arrangement would give a voice to all the partners in the Union – a voice to the Regions through the Council of Ministers, a voice to the Nationalities through the House of Nationalities, and a voice to the individual citizens through the House of Representatives.
One of the weaknesses of Nigeria’s post-military democratic experience has been the lack of real representation. No sooner are legislators elected than many of them lose sight of their duty to faithfully represent their constituents. In our view, the best way to keep the legislators in touch with their constituents is to require them to renew their authority at more frequent intervals. For this reason, we recommend the shortest practicable term of office for members of the House of Representatives, say three years maximum. In future years, once a culture of representative politics has set in properly, the term of office can always be extended by amendments to the constitution. A longer term of office is appropriate for members of the House of Nationalities who are principally concerned with
macro issues affecting their respective nationalities.
The law of diminishing returns applies to lawmakers as it does to other aspects of life, so that every additional member of the House of Assembly does not necessarily translate into an equivalent addition to the quality of legislation and deliberations. We therefore recommend that the new Constitution should provide for the smallest possible number of members for the assembly consistent with fair representation. This would encourage quality of selection, which should enhance the quality of deliberations. We would suggest no more than 240 members for the House of Representatives. The membership of the House of Nationalities should be dictated by the number of established nationalities.
NATIONAL RESOURCES
Ownership and exploitation of the country’s natural resources have contributed a great deal to Nigeria’s political problems, especially in the oil age. The MNR advocates that the strict legal ownership which rests with the oil producing nationalities needs to be balanced with the equitable interests that have come into being by virtue of our co-existence. As a means of addressing the issue of the diversity of interests in such resources, and with a view to ensuring that all interests, direct and indirect, are duly provided for, the MNR proposes that a distinction should be drawn between such resources, as follows: (a) resources on or under the land of a nationality, (b) resources in what may be considered a nationality’s waters, and (c) resources in the country’s international waters. In the first case, we would revert to the basic principle that the owner of land owns all that is on the land and beneath it. Any new constitution must not only recognise the exclusive claim of the nationality to those resources, but it must also provide for the owners of the land, whether individual, family or community, to receive fair compensation for their good fortune and to participate in the fruits of the exploits…..(CONCLUDED)

NATIONAL FEDERAL STRUCTURE
The membership of the European Union stands at present at 15 nations. Each of the nations is a mature democracy with an enviable track record in leadership and governance. Nigeria, it has been said, is made up of more than 100 nations, none of which has any substantial experience in Western style democracy. Furthermore, the total record of leadership and governance in Nigeria has been nothing short of tragic.
It is these realities, combined with bitter experience over the four decades since independence, that have informed our view in MNR that the key to peace and progress in Nigeria is not the continuous search for an ethnic superman who can manipulate the country’s existing constitutional structure but instead, to engineer a superstructure that can be effectively managed by the people’s representatives. Our original position, first argued in 1991, was that Nigeria should be structured into eight regions. Our thinking on this issue has broadened, taking account of the events which have since occurred in Nigeria and in the world at large in the context of peaceful co-existence between peoples of different races and ethnic groups. We now propose therefore that a new Constitution for Nigeria should reflect a Federation of Constituent Nationalities within which the nationalities should be grouped into Regions, and that each Region should itself be a federation of sub-nationalities or a federation of smaller nationalities. Where a region consists of a single nationality, as in Yorubaland or Igboland, its federating units should be its contiguous component sub-nationalities. Where a region consists of multiple nationalities as in the Middle Belt areas, its federating units will be the contiguous component nationalities. Under these proposals, a nationality or sub-nationality cannot form, or be part of, more than one Region. Under our proposals, the federating sub-nationalities of a mono-nationality region should be designated “provinces” and should have specified territorial powers greater than those of local government councils but less than those of a Region. The federating nationalities of a multi-nationality region should be designated “Associated Territories” and should each have (or they may choose to share with neighboring nationalities) autonomy in a range of subjects such as chieftaincy, cultural affairs, primary education, language development.
On the basis of these principles and criteria, the MNR suggests that the starting number of regions, each of which should itself be a federation, should be 18, of which 12 will be mono-nationality regions, which should be:
1. Ibibio Federation,
2. Ijaw Federation,
3. Igbo Federation,
4. Urhobo Federation,
5. Edo Federation,
6. Yoruba Federation,
7. Nupe Federation,
8. Tiv Federation,
9. Gbagyi Federation,
10. Hausa Federation,
11. Fulah Federation and
12. Kanuri Federation.
The other six (6) of the Regions should be multi-nationality regions, as follows:
(i) A federation comprising minority nationalities in Cross River and Akwa Ibom states (i.e. Eket, Annang, Oron, Ibeno, Efik, Ejagbam, Korop, Boki, Bakwara, Yakurr, Yala).
(ii) A federation comprising the minority nationalities in Rivers and Bayelsa states (i.e. Ikwerre, Etchei, Ekpeeye, Engeni, Ogba, Eleme, Ndoni, Ogoni, and Andoni).
(iii) A federation comprising the minority nationalities in Delta State (i.e. Ika, Ndokwa, Warri, Isoko).
(iv) A federation comprising the minority nationalities in West Middle Belt, i.e. Zuru, Kambari, Bariba, Bussa, Karekare, Ngizim, Angamo, Bola, Funne, etc.
(v) A federation comprising the minority nationalities in Central Middle Belt, i.e.: (a) Ebira Group: Ebira, Uku, Ebira-Ugu, Ebira-Panda, Etuno-Igarra, Ebira Mozun, Bassa-Nge. (b) Igala Group (c) Upper Benue Group: Alago Eggon, Gwandara, Mada, Kakanda, Mighili, Bassa-Komu, Ninzom, Arum etc.
(vi) A federation comprising the minority nationalities in East Middle Belt, i.e. (a) Plateau Group: Ngas, Berom, Afezere Taroh, Goemai, Nmavo – Jukun, Amu, Pyem, Youn etc. (b) Taraba Group: Chamba, Jukun, Kuteb, Mambila, Kona, Kunni, Kaanab, Ndoro, Abakwa, Mumuye, Yububen, etc. (c) Savanna Group: Bura, Tangale – Waja, Bachama, Manghi, Kilba, Yungu, Mwanna, Bwazza Mbula, etc.
The underlying principle of the suggested structure is that all the nationalities, regardless of size, are autonomous federating units of equal value to the whole. In this spirit, the divide between the nationalities suggested to be Regions in their own right and those which are suggested should co-operate to form a Region, is to be clearly established by nothing more than pragmatism, having regard to the tasks, responsibilities and resources expected of a Region.
FUNDAMENTAL RETHINKING
A good constitution must be designed to cope with the dynamics of human relationships. It must have in-built shock absorbers, since the aspirations of nationalities are not static. To guard against our past experience of lurching from one constitutional crisis to another, the design of the new constitution must be flexible enough to accommodate new aspirations of nationalities and Regions without upsetting the balance of the whole structure and prospects for stability.
In the course of time, nationalities starting out as parts of a Region may wish to be Regions in their own right, having become capable of so qualifying. The constitution must allow for such development. The MNR therefore proposes dual criteria for the creation or recognition of a Region, viz:
(i) Adequate Economic Resources, i.e. viability of the area concerned having regard to the scope of Regional powers and functions, which should correspond with the powers and functions of Regions under the 1951 Constitution; and
(ii) Adequate Human Resources, i.e. combined population of not less than one million people living within the area concerned.
These combined criteria underline our belief that neither population nor resources should be the sole determining factor as to which nationalities can by themselves constitute Regions.
SECESSION
Given our traumatic experience, I suggest that the following question is pertinent: should the constitution allow for the ultimate change of secession? In the past, this issue has been treated as a taboo topic but the absence of thought and debate on the matter is a poor substitute for judgement. Obasanjo has helpfully opened discussion on it in his book “This Animal Called Man“, wherein he stated that any future constitution of Nigeria must provide for a right of secession. This is but a recognition of the reality that, short of brute force, the only way that different nationalities can be kept together in the long term is by their will to stay together.
Our expectation is that in the new Union of Nigeria in which all nationalities are treated fairly, no nationality will have cause to want to secede. It is nevertheless prudent that provision should be made for this possibility, however remote it may seem at present. The peace and stability of the departing nationality, no less than the peace and stability of the surviving members of the Union, would require that a pre-agreed peaceful procedure should be followed. The procedure, which the MNR suggests is one that would ensure that the initiative has genuine popular support within the nationality concerned. This can be ascertained by a two-thirds majority vote of the legislature of the territory concerned as well as by a two-thirds majority vote in a referendum of the people of the territory concerned. The MNR also recommends that there should be a three-year interval between the initial formal proposal in the legislature concerned and the referendum of the people concerned. This is to allow adequate time for proper reflection, for the calming of nerves, and for alternatives and compromises to be considered and worked out. However, since under our proposals the nationalities through their freely chosen representatives at a National Conference will have adopted the Union arrangements, it would not be unreasonable for the constitution to provide that a period of fifteen (15) years should elapse after the adoption of the Union arrangements before any new Region can be created or any democratic secession moves mature.(TO BE CONTINUED)

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By adminadmin on November 21, 2015



The alarm bells rung by the Nigerian Governors’ Forum as to their inability to sustain the current wage structure in spite of the recent assistance rendered by the Federal Government raises the specter of Nigeria becoming an economic basket case relying on extractive commodity sales for sustenance more so when the state and central bureaucracies, along with the political structures take up a chunk of the proceeds. A Nation-State predicated upon this type of structure cannot become competitive in the global economy and therefore cannot thrive since the “source” of money, as capital, is not based on any productive force. Thus, when the Government is talking about reducing the cost of governance via wage cuts, it is not even scratching the surface. The success of desegregation in the United States was a function of its economic impossibility ably demonstrated through the famous Brown vs Board of Education lawsuit, influencing, politically, the rise of the civil rights movement heralding both the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, while the same was also true of the abolition of Trans-Atlantic slavery, where its continuation became more and more unprofitable due in large part to less reliance on slave labor for industrialization, resulting in a more formal political control of former slave territories; yet continuation of such control became economically unprofitable hence a “new form” was found in granting a largely “flag” independence while maintaining close marking of the economies of the newly independent countries. Nigeria itself was the manifestation of a political structure built on an economic enterprise; first as protectorates and later as an amalgamated entity, hence it cannot afford to spite history, where the continued retention of the economic basis of the present structure, a negation of the independence economic paradigm, is not sustainable and which should make this the time for the Central Government to begin moves to boldly address these issues, which among others, would lead to a fundamental shift of the structures of governance. It is in this context that “ooduapathfinder” adopts in totality and here presents, unedited, Chief Anthony Enahoro’s 2002 Lecture on The National Question at the Yoruba Tennis Club as its Editorial for this week. We believe that the thematic underpinnings and prescriptions enunciated in this Lecture will serve as a very good Working Document for the economic and political Reformation of Nigeria. (Editors)


PRESIDENT Olusegun Obasanjo was reported in the media to have stated that he is not opposed to a National Conference provided it is constructive and contributes to national solidarity. Our organization, the Movement for National Reformation (MNR), reacted by publicly welcoming the president’s statement as a positive contribution to the national debate on the expediency of a national conference in favor of which popular public demand has refused to go away or to abate, in spite of all efforts to misinterpret and undermine it.

Our discussion this afternoon can be reduced to a simple question: what do we expect a National Conference to produce? Before endeavoring to answer the question, I ask your indulgence to quote at some length from an address, which I gave seven months ago to the Steering Committee of the MNR, because it is at the very heart of our subject today.
I said them: “I invite you to reflect on the fact, which I suggest is abundantly clear, that one of the most challenging determinants of the crises on the international scene as well as on the domestic scene today, is ethnic diversity. The challenge of ethnic diversity – in some cases even strong sub-ethnic diversity within an integral ethnic group – is a major ingredient in crises in Africa and abroad today. Unfortunately, it is vigorously at work in Nigeria, hence we must recognize that stability, progress and the prospects of democracy and equitocracy in our country – indeed the very survival of Nigeria depends on positive resolution of our ethnic differences. “I suggest that the solution to our crisis cannot be to ignore it or to pretend that the diversity does not exist or to expect it to disappear without attention and purposeful treatment. We must boldly acknowledge the existence of our diversity and seek equitocratic togetherness from it. How may we describe, or what may we call, this positive approach to our common existence? I would call it “constructive diversity.” If our undoubted diversity can, by dialogue and common action, be made creative, positive and constructive instead of barren, negative and destructive, and if our nationalities can freely contribute their individual quota to our common treasure house of creativity, imagine our collective potential as one country. We could abolish poverty among our people and we could chart a course for the democratization and modernization of Nigeria.
“This is the challenge which the 21st Century imposes on us and on Nigeria’s leaders. And this is the fundamental purpose of the National Conference, which we have urged for many years and which has now caught the imagination of the populace (and, we are delighted to note, the President himself). The cardinal rationale of a national conference, as I see it, would be to enable us come to terms with our diversity and turn it to our collective advantage. I repeat that this is what I would call “constructive diversity”.
“I firmly believe that the diversity among the nationalities of Nigeria can be reconciled to realize our dream of a voluntary Federal Union of Indigenous Peoples to build the greatest country in Africa and to promote perhaps the greatest internationality enterprise of the Black Race. This is our positive rationale for a national conference.”
Where are we to begin this historic, awesome and inspiring task? The first undertaking, the take-off point, must be to produce a peoples’ constitution through a national conference and a national referendum. And what should the new constitution espouse and contain? I invite you: let us apply our minds to some key issues and considerations in the new constitution – making enterprise.
The foundation of civil society is the compact or constitution made by the people as to the basis on which they agree to live together. It really does not matter much whether the compact is written as in the USA or unwritten as in the UK; what matters is that a compact should exist. A constitution necessarily reflects the experience, anxieties and aspirations of its makers, and the durability of a constitution is a function of the extent to which the people have been involved in its making.
Since independence on October 1st, 1960, we have had no fewer than six constitutional reviews and there is another in progress in respect of the 1999 constitution, which you will recall was a ghost constitution when it came into effect. Our constitutions have not, to date, endured not only because they were successively abrogated by military regimes but also because, among other reasons, they were not the handiwork of the people. The mechanical preamble of “we the people” cannot disguise the true identity of the originators of these constitutions. The constitutions have merely been the expression of the fears and aspirations of the authors and promoters, whether these were the colonial rulers, military dictators or ruling cliques. Our movement insists that Nigeria needs a constitution that will endure, one that will reflect the aggregate aspirations and experiences of all the Nigerian people. We are of the view that such a constitution cannot be produced without the involvement of the people, hence the MNR has always stressed that this should be accomplished through the instrumentality of a National Conference composed of representatives of the peoples of Nigeria freely chosen by the people themselves for the purpose. Happily, the question today is no longer whether or if a National Conference will be held, but when, and what are the issues to which the conference should address itself? We may not know when, but I can at least take the opportunity of today’s occasion to outline our views on some of the key issues and considerations for an enduring constitution for the country, which we suggest should now be called the “Union of Nigeria”, at least to signify a break from the past.
THE NATIONALITIES
The failure of Nigeria so far may be attributed in great part to the perennial tensions and conflicts among its nationalities, resulting from mutual insecurity, poverty, jealousies and fears. Rather than manage primordial identities, which are our nationalities, positively, successive constitutions have studiously and dismissively ignored them. But as disillusionment with the Nigeria project has grown, it is to these very celebrated identities that the people have begun to look for refuge. Thus the nationalities that the colonial invaders thought they had buried have forced themselves back into our collective consciousness. No amount of blank repetitions of hollow appeals to unity can change those realities. The latest confirmation - and I suggest it is compelling evidence – of the validity of these postulations is the current vigorous campaigns by diverse ethnic groups that they should produce the successor to General Obasanjo as President of Nigeria. You must surely have noted that the issues in these campaigns is not the quality or competence or performance record or beliefs of General Obasanjo or his successor, but quite simply the place of origin of the successor. Arewa, the Middle Belt, Ndigbo, the South amalgam and others each wants General Obasanjo’s successor or rival to come from their own ethnic group or areas whether or not he or she is the best available candidate for the post. It is thus obvious that whether or not the force of nationality identities within Nigeria can be contained, it can no longer be ignored. We in the MNR are of the view that unless a meaningful role for our nationalities is defined within the Nigerian body politic, the nationalities will define a role for themselves, and the dimensions of that role may not be readily predictable or containable.
The MNR proposal is that any new constitution for Nigeria must recognize the nationalities that preceded the formation of Nigeria by British imperialists as the true partners and stakeholders in the Union of Nigeria. The present artificial, arbitrary and predominantly unviable states are a poor substitute for the natural, historic and established nationalities as a basis and base on which to build a strong and dynamic Nigerian federation.
The MNR position, which is informed by the experience of successful multi-nationality states like the United Kingdom and increasingly the European Union, as against unsuccessful ones like Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, is that the ancient identities that are God-given cannot, need not and should not be destroyed or wished away simply because we have acquired additional identities as “Nigerians” or “Africans.” The two identities can and should live together and prosper together.
CONSTRUCTIVE DIVERSITY
Our quest for national unity has been conducted thus far at the expense of our diversity. This need not and indeed should not continue to be so. It is not necessary, nor is it sensible, that we should abandon our God-given millennial identities and heritage in order to be considered patriotic Nigerians. The new Constitution for Nigeria should therefore make it clear that citizenship of the Union of Nigeria is additional to membership of its component nationalities and not a replacement for those natural allegiances. In this way, we would fall into line with countries like the United Kingdom, where a man is not less British and loyal to Britain by reason of being English, Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish.
To symbolize the new approach of managing rather than suppressing our diversity, the MNR recommends that a new Constitution for Nigeria should allow the Region to have its own flag in addition to the Union Flag. Again we can point to the example of the nations of Britain with her distinct and distinctive English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish flags, but who can also enthusiastically fly the Union Jack, which in fact combines the other flags. Similarly, the nations of Europe fly their national flags as Britons, French, Germans, Italians etc. alongside the distinctive European flag. We all know that in the USA, each state has its flag and the union has the famous Stars and Stripes. In Nigeria, all we need do is to provide that regional flags should also bear a common union emblem, to reinforce the message of our “unity in diversity.”
LANGUAGES
The nearest that previous constitutions have come to recognition of our diversity is to provide for Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba to be companion official languages alongside English. This discrimination between nationalities on the sole basis of population is not acceptable to the rest of Nigeria and is not in the long term defensible other than by force of arms.
Some 12 years ago, in a speech at the University of Benin, I said: “All the languages of Nigeria have equal validity or if you please equal lack of validity, before the law and under the constitution. No linguistic group has the right – the moral or constitutional right – to impose its language on any other linguistic group in the country. One might even go further to say that no collection of linguistic groups have the collective right to impose their separate languages on the other linguistic groups in the country. Any attempt to impose any particular tribal languages or languages on the country is fraught with grave danger for the peaceful development of the Federation. Government should not confer on some Nigerian languages the potentiality of instruments of domination over other Nigerian groups. Over one billion people speak Chinese and nearly one billion people speak Hindi, yet it has never been suggested that these two mass languages should therefore be imposed on the rest of world or that UNESCO should promote them as world languages in preference to English or Arabic.” I have had no cause to change these views.
Consistent with the principle of equity between the nationalities, the MNR recommends that a new constitution should provide for English, as a neutral language, to be retained as the principal official language of Union institutions and the constitution should require all Union Government publications to be made in the English language and translated into indigenous languages. While at the union level, it can be fairly held that language is no more than a means of communication between the diverse nationalities, so that any language will do, it must be realized that at the level of the nationalities, language is a way of life in the long run and we cannot develop ourselves or earn the respect of others by building our life on another country’s language.
In fact, we question whether meaningful in-depth development can take place in the long term other than on the basis of our own languages. Up till, now, education conducted in the English language has remained the privilege of the few rather than the right of the many. While English, French, German, Japanese and Korean children receive their education in the language that they speak and learn almost from the womb, our children are obliged to become linguists first before they can even begin the learning process. Our home grown literary industry is virtually still born, as few of our writers can attain the level of proficiency in the English language to effectively compete with those for whom English is their mother tongue.
Towards the revival and development of our indigenous languages, the MNR recommends that a new constitution for Nigeria should provide that at the level of the Regions, the indigenous languages should be used as the official language and for all government publications to be made basically in the indigenous languages, with the addition of English to facilitate countrywide and broader understanding.(TO BE CONTINUED)

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By adminadmin on November 14,2015


Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, in his speech to the Nigerian Legislative Council, had this to say: “we shall demand our rights when the time is ripe. We do want independence and we shall fight for it if necessary, but I should like to make it clear to you that if the British quit Nigeria now at this stage, the Northern people would continue their interrupted conquest to the sea.”
Nnamidi Azikiwe, as President of the Igbo State Union, said “it would appear that the gods of Africa has specially created the Igbo nation to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of the ages”, while another prominent Igbo, Charles Daddy Onyeama was the same time saying that “the domination of Nigeria, indeed Africa, by the Ibo race was a question of time”.
Oloye Obafemi Awolowo, on his part, had this to say: “Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no Nigerian in the same sense as there are English, Welsh or French. The word Nigeria is merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria from those who do not.”
These statements, made around the same time, 1947-1949, in the heat of the push towards independence formed the foundational and continuous story of Nigeria where some parts would be thinking of reserving for themselves the right of a conquest, either by sheer force of arms or by a supposed divine mandate.
These historical trajectories had been at the expense of the Yoruba, who appeared to be the target of these adventures especially with the alliance between the aspiring domineers, such that the breakdown of the alliance in 1966 and its attendant orgy of violence against each other did not prevent further cementing of the alliance in peacetime. Having gone through fifty years of this alliance in one form or the other, everyone now realizes that the resultant political space is unsustainable.
Nowhere was this manifested more than our most recent past with the economic meltdown in the states and in the federal government itself; institutions that had been surviving solely on “allocations” from the federal government even as some claims were made as to increases in what is called internally generated revenue. The cost of running these bureaucracies at the state and central levels go over seventy percent of the total income of the entire country thus leaving no room for any capital for any form of development.
Yet, for the Yoruba Nation, our post-colonial experience showed that such a bureaucracy is antithetical to development as all it took us was in being rooted in a socio-cultural ethos based on the need to situate the Yoruba anti-colonial experience within the ambit of the development of “man”, which was why Federalism took root in Yorubaland and had since been the bedrock of our praxis.
This is borne from an appreciation by Oloye Obafemi Awolowo, not only because he was the major proponent of Constitutional re-engineering of Africa based on the recognition of the African to influence the trajectory of the world based on his inherent ability as a human being to determine his relationship within as well as without, which all boils down to the meaning of a Constitution as the formal establishment of a social, economic and political relationship between different people.
In his Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lecture delivered in 1976, he had this to say about Constitutions:
“ [b]Constitution-making has, since independence, become a past-time in all parts of Africa. As soon as a new set of people accede to power, they find some pretext for introducing a new Constitution. Be that as it may, the point I wish to make here is that none of the Constitutions operating in Africa today are likely to endure beyond the tenure of those who make them and hand them down to the people, because they are fundamentally unsuitable in character for a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual or multi-national State.
I have made a long and careful study of the problems involved in Constitution-making and, as a result, I have certain definite principles. Time does not permit me, in this lecture, to set out the theoretical and empirical bases for the principles which I am going to state presently. But if I may say so, without appearing immodest, I would refer those who are interested to two of my books entitled “thoughts on the Nigerian Constitution and the People’s republic which contain a full exposition of the said principles.
Of all the 189 countries in the world, twenty have Federal Constitutions and the remaining 169 have Unitary Constitutions. The twenty Federal States have a population of 2400million, that is approximately two-thirds of the entire population of the world and as far as is known, in spite of occasional social upheavals in some of them, th4e character of their Constitutions, together with the basic provisions thereof, has endured because it is suitable for their respective peculiar conditions.
I will now state the principles which I have evolved and relate each of them, as appropriate, to the twenty Federal countries and to other multi-lingual States with Unitary Constitutions. They are as follows:
(1) If a country is unilingual and uni-national, the Constitution must be unitary. Examples are: France, Italy, Portugal, Poland and Greece, among others, which are unilingual and have always had Unitary Constitutions.
(2) If a country is uni-lingual or bi-lingual or multi-lingual and also consists of communities, which, though belonging to the same nation or linguistic group, have, over a period of years, developed some important cultural divergences as well as autonomous geographical separateness, the Constitution must be Federal, and the constituent States must be organized on the dual basis of Language and geographical separateness. Examples are: USA, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Indonesia, the Federation of South Arabia, Australia, Austria, the two Germanys and Switzerland.
(3) If a country is bi-lingual or multi-lingual, the Constitution must be Federal, and the constituent States must be organized on a linguistic basis. Examples are: Canada, Mexico, Burma, China, India, Malaysia, Czechoslovakia, the USSR and Yugoslavia.
(4) Any experiment with a Unitary Constitution in a bi-lingual or multi-lingual country must fail, in the long run. Examples are the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Belgium, Spain, Sri Lanka and Cyprus, all of which have, for some time, been experiencing incessant turmoil and violence because, though they are either bi-lingual or multi-lingual, yet they stubbornly insist on operating a Unitary Constitution.
If the vast majority of mankind, among them the USA, the USSR, China—the three super powers-and India—the harbinger of freedom from colonial rule—if all these countries, for what I sincerely think are very sound reasons, consider a certain form of Constitution suitable for some specified set of circumstances and adopt such a form of Constitution, African leaders would do well to learn from them and not follow the erring ways of Britain, Spain and others who have refused to learn, and are right now suffering the agonies of their errors. But before proceeding to learn, African leaders should endeavor to appreciate the true meanings of terms like Clan, Tribe and Ethnic or Linguistic or National Group, and the difference between tribalism and ethnicism. For it is not in a chemical laboratory alone that wrong labelling could lead to serious disaster and death. It could do so too in politics. The only difference is that in the former case, disaster is instant, whilst in the latter, it tends to be insidious and delayed.
If our leaders and all of us observe the principles enunciated above, it will be the easiest thing for us to fashion, for Africa’s multi-lingual States, a Constitution which will endure in its character and eliminate ab initio, the tendency to future secessionist agitation, because it preserves the pre-colonial co-eval status of each of the constituent ethnic or linguistic units, and allays the fears of minority groups.”
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The above would be the further concretization of his 1945 statement which manifested in the quest for Federalism to which it appears everyone has now subscribed, one way or the other, even as secessionist tendencies also thrive. This is exactly the reason why Nigeria is presently in a position to set an example for the rest of Africa in a fundamental manner and the Yoruba have a lot of responsibility in this regard.
Such responsibility hangs on, among others, creating a pathway for its realization. Nigeria has had so many conferences whose reports have not seen the light of day such that aspiring or advocating for another will be a waste of time as well as an unnecessary ritual. Yet, the only way the aspirations of a people can be decided is through such a Conference or Convention, but now anchored on a Referendum among the various peoples simply because of the multi-lingual, multi-cultural composition of Nigeria itself.
This is all the more urgent considering the 2015 election experience and whose replication in 2019 is just around the corner. The economic meltdown and the corruption associated with it alongside the attempts at truncating the legal means of tackling corruption will leave no room for any form of radical transformation of the economy that will be needed to check the economic drift, hence the necessity to arrest this situation from its foundation—the political structure. The Yoruba Nation can begin this process by calling on the Attorney General of the Federation to hearken to this necessity based on his own convictions on Constitutional imperatives.

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By adminadmin on November 7, 2015

The “resolution” of Afenifere leadership crisis has not resolved the initial question that brought it about, to wit: the organization has derailed, according to Chief Fasoranti. So then, aside from the razzmatazz accompanying the resignation itself, the issue is, derailed from what?
The Action Group’s message of “freedom for all, life more abundant” was literally translated as Afenifere, hence, at birth, Afenifere was not an “organization” with its own structures, leadership, strategy and tactics but a political slogan espousing the social democratic preference of the Action Group thus enabling Yoruba people key into the philosophy.
Afenifere became an “organization” when Yoruba patriots met in Owo in 1994 to determine the best route for Yoruba “June 12″ resistance as well as the Sanni Abacha military regime when Afenifere was chosen as the name for a special purpose vehicle to fight the annulment thus occupying the political space against that military regime by assuming leadership of the entire process and clothing itself in progressive robes.
This became at once a solution as well as a problem; solution in the sense that it played its resistance role more or less well; a problem in the sense that it saw itself as a permanent political force capable of embarking on the emerging electoral role that succeeded the military regime. The manifestation of this problematic led to the organization’s leadership confusing its origin as a philosophy with its practice as a political organization. Even if it is conceded that an organization could take its philosophy as its formal identity, such an attempt must be clear as to its direction, especially regarding its leadership; for it is political opportunism to have a social democratic philosophy anchored by leaders whose political praxis is its exact opposite, such that even if membership could be loose and while political electoral platforms may accommodate different tendencies, contrary philosophical mindsets, occupying leadership positions, would only turn the organization into its opposite.
Afenifere is symptomatic of this problematic by allowing all manners of political philosophies to infest its leadership, manifested by parading as AD on the one hand while accepting PDP partisans as its leaders on the other, even when it was obvious that the PDP made no secret of its intention to neutralize the AD as a political force in Yorubaland.
The question left unanswered by Afenifere during this time was how such an entity could manifest its “freedom for all, life more abundant” when one side of its leadership, with direct access to central power was bent on destroying the other side without control of political power, in and of itself; meaning, the only way this could be achieved would be the negation of the AD utilizing PDP’s central powers. This ordinarily ought to be a no brainer.
In 2003, hardly a year after Afenifere became an all-party affair, the AD was in tatters save for the heroic stand taken by the Lagos Chapter. The bulk of Afenifere leaders pitched their tent with the PDP through its support for Obasanjo’s second term efforts explained away as their acceptance of Obasanjo’s promise to “restructure” Nigeria, in spite of the warnings from the Lagos Chapter. Of course, Obasanjo’s attempt at “restructuring” ended up as an open attempt at tenure elongation but the damage had been done. Afenifere’s continued reliance on promises enabled it to accommodate Jonathan’s conference even when it was mooted only on the eve of the 2015 elections, which was why its report, diametrically opposite what the Yoruba had already agreed upon and christened the “Yoruba Agenda”, finally exposed Afenifere as an opportunist organization.
Thus, in two major historical epochs, Afenifere, as an organization, had not only failed to live up to its assumed philosophy, it has gone ahead to represent the exact opposite of that philosophy based on a rationale of recognizing the necessity for a political platform necessary for its actualization.
The recognition made it fall far short of its proclaimed intentions, for, in both instances, it was embedded in a political platform diametrically opposite its intended goal, all the more so when the leadership had been forewarned about Obasanjo’s aim of neutralizing Regional Ethno-National centers of power. Obasanjo and Jonathan, both of the PDP had no cause to hide their primary aim of simply retaining power via the instrumentality of imposing PDP on Yorubaland by any means necessary, hence Obasanjo’s “do or die” and Jonathan’s dollar rain, where the thrust of the will of the people, electorally through their democratic choice and “socio-culturally” through the “Yoruba Agenda”, played no part and was jettisoned, pre and post conference with the insistence on the implementation of the reports becoming an open repudiation of the Agenda itself.
Granted Nigeria’s post-1966 political structures leave no room for the expression of particular Ethno-National interests thus leaving the field wide open for various “socio-cultural” organizations, it becomes imperative for such organizations to push for the realization of its expressions as a matter of course within extant political formations, even as political parties usually found ways of sidestepping this problematic by resorting to selling themselves to the Nationality only in the very narrowest of terms; in Afenifere’s case, the Jonathan Conference and its recommendations which various Yoruba commentators, including “ooduapathfinder”, have critiqued as being not in any way near True Federalism.
For the APC, it found it necessary to put the pursuit and attainment of True Federalism into its Party Manifesto and President Buhari’s inaugural speech dwelt on the achievements recorded by Nigeria during its Federalist years, mentioning the civilian leaders who made this possible, by name, all the more so when, for Yorubaland, the APC is the direct successor to the AG/UPN/AD/AC/ACN.
Considering the existence of other non-Afenifere “socio-cultural” groups, it is true that a pan-Nigerian political party may not be able to articulate a Nationality-specific agenda but it is also true that Nigeria’s political reality is Nationality-specific, hence, any “socio-cultural” organization must be able to articulate its Nationality-specific partisan political choices, otherwise, its own aims will become dependent on “promises” a la Obasanjo and Jonathan.
Any “socio-cultural” organization must therefore be able to formally operate as a “pressure group” within that party. This formal relationship is the only guarantee of its being able to playing its role as a pressure group, even if it can also be said that the general Ethno-Cultural consciousness, by itself, could become such a basis and able to influence party policies in such direction by its mere existence.
A “general” Ethno-Cultural consciousness manifesting as a pressure group is by definition, atomized and ultimately leads to all sorts of manipulations and necessary and unnecessary ambitions with a facile attachment to “democracy” especially when the political party itself would be reeling under its own battle for political survival, hence a “generalized Ethno-Cultural consciousness” would amount to nothing, as a pressure group, where such slogans as, for example, “many pathways converge towards a goal” or “our pursuit need not be unidirectional” popular within the Yoruba, become an intended or unintended excuse for disarming the focus on achieving the aims of the Nationality through the electoral process as it reels under the yoke of party survivalism.
The Egbe Omo Oduduwa found itself in this same problematic both at the time of the formation of the AG as well the period of the elections into the Western Region House of Assembly. Even as the political circumstances are now quite different, the historical import is the same.
The Action Group, evolving as a pan-Nigerian political Party, enjoyed maximum support from the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, not because the AG was founded by the Egbe’s principal leaders, but in spite of it; for the Egbe initially wanted to establish itself as a political party but eventually decided to remain in its “cultural” mode at the same time declaring that its support for any political party whose program appealed to it. Of course there was no other party fulfilling this condition except the Action Group. The Egbe’s strategy thus lay in the synergy between its “cultural” and political preferences leading to the creation of the political atmosphere necessary for the realization of its cultural goals without relying on the “promises” from any individual but as an expression of the belief in the political party itself as a reflection of its own strength. In today’s circumstance, no “socio-cultural” organization can afford to strategize less.

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By adminadmin on October 31, 2015


The preamble to the 1999 Constitution says: “We the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, having firmly and solemnly resolve, to live in unity and harmony as one indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation under God, dedicated to the promotion of inter-African solidarity, world peace, international co-operation and understanding and to provide for a Constitution for the purpose of promoting the good government and welfare of all persons in our country, on the principles of freedom, equality and justice, and for the purpose of consolidating the unity of our people, do hereby make, enact and give to ourselves the following Constitution….”
If, in legal terms, this Preamble does not, by itself, grant any powers and rights not specified in the Constitution, it cannot itself, being a statement of the principles in this Constitution, be based on a false premise. That such a premise as “We The People” is false implies that the entire principles, powers and rights it purports to embody are also false since “We, The People” had no hand in its making, directly or indirectly, as it was a product of military fiat which was not acting and did not act on behalf of “We, The People”, even as, by so doing, the producers of this Constitution unwittingly affirmed the Peoples’ sovereignty. This false preamble only means, on the one hand, not binding on “We, The People” on whose behalf such an assumption was made, and on the other, “We, The People” need to exercise our right to correct this anomaly by ensuring that the Constitution is indeed a product of “We, The People”, the only guarantee of its effectiveness.
As such authority was not delegated to the military, it also, at the same time, implies that, at any and all times, only “We, The People” have the power and the right to make, amend or change the Constitution, partially or in its entirety and such powers and rights cannot be circumscribed by whatever provisions contained therein once the “We, The People”, on our own initiative, decide to express ourselves and make any changes, to the extent of overriding whatever provisions that had been provided for any changes at any time, based on the exclusivity of the rights of “We, The People” to always have the ability and the need to make such decisions, partially or wholly, and at any point in time, thus voiding all the two-thirds of states and National Assembly provisions for its amendment.
Nigeria has witnessed the violation of this 1999 Constitution in various forms by different arms of government characterized by official impunity with no consequences, since products of the Constitution itself and the Laws derived therefrom, are not organic expression of the “We, The People’s” sociology, morality and ethics. The first line of obedience is on the morality and ethics of a Nation or People which, ab initio, influences individual and social behaviors before the application of the letters of the law. Thus, a Yoruba, for example, inherently knows certain unacceptable forms of private or public behavior, products of family and/or community upbringing, the violation of which not only imposes social and cultural sanctions but also now sanctioned by Constitutional legalisms. Thus, a “We, The People” based Constitution reinforces our cultural values as against the heavy pressure of negation from both our colonial past as well as our post-colonial present which is slowly turning us into human beings living outside the context of our God given existential reality.
This is all the more so when the same preamble defines Nigeria as an “indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation under God”, thus ensuring the Constitution being consistent with what we know as God’s prescriptions for Nations; otherwise, the preamble would also fail the “God Test”, for if God’s Sovereignty is accepted as it is in this preamble, it follows that we must accept the cultural essence of humankind as created by God. The “works of man” as in the post-colonial state, remain just that and cannot be substituted and turned into “works of God”, for the work of God in “man” recognizes the cultural being upon which “man” is to reciprocate by recognizing God’s Sovereignty in his or her affairs. To be “under God” therefore means that all of us must exist in and exhibit our God-created essence and our having to live together, “under God” cannot be based on the negation of such essence, otherwise, such a negation already denies the Sovereignty of God who created them. To avoid this, live together and positively influence each other, for the good of each other, becomes a human political construct, which in our case, expresses itself as Federalism where the expectations and aspirations of “We, The People” become the fullest manifestation of God in us.
The negotiation of the Federalism that ushered in our Independence was substituted with a “Nigerian Personality” of no foundation in either Language or culture, and purportedly “under God” and had been unable to even address the social and economic issues of today’s age, which we are still battling with, today.
Everyone in Nigeria now laments the erosion of the developments achieved in the First Republic founded on the social and cultural aspirations of the Peoples, in whichever way they were expressed, where, for the Yoruba Nation, the Western Region’s education policy was premised on creating a work force capable of ensuring her economic development via industrialization of the Region allowing for competitiveness on the world stage because there is something in us(culturally) to be showcased to the world through our economic activities.
The beginnings of the University of Ife saw the Portuguese Language being the first Foreign Language course introduced based on the expected relationships that would be developed with the Yoruba Diaspora in Brazil which was expected to become the basis for an economic relationship between Brazil and the Western Region. Today, Brazil has not only left the entire country of Nigeria behind, but has gone ahead to become one of the BRICS Economy challenging the IMF/World Bank Status Quo. If the Federalism of the First Republic had not been politically and militarily truncated, it can comfortably be said that the Western Region would have been part of this global economic initiative.
This false premise was again recently manifested by the Emir of Kano who proposed, as a solution to Nigeria’s current economic distress, the abolition of fuel subsidy as well as the naira being made to find its level. Without addressing the over-bloated political structure responsible for about 70% of recurrent expenditure as well as the near unanimity of all activities in all the states, as products of this false premise embodying the 1999 Constitution which ensured that everything in the center is replicated in all the states, the Emir simply suggested the same solutions Nigeria had been experimenting with for the past 30 years; focusing specifically on the Naira finding its level when we all know that such has not happened since its introduction about 30years ago but it is actually steadily going down, as if going down to sheol is actually its level. We also all know that in spite of the Special Intervention Vehicles like SURE-P or PTF designed to manage “savings” from subsidy removal, the economy did not progress from its extractive dependency into the productive, which ultimately makes nonsense of the removal. Hence, from every angle of our political, economic and spiritual existence Nigeria has become stuck, based on this simple false premise and which has to be addressed for any progress to be made but which was not addressed by the Emir.
At this point, the question is whether our elected officials can, with all conscience, turn round and overturn what they have sworn to uphold and govern with. Constitutional existence of citizens is derived from the delegated authority of “We, The People” via any direct or indirect method, be it a plebiscite, referendum or simple votes on its provisions. Whichever way it is done, the imprimatur of “We, The People” must be obvious. Thus, for those sworn on the basis of its provisions, it must follow that the restoration of the power of “We, The People” and its true reflection becomes their only conscionable activity.
“We, The People” should therefore be able to engage these officials by formally presenting our own aspirations, in whatever form and legitimized through Referendums or Plebiscites among the Peoples of Nigeria, to usher in, among others, a drastic reduction in the recurrent expenditure flowing largely from an over-bloated political structure, via the necessary political restructuring embracing the already canvassed Parliamentary system with full or part time features, ability of the Peoples to administer their resources to the best of their ability with its multiplier effects on other aspects of social and economic existence. The challenge is therefore how those elected officials will be made to pursue this responsibility, and in a responsible manner as a matter of necessity, under God.

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By adminadmin on October 25, 2015



To date, addressing the National Question in Nigeria has been based on the assumption that the logic behind the demand for its resolution will be based on “reason” hence the expectation that such “reason” will prevail. So far, “reason” has not prevailed, which is why, in spite of all sorts of talk shops that have been held, the conveners always end up converting it to their own stated or unstated purposes. The talk shops thus served as necessary political diversions without touching upon the crisis created by the National Question. Yet, it is apparent that every Ethno-Nationality in Nigeria has its own grouse with the post colonial Nation State even as the question would be asked whether such a grouse would constitute the main contradiction for the Ethno-Nationality. For the Yoruba, there is an underground move to redefine this contradiction as being of an anti-North, anti-Fulani character without contextualizing it within the alienation engendered by the post colonial Nigerian State affecting all of Nigerian Nationalities.
As long as the fundamental contradiction is defined in this Ethno-National manner, so long will its manifestation become an inter-Ethnic agitation, leaving the post colonial Nation State the arbiter, when actually this Nation State is the problem. It also becomes impossible to migrate the resolution from the altar of “reason” to that of practical politics, for the “reason” of the Ethno-National opponent will become continuously questioned. Yet, the political is the only platform through which a resolution can be found and without which the extant state of affairs will allow the continuous isolation of the quest for Restructuring from the political field thus limiting its effectiveness and possibility of engaging the post colonial Nation State, the necessary precondition for its resolution, will become non-existent.
While there may be many reasons/factors responsible for this state of affairs, with the extant attitudinal disposition of the politicians and associated privileges being made out as immediate causes, the remote and more important reason is the failure of an overall strategy which can be described as nothing short of a dis-organized retreat from a position of strength; such strength being found in the weak underbelly of the post colonial Nation State, at this time characterized by near economic collapse and uncertainties, political immorality and opportunism established by the national legislature, aided by a willing Judiciary and the security mechanism of the Nation State, especially embroiled in an anti-terrorism campaign, all emanating from the structural imbalance that had been at the core of the problem since the deconstruction of the Federal and Regional System in 1966 all based on a false assumption of the 1999 Constitution as being of “We, The People”.
This existing state of affairs necessarily creates room for great disappointment and, for many, outright disillusionment; indicative of a lack of a not well thought out overall strategy. And, quite clearly, if a strategy is not well thought out, it implies that its intellectual back-up is weak!
Thus, the Restructuring process, having been made to fail on this point and with an intellectual base unable to create the political and programmatic space for itself sufficient enough to meaningfully influence the political choices that needed to be made, became a ball tossed to and fro when it is known that if a desirable degree of influence had existed, there would definitely have not only been a better articulation of the political choices available to us as a people but also a definitive movement towards the resolution of the contradictions presented by the National Question.

This situation reflects a failure to fully appreciate the enormity of the obstacles attendant to the quest for Restructuring revolving around the robust determination to at best panel beat the Nigerian Nation state into a supra-national state under the banner of “unity” without a determination as to who and what is to be united. Supra-national here is in the sense that all ethno-national centers of power would have to be neutralized as a necessary pre-condition and replaced with the “Nigerian idea”, largely espoused by the military, whose praxis is found in its occupationist origin, from being a colonialist enabler to becoming transformed into its full embodiment by coming up with all sorts of political and economic templates that had no bearing on making the peoples the Subject of the Restructuring but would rather make them an Object which is also the colonial foundational aim. Nowhere is this manifested more than the Babangida regime’s hearty welcome and celebration of the “brain drain” era as being beneficial for bringing in foreign exchange through remittances from those who left the country. This is coupled with its “pan-Nigeriansm” which is totally oblivious to the social and cultural make-up of the country since, according to this mindset, such had become mute, as it were, within its own formation. Yet, the only way for this ambition to be pursued was partly through the creation of alternative and/or new political power bases through the instrumentality of presidential patronage; a system perfectly compatible with its own existence.

The effect of this was more pernicious in Yorubaland where the attempt was towards the achievement of the sort of neutralization program that was embarked upon by the Babangida-Abacha-Diya trio; where, specifically, the attempt was based on tinkering with the 1999 Abubakar Constitution (i.e. with no fundamental changes) via first, Obasanjo’s All-Parties Technical Review Committee followed by the 2005 Political Conference and its political fall out where the AD, creditably the “Yoruba Party” of choice at the time, was all but wiped out were it not for the lone resistance mounted by Lagos State AD, later transformed into AC, ACN and now APC.
What would have happened to Yorubaland could only be imagined had Lagos also succumbed, for not only would Yorubaland lay prostrate for the PDP to play around with as it pleases, the idea of Restructuring would have become extinct. Going by what eventually happened to the Obasanjo “tendency”, the prime mover of this attempt, disguised as necessary for its own survival within the PDP, it was itself emasculated by the Jonathan “tendency” whose regime attempted to substitute itself for the leadership of Yorubaland. We need no soothsayer to tell us that Yorubaland would have become completely neutralized and turned into a plaything of other regional power centers, especially when it is historically noted that the control of Yorubaland by either or both of the North and East appears as the motivating factor for the “pan-Nigerianist” project .
This is even more so when Jonathan’s Yoruba enablers completely and totally jettisoned the Yoruba Agenda in favor of whatever it was Jonathan’s Conference would come up with, even before the Conference formally commenced sitting, simply following on its 2003 capitulation.

Using “public sittings” as a form of legitimacy, both the 2005 and Jonathan’s Conferences were able to create a false image of a democratic and localized participation without a formal input by the people, which can only be exercised through a Referendum by the people themselves.
“ooduapathfinder”[/b] is mindful of what “public debates” have done to our body politic in legitimizing doubtful socio-political legacies – IMF debates, Political Bureau, Niki Tobi’s Constitutional review, Abubakar, Obasanjo and Jonathan’s consultations. In each of these instances, it was a case of working to the answer, where, at the end, a pre-determined position emerges which will vitiate the struggle for ethno-national autonomy.
Where then do we go from here? [b]“ooduapathfinder”[i][/i] posits that with the Lagos resistance having, to a very large extent, solved the teething political problems, it is time to move to the next level, whereby the consolidation of our historical, political experience will become formalized in its being made the heart of our praxis as a logical consequence of the Lagos resistance which was not a function of simple political survivalism but a historical necessity whose time has now fully come.

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By adminadmin on October 18, 2015



When the Akotileta (Yoruba Jonathanians) gathered and decided on secession as their response to what it called Fulani herdsmen atrocities, especially with Chief Falae’s kidnapping coupling it with whatever is impeding the implementation of Jonathan’s conference recommendations, “ooduapathfinder” sees a contrived, emotion-based attempt at stampeding a Yoruba response devoid of any reality. This is more so when nearly all of those gathered were active participants in the processes that culminated in the Yoruba Agenda, a proposition in direct contrast to the recommendations thereby making the Akotileta’s conclusions a direct attack on what we have famously advocated.
Why then would secession be predicated on the failure to implement the recommendations? Without going into story telling as to who did what, where and when(there are so many stories to tell “ooduapathfinder” would not even know where to start) it is possible to identify significant and time-changing occurrences within Akotileta practices that point to where they missed it, how they got to where they are today and what we must do to prevent them from becoming a permanent roadblock on our march towards self-realization as well as moving our level of engagement with our historical necessity beyond the pedestrian, which is now the Akotileta paradigm.
Niger Delta “militants” perfected the art of using threats of secession as a form of political and emotional blackmail in their agitations against the Central government wherein secession is introduced as a fall back option if their demands are not met and this has now been handed over to the Akotileta as its latter-day advocates, which is not surprising as the Akotileta lost any originality in thought after jettisoning what the Yoruba have determined as her rational response to the post-colonial state fault lines.
Afenifere and the Yoruba Council of Elders, the two topmost entities in Akotileta are supposedly diametrically opposed to each other, yet both had always had the need to unite against perceived threats to their mutual existence, which was why, in the early days of return to civil rule, both were able to isolate what they considered as Yoruba “militancy” parading several self-determination groups, often at the instance of one corralling the other into its orbit even while publicly proclaiming animosity against each other as if there are fundamental differences between them; differences which actually amount to the proverbial difference between six and half-a-dozen.

For both sections of Oodua Peoples Congress, its trajectory was based on a consistent denial of intellectual or even theoretical input, wherein any individual with any form of intellectual or theoretical appreciation of the issues at hand was summarily sidelined and made redundant while the leadership would retain and promote a demagogic attachment to the “Yoruba cause”. Without its own theoretical foundation and having jettisoned the Yoruba Agenda, it was merely a matter of time before the vacuum would be filled with whatever is thrown at them hence becoming imprisoned within the Niger Delta/Jonathanian consciousness which now defines its praxis as reflected in her political trajectory, the full effect which occurred during the last election cycle.

By the time of the 2015 elections, the Akotileta had championed the use of Niger Delta, especially Ijaw “militants” in a failed bid to intimidate Osun voters into submission while successfully aiding and abetting Jonathan’s corralling of State apparatus to impose PDP rule in Ekiti State. While the 2005 Political Reform Conference was rightly scuttled by the Niger Delta delegation’s insistence of “Resource control”, the same Niger Delta saw the Jonathan presidency as their entitlement where it was supposed that their Resource Control agitation would have been a major focus, even if not perfected; a major leader of the Niger Delta delegation to the 2005 conference, the late Oronto Douglas was Jonathan’s Special Adviser on Documentation and Strategy who also doubled as the “backbone” of the 2014 Conference; yet in 2011, when the then ACN submitted a memo on True Federalism directly to Jonathan, he or the Niger Delta kept it under lock and key throughout his tenure only for Jonathan to show up in the SW on the eve of the 2015 elections to, with the aid and active connivance of the Akotileta, promote the implementation of his National Conference recommendations. It is also noted that this gambit was restricted to only the SW.
It can thus be seen that the Akotileta are now desperately shopping around for anything that will aid their coming back into political reckoning in Yorubaland, hence the noise about “Fulani herdsmen”, conference recommendations and now secession, all bearing the hallmark of Niger Delta “militancy”. “ooduapathfinder” will not be surprised if the group latches on to the recent statement by some the North East leaders calling for investigation of the group for treason by ramping up more vitriolic statements in order to attract security interest in the hope of positioning themselves as “defenders of the land.”
To all intents and purposes, the Akotileta can be said to have become the conduit for Niger Delta/Ijaw political praxis, consciousness and ambitions over Yorubaland and making this call for secession would be part of a game plan to stampede the Yoruba into taking precipitate action towards self-immolation. Independence, Secession, Federalism, Autonomy or Devolution as forms of self-determination are not ad hoc responses to criminal activities by certain sections of a country; the Yoruba Agenda was not developed because of criminal activity of Fulani herdsmen or any Ethno-Nationality’s behaviors, such that curtailing Fulani herdsmen atrocities would not have removed the necessity for self-determination.
This was and is why self-determination, whichever form it takes, is internationally acknowledged, hence Yugoslavia’s break up ended with self-determination for its various constituents, even as embarked upon militarily by some; ditto Eritrea and South Sudan having emerged after years of armed engagement with both Ethiopia and the Sudan. Quebec and Scotland utilized an electoral approach via referendums in their particular geo-political areas with Catalonia closely pursuing such methodology. All of these instances were not as a result of purely criminal tendencies on the part of any of their Federating entities but a systematic pursuit of that inherent right to social, economic political and cultural self-expression, all subsumed under the self-determination paradigm.
The quest for “Restructuring” Nigeria arose from the necessary creation of 12 states in 1967 as a solution to the then emerging crisis flowing from the negation of the Regional model by the military in 1966, partially as a result of the failure of the First Republic to create more Regions, especially for the minorities. Since that time, the military, as an institution, has guided all attempts at “restructuring” revolving around the central control of resources which was the direct opposite of the pre-1966 structure. Tinkering with this central control, without its removal, became the hallmark of such “restructuring” exercises, with all sorts of political abracadabra based on the United States Constitutional form without the substance of her Federalism; for, retention of centralized control of resources is vital for the maintenance of its political experiments; and the Jonathan regime did not depart from this paradigm. The Akotileta are now attempting a “final solution” against Resource Control and True Federalism as their recommendations only seek to further atomize the country into more beggar states while strengthening the Presidency in what Oronto Douglas called a “stronger Union”, under Jonathan.
Self-determination, armed or unarmed, cannot be fought outside its political context, which in Nigeria’s case is anchored on True Federalism, the driving force of her decolonization. Going outside this political context is actually an attempt at negating it, as the 1962-1966 crisis showed.
Now that it has become obvious that the current structure is politically, economically and culturally unsustainable, “ooduapathfinder” says that this is the time to get True Federalism back on track based on issues which will include but not limited to the modality for Regionalization consequent upon “Derivation and Devolution”, necessity or otherwise for bicameral or unicameral, full or part time Federal and Regional Legislatures, remunerated by their Federating Regions; the need for a collegial Presidency with an elected or appointed representative from each of the Federating Regions with a President chosen among them or in rotation; internal Regional security especially when terrorism is flexing its muscles, etc.
As was clearly stated in the Yoruba Agenda, “….. the restructuring of the polity for decentralization and devolution of authorities and functions is imperative now for more useful and durable internal security, social and economic infrastructures that can promote individual citizen’s inner-confidence, educational consciousness and welfare, and which can substantially reduce corruption and poverty in Nigeria ……”, “ooduapathfinder” can confidently state that the Yoruba Nation has not departed from this purpose

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By adminadmin on October 11, 2015



Those in other climes classified as Quislings are the “Akotileta” in Yorubaland, whose main characteristic is active and serial collaboration with forces intent on politically neutralizing the set goals of the land. In their latest gambit via a meeting in Ibadan on October 8, 2015 anchored on the ravages caused by Fulani herdsmen, and more importantly on Chief Falae’s recent experience, the Akotileta-Quislings, having placed the blame on Fulani herdsmen without waiting for the conclusion of any official investigation, failed to address the fact that the herdsmen criminal activities ordinarily ought to be handled by particular institutions of State, notably the police force and other security agencies, all of which had been perpetually found wanting which points to a failure of the State itself, a fall-out of the Unitary Structure of the Nigerian State clothed in borrowed Federal robes. It is therefore the failure of this structure that must be addressed in order to find a lasting solution.
The Akotileta-Quisling solution, purportedly a Federalism anchored on the recommendations of Jonathan’s Conference summarized by them as: “States can now create employment and develop their own states. Each state can have its own constitution, its own police force, can have its own prison service, can create its own local governments and in addition, in the economic domain, solid minerals that had been the exclusive preserve of the federal government since independence, have now been brought to the concurrent list; “self-funding regional institutions in order to encourage developmental efforts among cooperating states” show that the recommendations only perpetuate the problem, as it is questionable whether these measure up as a Federalist solution.
“Self-Funding Regional Institutions among cooperating states” is not new in Yorubaland hence cannot be ascribed to recommendations from Jonathan’s Conference. In the Western Region, the Action Group government created the self-funding Western Nigeria Development Corporation, which, among other things, was responsible for the industrial and economic development of the Region through the mechanism of the various industrial and residential estates as well as other profitable economic entities. It was also directly involved in human development via the provision of educational scholarships. When the Region was turned into Western State, as the successor entity to the Western Region, the WNDC continued its historical mission and when the State was further carved up into the three States of Oyo, Ogun and Ondo, as successor states, a holding company known as “Oodua Holdings” was created in order to prevent the outright collapse of the institution, as such was what the then military administration in Nigeria favored. That holding company is what we now know as Oodua Investments Ltd, with all of the Yoruba successor States as shareholders. Hence, ordinarily, strengthening and repositioning of Oodua Investments should be a Yoruba Priority which has nothing to do with any recommendation from Jonathan’s Conference.
Chief Olu Falae was the voice and face of Nigeria’s Structural Adjustment Program, which for Yorubaland ensured the demise of the Marketing Boards purportedly to jump start economic take-off of cocoa farmers but which in the end turned out to be an avenue to economic suicide via making local production unattractive at a time of privileged proliferation of imported substitutes, thereby turning a formerly productive sector into an absolute consumer of imported, finished goods which also led to our political and cultural strangulation. Some of the victims of SAP were the Farm settlements, some of which operated as cattle ranches and which, had it continued and developed, would have reduced the incidence of nomadic cattle rearing in the land.
This developmental trajectory was part of a political paradigm that saw to the combined and even development of a region just emerging from colonial underdevelopment and midwifed by the Action Group as its core demand for decolonization. Yet, the recommendation denied this core political necessity with its further attempt at balkanizing the Region via creation of more states with a sop in the form of cooperation between and among the states and which cooperation is dependent upon an approval by the National Assembly.
A “self-funding economic agency” without this political basis is a non-starter, a priori; and a denial of economic self-actualization for an economic platform in a center of antagonistic political configuration is a panacea for economic failure. Recommending a self-funding economic agency without Fiscal Federalism that makes revenue raising and collection Regional is nothing more than self-deception. A country in which the states or Federating units depend on allocation from the center cannot call itself a Federal system. None of the Federations in the world: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, United Arab Emirate, and U.S.A., operates on the model of state dependency on allocations from the center recommended by the Jonathan conference now being proposed by the Quislings.
States as“federating Units” that can have their own Constitutions already assumed the singularity of the geo-political space called Nigeria and all of its proposed solutions are relegated to maintaining that singularity while turning issues of Federalism into an administrative convenience even when it is obvious that the problem is exactly in that singularity. That is why the recommendations promote the ridiculous position that “states are Federating Units”. But States, as we have them in Nigeria, are administrative entities, which were not even created by the residents but by military fiat. A country can have any form of administrative unit and every Union or Federation in the world is based on a Union of Peoples which may now be administered either as states as in the US or Regions as in Germany but the recommendation simply sought an increase in the number of states from the present 36 to 54.
When the case is made that the current states are now a reality which we cannot run away from, the short answer to that is, Yes, we can run away from it, in the sense that the political and economic circumstances that make for their creation is the root cause of Nigeria’s problems today, such that their retention or changing can only be by the Peoples themselves and not by fiat from the Center. Thus, the Yoruba Nation may decide to make every Yoruba town or city an administrative center—that will be our choice based on our economic and political imperatives.
A Constitution being the Grundnorm of a society embodies the socio-cultural essence of the People; it aggregates their existential paradigms; therefore, it is not simply a series of legal codes that can be altered at will, which was why, for the Western Region, its political space is also a cultural space with time-honored values, which was why the People of the West did not really respond to the rigging apparent in the 1964 Federal elections but chose to respond decisively to similar rigging of the 1965 Regional elections, because they had something to defend: their Grundnorm and the values that drive the Region’s civilization.
A state constitution is therefore meaningless outside the definition of the Federating Unit in and of itself. In other words, the issue is not about “state Constitution” but about the Peoples that want to create a Union. Such that if we are talking about Federating units being in existence, such Federating units are not the states, but the Peoples, who are already in existence and can decide to administer themselves as they deem fit, be it as states, regions, cities, etc. This also flows into the issue of Local Governments where the recommendation says that the Central government will retain and disburse all the funds for Local Government; yet we are being told that each state can create its own local government!
State Police is a consequence and not the cause of Federalism as these Quislings want us to believe. States now depend almost entirely on federal allocations to pay their workers’ salaries; and it is this allocation that will be additionally saddled with funding state police even after the number of states have been increased from 36 to 54. With minimal change in revenue allocation, this translates into such state police being underfunded and unable to achieve its maximum potential in terms of training and professional advancement.
“ooduapathfinder” believes that what the Quislings are selling to us is the exact opposite of what the Yoruba had been consistently asking for—True Federalism of Nations/Nationalities and there is both the Yoruba Agenda and the Draft Yoruba Constitution to prove it. The Akotileta-Quisling recommendation proposition is a negation of these documents, arrived at through various and deep consultative processes, which again confirms their being characterized as such.

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By adminadmin on October 4, 2015



Considering the deliberate divisiveness that characterized Goodluck Jonathan’s re-election campaign, with its deliberate anti-north agenda, current happenings in Yorubaland would point to making our land the ground zero for its resurgence. Jonathan’s Yoruba foot soldiers were and are in the forefront of promoting the notion that any anti-corruption of this Change regime must encompass previous administrations, at least since the return to civilian rule in 1999; they are now trying to create a “Yoruba Ethnic consciousness” by making Fulani herdsmen the scapegoat of recent kidnappings without questioning the post-colonial State and now making the point that Goodluck Jonathan was “punished” for trying to “liberate” Nigeria as if Nigerians do not know what is good for them and as far as the Yoruba are concerned, reminiscent of the Biafran invasion of Lagos under the pretext of “liberating” the West from the North while retaining all political and of course, economic decisions in Enugu; now exposing the fundamental disrespect of Yoruba people by and from those who claim to love us more than ourselves.
While Biafra forced Victor Banjo to lead in the “liberating” effort, the same cannot be said of today’s enablers, who consciously embarked on their quest as a matter of political choice. This is exemplified by Sir Olaniwun Ajayi’s attempt at dressing Afenifere in superior robes by blaming others for the fate that befell Afenifere while standing history on its head, and by so doing dug Afenifere into a deeper hole for it revealed the certainty of the impossibility of the organization from ever actualizing its previous role as the “unilateral voice” of the Yoruba. Sir Ajayi might have been one of the early members of the AG hence would be expected to have information and facts at his beck and call but his recent interview shows that having facts is not enough, it is more important to know to which use such facts will be put; for it can be used for negative or positive purposes.
What Sir Ajayi did was to use it for negative purposes by placing the circumstances of Afenifere’s descent into infamy on the doorsteps of persons like Bola Tinubu, Segun Osoba and Chief Bisi Akande, among others and tying these up with on-going issues within the APC on party supremacy using the Saraki shenanigans in the Senate as a backdrop, saying such would never have happened under the AG while giving some examples of how certain persons surrendered themselves to party supremacy on account of their being asked to shelve their electoral and appointive aspirations. Sir Ajayi failed to remember the three very vital instances that later proved fatal, not only for the AG but also for Yorubaland, two in the first republic and the other during Obasanjo’s period as President which became the defining moments for us.
At the onset of formal independence, an attempt by the AG to go into an alliance with the NCNC was aborted partially because of Akintola’s shenanigans with the NPC, which, together with NCNC’s own unnecessary reservations led to the collapse of the effort. This was followed by what he did in the AG in the run up to the 1962 Jos Convention, where he employed all sorts of mechanisms to try to rubbish the party Convention and refused all entreaties for a sort of ceasefire all ending up with a decisive split in the Party; whereupon he began to rubbish the ideas being propagated by the AG while setting up his own platform. “ooduapathfinder”[b][/b] thus wonders where and how Sir Ajayi would come to the conclusion that what Saraki is doing would never have occurred under the AG? In these times, while Sir Ajayi was blaming Tinubu et al, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, also a long time Afenifere leader, publicly stated that Afenifere and by implication, the AD, in 2003, agreed to support Obasanjo’s second term because he(Obasanjo) promised them to restructure if voted back into power; hence AD was unable to file any presidential candidate at the time. The same vehemence unleashed against the AG by that first republic coalition, then enabled by the Akintola faction, is similar to those unleashed by the Obasanjo administration, now aided and abetted by Afenifere, on the sole opposition AD governor of Lagos, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who became the lone voice against Afenifere’s political suicide thus saving the Yoruba Nation from political extinction; just as the pan-Nigerian crisis enabled the Yoruba Nation to recover itself in the first republic.
These three instances, combined, would show a lack of strategic thinking on the part of its purveyors with the actions directly leading to serious consequences for not only the Yoruba Nation but also to her political expression.
In whitewashing Afenifere, Sir Ajayi failed to mention the role played by a section of its “younger” elements, whose roles assisted in neutralizing the organization as a responsible political construct. These “younger” elements fall into two categories: those who saw the rot coming and those who cared less for any reflection on the organization’s future, preferring to latch on to the name as an end in itself. The first category comprise those who have now coalesced into the Afenifere Renewal Group and sundry formations, who, understanding the necessity for a change of course, embarked on very serious critique, openly and secretly, in order to effect those necessary changes but which were rebuffed by the organization’s leadership. Arguably the most famous victim of these types of engagement was the unceremonious sacking of its General Secretary in the person of Ayo Opadokun, a strategic blunder based on a wrong reading of the then emerging political situation in Kwara State; which, if handled correctly as canvassed by the change-agents of the time, would have made the Saraki political perfidy in Kwara State, history.
The latter group comprise those who asked for, and obtained, a change in Afenifere to become an all-comers’ organization, with the clamor in support of those in the PDP at the time having as much right as anyone to be in Afenifere. Members of this group eventually became Governors, aspiring governors, ministers etc under the PDP regimes of Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan with Afenifere’s backing and some of them are still in the organization today, playing leadership roles and anchoring this Jonathan resurgence.
From these, what the Yoruba Nation has to avoid is certain in order not to fall into the same pit all over again. The main issue being that pretenders to a Yoruba cause always end up in alignment with hostile forces in the Center, which, but for providence, would have meant Yorubaland becoming history. The duty of the present, among the young and the old, lie in this recognition and ensuring that such forces are neutralized in Yorubaland.
It will not be a contradiction to the above to say that, for the first time, Yorubaland has become a major player in the Central politics because the same historical forces that have tried, since independence, to prevent the neutralization of the land was able to defeat the hostile central forces, ensuring that the dangers to the land is minimized with the necessity for maximization through the permanent neutralization of these anti-Yoruba forces in Yoruba garb.
Thus, when it is being said that a way for unity must be found in Yorubaland, questions are bound to arise as to whether such should be an end in itself. Unity between those who have spent their political capital trying to render Yorubaland useless, without remorse and those who have consistently retained our political right of existence such that a unity that fails to address the issues of our present and future, ab initio, is a call to surrender.
Previous forms of “unity” in Yorubaland were not outside the context of the relative strengths of the political divide and this appears to be the first time that we will be in a position to permanently defeat these dark forces in the land.
“Unity” was found at the 1967 Ibadan Unity meeting only because the anti-AG alliance came to a recognition of its own limitations and infractions and accepted Awo and therefore AG’s leadership. Subsequent attempts at presenting a united front ended with affronts to the Yoruba Nation with the latest being their advocacy for the Jonathan conference recommendations which were/are at complete variance with any Yoruba quest.
None of the attempts were able to articulate a political roadmap for the Yoruba Nation; and this time, they are at home with the Jonathan/PDP (mis)administration. “ooduapathfinder” says what is needed now is a political roadmap anchored on the present political configuration of APC dominance where it will be able to navigate its way through the Nigerian political maze. Anything outside of this will only circumscribe Yorubaland.

www.ooduapathfinder.com





On February 27, 1933 the German Reichstag(German Parliament) was burnt and even though a communist partisan was charged with the crime and sentenced to death, the Nazi Party blamed the entire world wide communist movement for the act and created the bogey of Communist take-over of Germany as the basis for its own absolute hold on power and this singular effort subsequently led to the destruction of the Communist party as well as the rise and dominance of the Nazis with all of its implications for the rest of the world.
Afenifere and its associates, having made a bogey of the Fulani, have attempted to place the recent kidnapping of Chief Olu Falae, one of its leaders, within the context of their anti-Fulani rhetoric. Afenifere had earlier made the anti-Fulani narrative its political showpiece in an attempt to coral Yoruba votes for Goodluck Jonathan, hence situated the 2015 presidential election within an anti-Fulani, anti-North paradigm, even as it is on record that the same Afenifere supported and promoted Buhari’s 2007 and 2011 presidential runs, regardless of Buhari’s Fulaniness. This transformation from a pro-Fulani(Buhari) to its opposite within a space of four years came without any significant change in Buhari’s persona or political views, so much so that making anti-Fulani its mantra is the stuff of political opportunism at its highest. The organization wasted no time in concluding that Chief Falae’s kidnappers were Fulani herdsmen intent on destroying not only the chief’s farmland but also advance their long-standing ravaging of farmlands.
There is thus a need for the Yoruba Nation to be circumspect in the emerging narrative lest we be corralled into a fruitless political endeavor unwittingly allowing unfriendly interests to have political control of our land.
While it is historically true that Fulani herdsmen embark on forcible use of farmlands, “ooduapathfinder” says that the modus operandi of these herdsmen has not, so far, involved kidnapping-for-ransom. They have maimed, raped and killed in the process of grazing their cattle but have not engaged in kidnapping-for-ransom. The matter is not helped by Chief Falae himself, who, according to his published statements, tended to allege the kidnappers as “Boko Haram”; that is, “Northerners” and by implication and following Afenifere’s logic, Fulani, simply on the reference to the terrorist group by one of kidnappers.
“ooduapathfinder” believes that Chief Olu Falae is capable of knowing a Fulani when he sees one; just as he ought to know, given his very extensive participation in Nigeria’s governance at the highest levels, that a casual reference to any organization by a kidnapper or criminal does not necessarily translate into the criminal belonging to such an organization.
Yet, we all know that the Niger Delta “militants” specialize in kidnapping-for-ransom; and they still operate in that mode, even after their amnesty program. Coupled with this is the fact that the Ijaw “militants” have not only threatened Yorubaland preparatory to the 2015 presidential elections, they have also been active in the Ondo axis, especially in the riverine areas which they lay claim to while an attempt was made, during Jonathan’s Conference, to carve that portion out of the present Ondo State as a state on its own. “ooduapathfinder” believes that Chief Olu Falae’s experience lie between these two possibilities.
The reference to the Nazi paradigm is to alert us to the reality of using a bogey to neutralize an opponent while establishing a different order. So, what would Afenifere gain by flip-flopping on Buhari when it is not only not in power but also not in contention for it? The only answer would be an effort to make Yorubaland a “no man’s land”, make the land lay prostrate for any taker; a case of cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face; its ultimate expression of political degeneracy.
In this process, it has embarked on all sorts of political somersaults, primary of which is its insistence on the recommendations of the Jonathan Conference. Yet, when Afeinfere gets on its anti-Fulani, anti-North bogey-wagon, it fails to acknowledge the reality of the National Question in the North itself. The NE zone actively participated in the same Jonathan Conference; yet many of its representatives have now agreed that the conference was a sham and would not remotely address their own issues hence called for a fresh Conference to specifically address their problems. The difference between the aspirations of the NE and what Afenifere is selling is as clear as daylight. What then would be the difference between the two if not that the NE is very concrete about its own problems hence sure of its solution in not being subservient to a Jonathanian adventurism while the Afenifere would prefer continuous subjugation under what would have amounted to a more centralized State were Jonathan to get away with his Conference recommendations?
Granted that historically, the Fulani had exhibited and perfected the assimilationist tendency which allowed its autocracy to accommodate non-Fulani in its power structures, primary examples being the likes of Sunday Awoniyi and Adamu Ciroma in the first republic, it is also historically proven that both the then Middle Belt represented by UMBC and the NE via the Borno Youth Movement were not shy from displaying their autonomist tendencies which allowed for their alliance with the Action Group, the foremost party advocating for a true Federal State at the time. Befuddling the political space with the “Northern” or Fulani bogey is therefore not only a-historical but also anti-Federal.
The implication of all these would be an alienation of the Peoples of Nigeria not only from themselves but also from each other such that the only beneficiary would the central state structure which would be able to manipulate the peoples to its own advantage hence creating its own assimilationist mechanism. Thus, the Peoples self-expression would be folded into a “Northern” and “Southern” paradigm aimed at neutralizing even such current demands of the NE for a development rethink on a country-wide level.
Aside from all of the above, it is common knowledge that Fulani herdsmen trample on farmlands at will, without any existing State apparatus able to do anything about it which also calls into question the necessity and/or viability of such State structures. Within the context of this kidnap therefore, Afenifere and its associates have not done any favors to the grazing problem, which, paradoxically, the NE call for a developmental Conference for its zone must necessarily address. That Afenifere would fail to see the connection and simply resort to an anti-North, anti-Fulani alarmist mode would show its complete political inadequacy while pretending to advocate its own version of “Yoruba interest” which is at variance with the general interest the Yoruba have always demanded.
Even if limited to a contradiction between the herdsmen and farmers like Chief Olu Falae, a non-opportunistic approach would not fail to see the solution to this contradiction residing in the resolution of the National Question, where, leaving aside the criminal nature of the kidnap, which itself is a function of the limitations of the post colonial Nation State, grazing issues go beyond Nigeria borders; hence a clear roadmap towards resolving it ought to have been the major issue of the day, rather than the bogey of the “North” or the Fulani. Once again, the NE call for a fresh Conference provided the impetus where such could be addressed; for if Afenifere would be true to history, it would note the fact of the establishment of farm settlements in the Western Region where some were set up as cattle ranches, hence if today’s grazing issues were to be addressed, it would have to take into consideration the possibilities of other Regions in Nigeria establishing such ranches for its own cattle development which will in turn directly translate into relationships between nomadic and sedentary production of cattle.
The beauty of the NE call is in the fact that her own people will make their own decisions rather than an amorphous group which had always been the case with previous conferences. This initiative by the NE ought to have been the recommended template for other Regions/Zones which would ultimately lead to some sort of negotiations between the zones for a new Grundnorm for our mutual existence. Afenifere lacked the capacity and the courage to take this step, unlike the NE, who, even after being part of the Jonathan Conference, rejected it and promoted an alternative.

www.ooduapathfinder.com

By adminadmin

Chief Ayo Adebanjo, an Afenifere leader, recently accused the SW APC of not “knowing history”; but[b] “ooduapathfinder”[/b] asks: what history? Does history consist of linear, separate actions of individuals and events; coordinated actions of individuals finding their niche in the march of time and its contradictions, the underlying causes of which such individuals may not even be aware of; or consciously stamping one’s signature on unfolding events even when such events have negative consequences on the existential paradigms of the society being claimed as the beneficiary? Of course, history could also be considered as merely an academic exercise of time lines, regurgitating what is generally known in order to achieve whatever purpose, which “ooduapathfinder” believes is Chief Ayo Adebanjo’s definition and which is why he would reduce “history” to the “person” other than himself thus removing himself from any responsibilities to that history or series of events itself, thereby affording him the opportunity to act as an agent of its negation.
He was helped along by Pastor Tunde Bakare, whose sole rendering of this history is about how a Tinubu cannot be an Awolowo as if that is even an issue, such that disparaging those who wear Awo-type caps or eye glasses becomes his attitude to that history. That someone copies Awo’s mode of dressing is nothing more than an appreciation of the man, Awo; just as there were and are those who dress like Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevarra without any exchange of identities. “ooduapathfinder” says it is a failure of understanding and the thought of seeking political relevance that makes such reductionism an attractive concept among the Afenifere folks where Yoruba political trajectory has been reduced to the level of the “person” as if such persons are not active participants in history but are outside and therefore supposedly against it.
So then, what is the role of an individual in history, since history cannot be made without individuals? Yoruba political history is replete with individuals who have tried either to negate Yoruba existentialism or made efforts at its consolidation and promotion. But what exactly does this existentialism consist of? Without going into the full details of Yoruba history, “ooduapathfinder” realizes that whatever the form of the coming into being of the Yoruba Nationality, the Oduduwa revolution in Ife that eventually gave birth to the Oyo Empire as its foremost expression would provide us with an insight into Yoruba history’s trajectory. The empire, with all of its apparatus and paraphernalia, collapsed, which led to the various wars of attrition that culminated in the 1883 Armistice, which attempted to formalize the relationships between the various Yoruba communities. It was also during this time that colonial expansion became an arbiter thus ending such an attempt whereupon Yorubaland was placed firmly under colonial yoke.
From that time, Yoruba politics became not for itself and definitely not by itself, it had now to contend with other subject peoples of Nigeria and the colonial power itself. Even if we are to arbitrarily decide on any starting point as a boundary, it would be a-historical to pretend as if such a boundary precludes a context which would make nonsense of the arbitrariness and turn it into a self-serving mechanism.
Thus, Chief Obafemi Awolowo situated his political philosophy within the context of Yoruba existentialism which informed his setting up of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa and his subsequent promotion of Federalism as the only pathway for true development of Nigeria, thereby making Federalism the essence of Yoruba history, which, in contemporary times, is based on the recognition of the quest for Federalism as a major factor in the Kiriji Wars and also served as the formal political configuration of Yorubaland, in the setting up of Yoruba Kingdoms after the collapse of Oyo.
Did Awo achieve the quest for Federalism in the current historical epoch? The answer is No. Can it be achieved? Obviously Yes. Hence, our interrogation of our history can only proceed from that point; “knowing or not knowing history” thus has to proceed from this intersection of the “Yes” and “No”, for it is the interplay between the two that would determine an individual’s knowledge of, and role, in that history.
Why Awo and the Federalists failed in the bid to enthrone Federalism is very well known, even as there are variations and different interpretations, even among “Awoists” which did not negate the failure of such efforts. Proceeding from the realization of this failure, the pursuit of further efforts to entrench this failure cannot in any way be considered as being unconscious of that history to such an extent that one’s knowledge of it would be doubtful, thus providing an escape route for the continuous failure, which is what Chief Ayo Adebanjo is enmeshed in.
Hence, Chief Ayo Adebanjo and his allies, pretending to “know” history, are in the forefront of those who wanted to take over Yorubaland in order to neutralize it as a major player in Nigerian political firmament and completely surrender whatever form of political independence that can be mustered, and all of these against the grain of the same Yoruba history which he accused others of not knowing. They actively cultivated and supported a Goodluck Jonathan who had already declared the Yoruba as a minority in the West; and as is well-known, the same Jonathan, with the active backing of these Afenifere folks, utilized all sorts of Nazi Gestapo tactics to try to take over Osun State against the backdrop of “Ekitigate” still fresh in our memory. Alongside these, Afenifere was and still is, promoting the recommendations of Jonathan’s conference as the “Federalism” that anchors Yoruba history both within Yorubaland as well as in Nigeria itself. Yet, the recommendations wanted eighteen more states while the central control of resources is retained by the central government and worse, wants the central government to control and disburse funds to every local government. To add salt to injury, the Jonathan regime did not even use these recommendations as campaign issues anywhere outside Yorubaland, which would mean that the Yoruba were treated like Pavlov’s dogs salivating over a bone.
Chief Ayo Adebanjo and his allies are now trying to foist this culture of negation on us, hiding behind the mask of history and promoting his own supposed entrenchment in Awo’s political paradigm as the foundation of his negation of history. In their bid to foist this culture, they have resorted to hiding behind the “North-South” divide as if this is a function of a Manichean division between the “North” and the “South” and which, by so doing, obliterates the Ethno-National Question within both the North and the South.
They disregard the present in their excursion into history when history itself can only be relevant as a consequence of the past and an expectation of the future. Hence, in a situation where there is economic paralysis, both at the State and national levels, and where there is a convergence of the political and economic contradictions, a proper contextualizing of history ordinarily ought to alert the Ayo Adebanjos to the continuous process and possibilities of the “Yes” paradigm. They could not do this because they are focused on playing the fifth columnist inside Yorubaland and using the SW APC, especially the person of Asiwaju Tinubu, as the bogeyman. Reducing “knowing history” to mere personal interplay in social and political conflicts of the day truncates the meaning of history itself and leaders supposedly entrenched in a historical paradigm cannot, on the one hand, run with the hares and on the other hunt with the hounds. “ooduapathfinder” says Chief Ayo Adebajo cannot promote the anti-Federalism of the Jonathan conference while placing himself as a knowledgeable and historical defender or promoter of the Yoruba or even a Federalist. Both are at variance with each other.

www.ooduapathfinder.com


By adminadmin August 14, 2015



The anti-Tinubu tendency in Yoruba politics, represented in part by Chief Ayo Adebanjo, an Afenifere leader, has finally turned “leadership” on its head. To him, leadership is no longer a matter of casting and actualizing a vision but a descent into fidelity to their own historical experiences, even when such experiences negate their current dispositions. Leadership is thus only about de-contextualized individuals where, in this instance, everything becomes a Manichean division, for or against Tinubu. While this tendency is not begrudged for its stance, questions must be raised when such actually demeans our(Yoruba) capacity to interrogate issues with knowledge and understanding.
Chief Ayo Adebanjo was reported to have stated that part of the qualification for Yoruba leadership would be how many books were published by such a leader. If we are to go by this parameter, that is, the number of published books, Awo himself would not qualify; since Awo was and is not the most published Yoruba writer, yet he became the “Yoruba Leader” in his time. Even if he was and is, that would mean any other leader must exceed his published works, even when such publications contain irrelevant content. Besides, Awo’s prognosis of the “Nigerian Problematic” is still unfolding; what Chief Ayo Adebanjo referred to as the philosophies and theories Awo propounded are still being contested, either to be destroyed or manifested. So, those who emerged after Awo’s time need not reinvent the wheel, their yardstick would be how far they are able to pursue the vision “within the context of their own time”.
Awo’s Yoruba Leadership attended to a crisis and the reason is not far-fetched: Awo’s political tendency at the time withstood the centrally-organized onslaught against the land such that it remained the only cohesive force that was able to harness the general purpose and vision of the Yoruba at the time of the onset of the civil war. The then Yoruba Opposition, which had collaborated with the onslaught, had no moral or political standard to stand on or to pursue hence had no choice but to recognize the Awo tendency and place the burden of leadership on them, otherwise, they instinctively knew that doing otherwise would castrate the land. Leadership is thus not simply a question of individual positioning but the pursuit of the vision and the place of the individual in it.
Chief Ayo Adebanjo dismissed winning of an election as being necessary for exercising leadership, which, according to him, would not qualify a Tinubu, for example, as leader and followed it up by saying that the “background of Awolowo’s leadership was never because he was in government”. This is turning history on its head, more-so from someone who supposedly was actively engaged in that period, even as some credible accounts point to the contrary.
Awo and the AG prepared and campaigned vigorously to win the 1951 Western Region Election which enhanced Awo’s leadership qualities, pre and post-election. His governmental policies and programs stood the Western Region out, thus stamping his leadership qualities, without which what Chief Adebanjo calls Awo’s “integrity and track record” would not have been realized. Awo knew, quite early on, the necessity for a political/cultural base from which the anti-colonial quest would be pursued which was even why the Egbe Omo Oduduwa was formed in the first instance and from which the Action Group sprouted. Indeed, from Awo’s own accounts, his leaving for the United Kingdom was premised on the necessity to resolve this problematic, from both the political and economic perspectives. From these, it is quite clear that an election was won and a government established with beneficial policies which later cemented Awo’s leadership qualities. So then, the first issue resolved by Awo was in winning the 1951 elections in the Western Region, such that even with the loss of some seats in 1956, the party resolved to win it back, which it did.
With this background, why would anyone discountenance winning of elections, especially when the political quest is being fought on the electoralist platform? Awo and the AG operated under an almost 100% Economic and Political Autonomy, even after independence, in the First Republic, with almost absolute control on its finances and policies, which also dovetailed into manifestation of the vision. What obtains now is the complete opposite, where states were created at will by the Center, regardless of the wishes of the people and nearly all of the obligations of the former Regions are now concentrated at the center which makes the quest for any vision virtually impossible.
In this post-Awo dispensation, Chief Ayo Adebanjo and Afenifere are for continuity of the present order while riding on Awo’s name at the same time negating Awo’s vision by beclouding the people with stories about their association with Awo. They supported the PDP in 2003, in spite of the warnings, as early as 2000, in writing, to Afenifere leadership as to what the PDP, especially Obasanjo, was up to, to wit, the neutralization of the Regional centers of power, specifically the “socio-cultural” organizations, and in this case, Afenifere. Such warnings were ignored which ensured the loss of all of the West to the PDP; a party which, by every definition, is a negation of social and economic development and all that Awo ever stood for and promoted. Lagos State under Tinubu was the sole exception and the situation continued until 2010/2011 when the losses were completely reversed.
Chief Ayo Adebanjo and his Afenifere would prefer Yorubaland remain under the PDP yoke even as they would want to present themselves as a “democratic opposition” in Yorubaland. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They are indeed, fifth columnists; for every political stance taken by them is anti-Yoruba, anti-democratic and aimed at neutralizing the only force that was able to withstand the PDP onslaught on the land. When therefore, Chief Adebanjo denounced the importance of winning elections as a condition for leadership, especially when the field of contest is electoralist, this would be because he wanted to reduce the impact of what Tinubu did, which would be a-historical and a disservice to Yoruba political existentialism.
In the run-up to the Ekiti State governorship election, they were solidly in support of Goodluck Jonathan’s utilization of the Nigerian State apparatus for his partisan political project aimed at having total and complete control of Nigeria and its subsequent transformation into a fascist State hence what we now know as ‘Ekiti Gate”; similarly in Osun State, they went as far as “importing” mercenaries from the Niger Delta, who, alongside the regular and paramilitary police, attempted to intimidate the voters; and in the general presidential elections, the land was turned into a battle ground of sorts with reports of Jonathan embarking on a “dollar rain” on all who cared, to the point of almost desecrating the Obaship institution in Yorubaland.
More importantly, these Afenifere folks were not even able to provide leadership in their quest to promote the PDP in the West, as they were made to, or were comfortable with, the leadership provided by the Jonathan regime. Buruji Kashamu was the overall campaign boss; Gbenga Daniel was also in control of some sort of campaign leadership while Femi Fan-Kayode was the spokesperson. Aside from having criminal charges against them, none of these people had any historical or contemporary connection with Afenifere, save Gbenga Daniels’ prior interest from which he had summarily distanced himself once his campaign for Ogun State Governorship began in 2000. So, then, these are the types of characters Afenifere and Chief Ayo Adebanjo followed in order to overthrow the Tinubu forces in Yorubaland.
Prior to all of these, the same set of Afenifere people championed the Jonathan Conference and are still clamoring for the implementation of its report. The report was as far away from Federalism as the sun is to the earth; yet Federalism is the root of all of Awo’s theories and philosophies. On the other hand, the Tinubu forces, not only rejected the conference itself, but also propagated the necessity for True Federalism both in their various official presentations to the conference committee and in their individual capacities.
It is thus certain that leadership is not simply a question of the person involved but more importantly, the vision represented and how true such a person is, to the vision. Would it then be correct to state, unequivocally, that Chief Ayo Adebanjo is deliberately misleading us on this issue of leadership outside the context of its praxis? “ooduapathfinder” says: Yes, absolutely.

www.ooduapathfinder.com
By adminadmin



The Nigerian State had been a failed State since its re-organization by the Nigerian Armed Forces in 1978/79 as it had and has no higher power it was and is answerable to. A State, by commanding obedience of the citizens through one form of coercion or the other, must itself be subjected to a higher authority otherwise it becomes an end in itself, leading to a failure of sorts, autocratic and dictatorial. Such a State becomes the negation of the entire citizenry making them become the opposite of their natural being. In countries whose Constitutions are subsumed “under God” as a higher authority over the Constitution and the State, it was/is a reflection of the exactitude of God’s manifestation in the circumstances of their coming into being as a country and State. When such nomenclature is copied outside this context, it becomes a blueprint for failure, a caricature, which is why Nigerian State Institutions and their functionaries break their own laws and abuse their offices at will.
Manifestation of the failure of the Nigerian State stared us squarely in the face twice within the last twenty-two years, during the Abacha/Jonathan regimes; the Babangida/Obasanjo years being an interregnum even as it also manifested many of the traditions of this failed State. Previously, the January 15/16 military coupists, saw themselves as the embodiment of “Nigerian Nationhood” and simply ignored the socio-cultural realities, a function of its occupationist role, leading to the internal war and ending up with the armed forces defining the Nigerian State, expressly copying the US Constitution outside the context of US and Nigeria’s histories and experiences, thereby removing Nigerian Peoples humanity and replacing it with some form of the “other” thus negating the inherent potentials of the Nigerian Peoples. By this, the Nigerian Armed Forces arrived at its “higher ideals” from its own beginnings as an army of occupation, making it directly an anti-people institution, not created for the protection and security of the peoples of Nigeria but for their control and suppression.
It did not fail in this mission, which was why it adopted the US Constitution wholesale; attempting to build something on nothing; for the history and context of the US Constitution is vastly and completely different from that of Nigeria. There is thus no way the expectations of the US Constitution would materialize in the Nigerian environment; a situation which directly precipitated Nigeria’s descent into failure. Moreover, the British State from which it originally derived its existence is itself undergoing a serious attempt at a make-over in the form of Scottish and Welsh Independence either in full or as “Maximum” Devolution and subsequently the transformation of the British State into a Federal Union of the UK Nations.
Hence, in this era of “Change”, it is necessary to begin to enumerate exactly what is expected; for “Change” cannot be reduced to looking for “better” persons to manage existing apparatus and institutions. Such “Change” must be embedded in our aspirations as expressions of our higher ideal which becomes the expression of a people’s cultural experience. When it becomes intrinsic in the formation of the State, the totality of their being becomes reflected in the institutions operating the State.
Utilization of the “Law” is limited; for, when culture, as the embodiment of this higher ideal, has no implication on the lives of the citizens, “Law” becomes an instrument of manipulation, for it is not the “Law” that defines Man(our humanity) but the other way round. Laws reflect the social, economic and cultural practices and tensions in the society hence the adopted colonially induced Laws become irrelevant and are at variance with the historical aspiration of the Peoples.
Thus, “Change” cannot be meaningful if it does not go to the root of the matter—the nature of the State; for this determines the nature of its institutions, mediated by the “Law” and their capability to withstand any effort at their personalization; hence, using the imagery of a tree, the nature of the State is the root, Law the stem and Institutions the branches.
It is a truism that the Nigerian State was borne out of the 1914 Amalgamation of southern and northern colonial protectorates, which, by definition, was a negation of the various cultures in this geo-political space; where its economy is based on rent collection from crude oil exports shared by and between the institutions created for that purpose and giving rise to the Nigerian prebends; the more the situation continues, the more the Nigerian State becomes irrelevant to the Peoples of Nigeria; which would be why, at one point, Ibrahim Babangida, as the head of the Nigerian State, would gladly proclaim the necessity of the “brain drain” that had led to massive migration of real and potential intellectual talents out of Nigeria, as a good source of foreign exchange, as if the acquisition of foreign exchange is an end in itself and a Goodluck Jonathan would openly proclaim that “stealing is not corruption” where one of his ministers would be alleged to have pocketed Nine Billion US dollars, beyond the wildest dreams of many a large multi-national corporation.
In contrast, by the time of self-government in the Western Region and subsequent formal Independence, a new State Apparatus was coming into being. This new development arose from, and was embedded in the People’s socio-cultural experiences and expectations such that the degree of alienation by the colonial State was consciously, continuously and considerably reduced. It was a call to a higher ideal, expressed formally by the Egbe Omo Oduduwa in the Preamble to its Constitution thus: [b]“ The present division of Nigeria into Three Regions calls for the development of each region according to its tradition and culture. It affords an opportunity for rapid advancement without sacrificing valuable institution and for organizing a strong, efficient and modernized State with its own individuality within the Federal State of Nigeria. It is the unity of members of each Region to further its interest and ensure that it plays its proper role in the new Nigeria in full and equal co-operation with the other Regions.
The Western Provinces are well placed for the realization of these ideals as they are inhabited by the Yoruba and other “tribes”(ed) that either derive from there or have been in close political connection with them for a long time. Their Institutions are similar in a remarkable degree and their culture is essentially the same. The term “Yoruba” is, therefore, largely inclusive and the language itself enjoys wide currency throughout the region. It is in the belief that the other Regions will do likewise that we, as members of the Western Provinces seek to organize and unite the various elements in the region, in order to accelerate the emergence of a virile Yoruba State.”[/b]
The emerging State knew that achieving the above would require an industrialized and productive society which will also depend on the necessary human infrastructure for its maintenance, hence the introduction of its social welfare policies. Using Free Education as an example, it enabled the industrial paradigms of the emerging State to achieve its aim of a higher ideal while the society, through this foundation, was able to generate the necessary atmosphere, labor and management. The results are available for all to see.
Indeed our “traditional rulers” like the then Ooni, Oba Adesoji Aderemi and the Alake, Oba Ademola, were very instrumental in “selling” the idea and its practice to the people, just as they were also active participants in policy making and direction of the then Western Region Government. When it is therefore now being said that “traditional rulers” must be “insulated from politics” it was/is a negation of their role in their society, which had already conferred on them the primary role of being the defenders and custodians of the peoples’ existentialism which was in direct contrast to the colonial power’s purpose of taking complete control of the society’s political life.
In coming to this realization, the emerging State drew heavily on the peoples’ cultural experiences and because it had the capacity to effect any changes as necessary, it was able to develop its emerging nature with the aspirations of the people, through the development and promotion of, Yoruba History, culture and Yoruba Language, a sine qua non for development, in spite of the constraints of colonial State Apparatus.
In these times of “Change” therefore, Nigeria cannot pretend to exist outside the context of her socio-cultural evolution, otherwise, we will again be papering over the cracks until the “fire next time” when the failure of the State will once again stare us in the face. Ise Ya

www.ooduapathfinder.com
By adminadmin July 28, 2015



Current events in Nigeria have created the intersections of the political and economic contradictions that would necessarily result in addressing the deformities of the Nigerian State Structure. Corruption, being the abuse of office and power, leading to, among others, outright stealing of public resources as well as manipulation of settled and accepted procedure for purposes other than what they were meant for is therefore not about the Peoples of Nigeria but about its State Apparatus, which ordinarily ought to mediate the social, political and economic relationships of the Peoples at different levels. The Legislature, being one of the political methodologies of this mediation cannot therefore be based on a negation of its own raison d’etre; for it is supposed to be the law making section of governance hence cannot be run on an illegality.
The Nigeria Police has determined that the election which produced the current Senate leadership on June 9, 2015 was based on an illegality, more-so on a fraud anchored on a forged document passing as its Standing Order. The “elected” Senate President and his deputy cannot claim ignorance of this forgery as they were both active senators pre-2015 hence were and are aware of its standard operating procedure and are therefore culpable.
“ooduapathfinder” says that since the “Change” we want includes fighting corruption, it must start with the current senate leadership which must be made to resign their positions, at the minimum. They must also be disallowed from further contesting any leadership position in the senate, including chairmanship of any committees and must be prosecuted for criminal behavior as ascertained by the Police. If found guilty, they must face the consequences and be removed from the senate. To sustain this illegality under any guise is to create avenues for decriminalizing all actions adjudged to be criminal under laws enacted by this senate, including transferred laws and Acts.
If none of these occur, “ooduapathfinder” says the legitimacy of the Legislature and therefore of the Nigerian State Apparatus is on the line. Even though the President and the Vice-President were democratically elected hence legitimate, they cannot function with an illegitimate, illegal and criminally-led Legislature; otherwise, the Peoples of Nigeria will have the absolute right to be able to pick and choose what to observe and obey within the general principles of the State, which leads directly into the legitimacy or otherwise of the Constitution of Nigeria.
In the aftermath of the return to civilian rule, it was discovered that a fraudulent claim was embedded in the 1999 Nigerian Constitution when it stated thus: “We the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Having firmly and solemnly resolve, to live in unity and harmony as one indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation under God, dedicated to the promotion of inter-African solidarity, world peace, international co-operation and understanding. And to provide for a Constitution for the purpose of promoting the good government and welfare of all persons in our country, on the principles of freedom, equality and justice, and for the purpose of consolidating the unity of our people. Do hereby make, enact and give to ourselves the following Constitution..”
If it is assumed that the 1999 Constitution was a continuation of the 1979 Constitution even as it was not expressly stated, “the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria” does not exist, now or even in 1979, much less in 1999. Nigeria has various Peoples and at no time did these Peoples come together and “firmly and solemnly” resolve anything. A Constitution, as the Grundnorm, cannot substitute a singularity for a plurality, otherwise, it becomes an agent of negation which will run counter to its own expectations of itself.
That the Nigerian State Apparatus went on living in this denial would be one of the major reasons why corruption festered and now resulting in the actions of the current senate leadership, while midwifing the downward spiral of Nigeria’s internal economic conditions, politically compounded by creating more states within the same economic paradigm ultimately resulting in the economic crisis recently faced by the states. Thus, political and economic conditions now exist for a fundamental look at Nigeria’s Grundnorm.
In anticipation of this, Yoruba People, one of the many Peoples of Nigeria, got together and produced their own Constitution as the basis for which they can “firmly and solemnly” resolve to live in unity and harmony with other Peoples.
The process of producing this Draft Constitution involved many and different sectors of the Yoruba People, and was agreed upon via a Constituent Assembly even as the effort was almost truncated by Afenifere, which wanted to take over the process for its own narrow and opportunistic purposes but gracefully thwarted by committed Yoruba Patriots. It was thus no accident that Afenifere ended up with the Jonathan forces through the Jonathan-induced National Conference to try to truncate all the articles of the Yoruba Draft and substitute them with their complete negation.
Hence, if none of the demands enumerated above goes unfulfilled, “ooduapathfinder” calls on the Yoruba People, at home(Nigeria)and abroad(all of the Diaspora) to pursue the ratification of the Draft, including any changes, by our various Governments and Houses of Assembly as a prelude to the Oodua Regional Government.

www.ooduapathfinder.com

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”.

www.ooduapathfinder.com



The crisis rocking NASS is a pointer to the necessity for Constitutional Reforms without which the Changes proposed by the APC would not see the light of day as many of the issues embedded in the Changes are of a Constitutional nature. It is therefore not unexpected that the battle being waged in NASS is taking place within the context of the economic downturn being experienced in Nigeria where the APC is determined to put in place measures that would cause a fundamental change, such change being an attempt at realizing the expectations of the Nigerian people.
The purveyors of the anti-Change battle, expressed in the form of disobedience to Party directives, are not unaware of this impending solution but are simply impervious to it as the battle is being waged purposely to maintain the status quo and render any possibilities of change possible. The APC is thus embroiled in a double take of having to engage itself in countering the attacks, in the pan-Nigerian sense while also maintaining its commitment to its own Manifesto of Change, otherwise it will simply become immersed in unnecessary power struggles with such struggle being an end in itself; albeit creating an illusion of having to create the necessary institutional space for the implementation of such Changes.
In both cases, a relentless determination by these opponents of Change becomes an on-going characteristic, going for the jugular by not only attempting to take over the NASS with the expectation of having the APC Presidency and its politics of Change under threat, but also trying to cause disaffection and distraction among the general populace based on the current economic malaise of which the PDP Governments are the main beneficiaries.
Yet, the APC can be said to be the most cohesive platform embracing progressive tendencies in the country’s politics, the neutralization of which will not only decimate the APC but also the entire progressive political enterprise in Nigeria.
For Yorubaland, two definite goals are obvious from these opponents: (1) Maintaining the status quo of power relations at the Center based on the retention of current economic paradigms thus resisting the economic and political changes to be manifested through the proposed “leaner” government and (2) Alienating the APC from the rest of Yorubaland(SW) as being a “foreign”, Lagos-based “invasion” of the rest of Yorubaland, a tactic previously employed in the 2012 Ondo State Gubernatorial election, where, now, the emergence of the renegade Lasun Yussuf from Osun State as the deputy Speaker is being hailed by these opposition as being good for Yorubaland because “Lagos was denied the slot” . This most invidious sentiment being promoted by the opposition in Yorubaland must be vigorously combatted, especially now that the next Ondo Governorship election is coming up in a short while where the current Ondo Governor is the beneficiary of such a mantra as well as the leader of this opposition in Yorubaland.
In historical terms, the APC(National), in its entirety, and in consonance with its promotion of change as its major political and economic objective, has taken upon itself the task of effecting the necessary Changes, albeit within the context of extant political institutions, notably the NASS, which ordinarily ought to be the testing ground for all the Changes proposed by the APC. This approach is now being negated by the opposition relying not only on the resistance to the Changes but actually waving the perks and patronages associated with the extant situation as its end goal.
It is therefore imperative for the APC(National) to develop appropriate responses in line with the peoples’ expectations as well as its own values of Change that will enlist the support of the various Peoples of Nigeria, especially when the Peoples are faced with such enormous economic and political challenges such that an Alternative economic and political proposition will constitute the main battle line with the opposition. In other words, the Narrative must be Changed in order to reflect the Expectations of Change.
To bring about the above, there is the necessity for contextualization within Nigeria’s current economic mess and the demands of a leaner Government being advocated by the APC, which will also address, directly or indirectly, issues about representation; as in whether Federating Units can determine their own limits on National/Federal representation and remuneration, an issue now exposed through the jumbo pay being enjoyed by these legislators which will, ipso facto, delve into leadership/remuneration issues bedeviling the NASS; issues of discipline, whether by a political party or the Federating Unit concerned hence the necessity or otherwise of retaining the current political structure all of which form the foundation of our expectations of Change. In short, this expectation challenges the continuity of the present political edifice in its current form which is the fundamental issue in this process of Change.
For the SW/Yorubaland, this will formally challenge, headlong, the “Lagos Invasion” mantra within the Yoruba political and Cultural context as well as the opposition’s proposition being promoted by the surreptitious introduction of Jonathan’s Conference recommendations which only aims at more “statification” of the country in tandem with the “Lagos Invasion” narrative; where, for example, states currently under economic stress will be expected to create a “State police” to be funded with currently scarce funds.
“ooduapathfinder” says that the APC has been handed a golden opportunity to up the ante in order to effect its own Changes by the antics of the opposition in collaboration with the renegades within the Party and whose basis is the 16-year rule of the PDP culminating in the total collapse of the economy witnessed under the last PDP regime. Political morality demands that the opposition must be denied its own expectations which are based simply on power for its own sake; for the end result of the NASS imbroglio is power and its all of its accoutrements, and for its own sake. Whereas the economic paradigms in APC states have occurred within the limitations imposed by the current structure, which, by and large, have sustained the people’s expectations.
To effect this, “ooduapathfinder” says the APC should commence a process where the will of the Peoples are formally expressed beyond the Party’s Constitution, through the instrumentality of the country’s Constitution. Whereas, the current Constitution is supposed to be amended only by a top-down process where it is initiated by and through NASS, and whereas the same NASS has become the problem and an albatross on the Peoples, the APC will be on good grounds to initiate such a Constitutional Amendment process from and through the States and by way of Executive Action through the State and Federal Executives. A Constitution, being the Grundnorm, can only be legitimate if it reflects, in totality, the will of the Peoples. It will not be impossible for the APC to get the required number of States to effect this Amendment, even if the NASS leadership as currently being constituted is against it. Such a leadership cannot override the two thirds of the States and therefore the Peoples that would sign up for such and confirmed in a Referendum of the Peoples which NASS and its renegade leadership has no control over.
The generality of the Nigerian Peoples are currently at war with the NASS, in general and the APC will be concretizing its own Change by changing the way, manner of existence and operation of NASS to the advantage of the Peoples. Our expectations of Change demand and deserve no less.

www.ooduapathfinder.com


Although the Inaugural speech of an incoming elected administration is not expected to be a Policy-making speech, it offers clues as to the mindset as well as the expectations of the speech maker. These expectations are necessarily placed within the context of its immediate reality with its many dimensions captured in the speech thus setting the stage for the actions and inactions of the in-coming government, even way beyond its term in office. Thus, during Muhammadu Buhari’s Inaugural speech, he captured most of Nigeria’s history, both on his own personal level as well as that of Nigeria, all within the context of APC’s “Change” momentum, which was a reflection of the seriousness he, and by implication, his party, attaches to these issues. Overall, the speech reflected a cause and effect; the cause being ensconced in the past and the effect in the present.
As was the case during Africa’s “wind of change”, when such wind virtually challenged the then settled course of world politics through the independence of the colonies, the present “Change” being advocated by the APC, and which is the party’s core value, is also happening in a world pregnant with Change.
The Middle East is witnessing a radical transformation of the after-effects of the earlier wind of change where the settled issue of the State is being vigorously, violently and in some instances, evilly challenged, such that the gift of change bequeathed by colonial thought process and its attendant economic and political structures can no longer resolve any crisis and cannot also mediate its own continuity or give birth to a new experience. All of these are not about “regime change” or economic methodologies but simply about National Expressions, even if manifested within religious or political prisms, as these have become their realities of today, the effect of its own wind of change. Thus, participants in the Middle East change process are not only defiant of the colonially-driven State borders but are not even restricted to only the Middle East as they have found and are vigorously seeking, collaborators from outside the Middle East, again within the context of their reality subsumed within religious and political experiences.
Europe itself is not left out; even if it can be said that the European experience had been continuous all along, with similar expectations as those of the Middle East, but with less violence and virulence, all because the European ruling regimes, in most cases, not only recognize these expectations, but actively promote the aspirations; hence, Czechoslovakia could break up without incident, the USSR also found its own solutions, largely without violence but Yugoslavia ended up with violence largely because of the insensitivity of its own ruling regime.

Yet, one of the major players in the wind of change, the United Kingdom, is also now confronted with Change, at this time, where Scotland has not only just undergone a Referendum on its Independence from the UK but is following up on the rejection of Independence via demands for more powers for itself; just as other nations within the UK are also pursuing their own ways. It is also instructive that the UK now officially refers to itself as a “family of Nations”, even as Spain, with its fascist-induced State is trying to balk from its own responsibilities vis-à-vis its own ‘family of nations”.
All of these simply go to show how the history of the State is not only being shaped by an abstract Europe, but largely by her own Peoples, the family of Nations of Europe, without descending into the chaos of the Middle East even as they had, at one time or the other, passed through such a stage, for itself and not as a consequence of another.
When, therefore, Muhammadu Buhari, in his Inaugural Speech, stated the following:
“Insecurity, pervasive corruption, the hitherto unending and seemingly impossible fuel and power shortages are the immediate concerns. We are going to tackle them head on. Nigerians will not regret that they have entrusted national responsibility to us. We must not succumb to hopelessness and defeatism. We can fix our problems.
In recent times Nigerian leaders appear to have misread our mission. Our founding fathers, Mr Herbert Macauley, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Malam Aminu Kano, Chief J.S. Tarka, Mr Eyo Ita, Chief Denis Osadeby, Chief Ladoke Akintola and their colleagues worked to establish certain standards of governance. They might have differed in their methods or tactics or details, but they were united in establishing a viable and progressive country. Some of their successors behaved like spoilt children breaking everything and bringing disorder to the house.
Furthermore, we as Nigerians must remind ourselves that we are heirs to great civilizations: Shehu Othman Dan fodio’s caliphate, the Kanem Borno Empire, the Oyo Empire, the Benin Empire and King Jaja’s formidable domain. The blood of those great ancestors flow in our veins. What is now required is to build on these legacies, to modernize and uplift Nigeria.
Daunting as the task may be it is by no means insurmountable. There is now a national consensus that our chosen route to national development is democracy. To achieve our objectives we must consciously work the democratic system”, it can only follow that he has recognized the current atmosphere in the world and cannot but situate his own, and therefore, his party’s solutions within that context. For what he referred to as being of immediate concerns are anchored on the nature and function of the State as the mediator between and within the “family of Nations” that was also recognized along with how the founding fathers attempted to tackle the issue.
To “build on the legacies” is to involve the Nations as the builders which will also flow with the acceptance, by national consensus, of democracy as the chosen route to national development. This is more so when the peoples of Africa have been largely taken out of making their own histories, which has rendered the “legacies” either redundant or in perpetual conflict with itself and with others. Africa has thus been made a participant in the formation of a State in which it has no input and the contradictions and the “immediate concerns” have become permanent concerns because they are end-products of such a State.
As earlier noted, the rest of the world has recognized this and are pursuing its resolution along with ensuring the re-organization of the parameters of the relationships within the family and the re-ordering the apparatus of its own mediation-the State.
At Independence, Nigeria’s founding fathers ensured this recognition thus fought very hard to make the nations active participants in their own history, hence the adoption of a Federal system, even if with the recognition of only the largest Nations in the country with the intention of getting other Nations into the orbit. Unfortunately, this was aborted by the attempt at negating this process through what Muhammadu Buhari described as behaving “like spoilt children breaking everything and bringing disorder to the house”, manifested in the neutralization of the Independence(and Republican Constitutions) as well as the rejection of “Decree 8” of 1967.
Yet, it is common knowledge that efforts at addressing what is now referred to as being of “immediate concerns” were confronted head-on in those times by the founding fathers with each of the Nations being satisfied both on the pace of the solution as well as the potentials for the future, before the interference of the “spoilt children”.
The effects of this interference is still with us today, being the cause of the “immediate concerns”, hence the beginning of the solution ought to be the removal of the impediments created by these “spoilt children” which is based on the nature and structure of the Nigerian State as the mediator of the relationships.
When “ooduapathfinder” now proposes a “Return”, it is an advocacy for a Return to the pre- spoilt-children period, where Nigeria had a Federal Constitution which is essentially the recognition of Nigeria as a “family of Nations”. The recognition of the “heirs to the great civilizations” without their own input as to the structure and nature of their State will make nonsense of the greatness of those civilizations, which “ooduapathfinder” will not attribute to Muhammadu Buhari and the APC.
Where then do we go from here? “ooduapathfinder” says the APC government at the Center must provide the environment for the involvement of the Nations, without necessarily setting up a “conference” by whatever name called; hence, for the Yoruba Nation, we support the proposals presented by the Egbe Omo Oduduwa at the March Ibadan Yoruba Summit, to wit: the necessity for a Yoruba Constitutional Convention to fashion out its own Nation’s Grundorm with the 1960/1963 Federal Constitutions as a framework and ratified by a Yoruba National Referendum; while other Nations in Nigeria can organize their own Constitutional Conventions with similar ratification Referendums. A Federal Constitutional Convention will be held to ratify whatever will be agreed upon as to the nature of the Nigerian State, which becomes the realization of ourselves as the “heirs to the great civilizations”.
“ooduapathfinder” believes the Center need not fund these activities as this will be a beckoning to the Nations to become active participants in the making of their own history, through this input, to the remaking of history currently going on in the world of today.

www.ooduapathfinder.com
adminadmin on May 23, 2015



Historically, May 29 is very significant for both the Northern and the Western parts of Nigeria. For the North, it was the day the Caliphate was established ; while for the West, it was what Awo described as the “twilight of democracy” following the illegal and unconstitutional declaration of a State of Emergency in the Western Region of Nigeria by the NPC/NCNC coalition Government. It was thus curious that the post-military civilian administration set aside the day as its “Democracy day” when it formally transferred power back to the civilians.
During colonial rule, the Nigerian Army had seen itself as the embodiment of the Nigerian ethos, Nigerian nationhood, even as the political governance was weighted heavily in favor of the North through a population census that gave it a parliamentary majority sustained by its alliance with the East, to the detriment of the West.
APC’s recent defeat of the PDP, despite the PDP’s over-pampering by the military in the last four years, constituted an ironic historical twist. Regardless of whatever causes are identified by pundits and party fanatics for the defeat, the fact of the matter is that the PDP as a political party as well as the brainchild of the military appears to have run its historical course. Thus, its replacement, the APC, as the agent of this historical change, must not only create and maintain the change momentum, it must go to the root of the issues that have hobbled Nigeria’s development since independence.
Since 1960, Nigeria has experimented with three forms of government: Parliamentary, Military and Presidential, with the last two being a combined negation of the first, in place since 1970. Thus, the two systems, roughly evenly divided over 45 years of post-Independence governance between them, have revolved around the same formulae, designed apparently to make the civilian administrations administer a parasitic non-productive economy and corrupt polity that eventually spawned more corruption, dwindling revenue, insecurity and complete underdevelopment that appeared to have brought the country to a standstill before the 2015 presidential election.
The APC cannot but take a different course if it is to tackle these issues. It cannot afford to merely strengthen its resolve to tackle corruption and insecurity without re-forming the State itself. The foundation of the Nigerian State is corrupt—from the census manipulation at Independence up till the last census to the usurpation of political power by the military to the imposition of a Constitutional order on the country in the name of the people who were not consulted before the launching of the 1999 Constitution after the election that brought General Olusegun Obasanjo to power at the end of the transition to civil rule under the management of General Abdusalaam Abubakar.
Even if we are to limit the solution to all of Nigeria’s problems to curtailing or reducing the 70% of the budget being spent on recurrent expenditure as a corrective measure, the Constitution of Nigeria must be changed or amended; for these issues are Constitutionally-mandated, one way or the other. Unless we want to remain perpetually on the same spot while hoping to be in a movement, the issue of Corruption and Insecurity cannot be decently tackled without querying the underlying suppositions embedded in the country’s foundational laws. From all of these, it is very clear that the major missing factor is the People. The Peoples of Nigeria were not responsible for this missing link as, in essence, they were not complicit even as they may be regarded as acquiescing.
This is why it becomes imperative for the Peoples to become active participants in the change represented by the APC which has no choice but to request, indeed demand such participation to such an extent that the Peoples must manifest this even if there were competing tendencies within APC capable of making the party complacent in its electoral victory.
Just as a change of course is being advocated as far as APC is concerned, so it is for the “self-determination groups” to prepare for change. So, how does this become an essential part of political reality, especially in Yorubaland/South West? Because the Change Nigeria needs is so fundamental, every interest group is promoting its solutions. So does the incoming Government has its own projected solutions, which, may not be effective as long as such solutions get imprisoned within the fundamental laws that created the problems in the first instance. So, while some of the laws can be addressed and changed, others cannot be easily and effectively changed, without addressing the country’s grundnorm. And that is the main task ahead, at this point. It is no longer enough to simply advocate for Restructuring/Self-Determination/Autonomy. It is now time to situate these within the context of the new politics of change. It thus becomes a matter of practical necessity for the SW/Yorubaland to determine its own form of Change within the overall context of Nigeria.
Economic development cannot manifest outside the production of knowledge. Thus, for Yorubaland/SW our educational establishments must be based on Yoruba language as the language of instruction from the primary up to undergraduate levels; 50% at the graduate levels, gradually increasing up till it reaches 100%. Not only would this approach prevent the collapse of a historical language, it will also tackle some of the issues left over by decolonization where the Yoruba outside Nigeria are also under the yoke of a “foreign” language and, by extension, culture. Of course, this effort alone, would become an economic powerhouse in terms of job creation and maintenance.
Supervision of our educational institutions would be under local control with the State/Region only providing advisory/supervisory roles. Consequently, what we now have as “SUBEB” would be replaced with local boards, directly within the communities they operate in, in order to create opportunities for accountability and transparency as well as develop the innate ability of residents to become active participants in the the present and future.
Furthermore, the atomization of our education, especially tertiary institutions, must be completely overhauled and replaced with a Regional University system, with some campuses specifically dedicated to producing teachers, studies and research in Yoruba Language while foreigners or non-Yoruba speakers wishing to study in Yorubaland must pass proficiency tests in the Language.
The resuscitation of National Bank or creating a new Regional Development Bank, as an economic imperative, coupled with the restructuring of Oodua Investments into a private sector driven entity, where those chosen to represent the owner- states will be subject to confirmation through an indirect process by the residents of the states and in an open and transparent manner so that its political excesses can minimized.
These and many more are the basic issues which the self-determination groups must saddle themselves with, as their contribution to the process of change. The political implication of all of these would mean the non-interference of the Nigerian center in our political processes, such that our electoral processes are not dependent on a central organization but wholly on our own needs.
Thus, as Nigeria has passed through various political stages, we can comfortably decide on which we have experienced as being the most beneficial, which, in spite of its flaws, was the Parliamentary System.
The Political and Economic imperatives of Change, therefore, must be based on addressing the Re-Formation of the Nigerian State, as a matter of necessity. This does not depend on any new “national” Conference. Not only have we had several of such conferences with nothing to show for them but the incoming Government has also set up different committees to develop its own Change agenda. As the Peoples are out of this loop, what is necessary is for the Peoples to develop their own paradigms. Thus, for Yorubaland and the SW, the momentum should now be how to ensure such needs are placed before the right quarters for action, on the basis that these are the demands of the People. That is the minimum imperative. The matter of how to contribute ideas to the type of federalism that the Yoruba want cannot be left to just a few thinkers. It must be subjected to approval of the people of each region calling for re-federalization of the country

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A Yoruba aphorism says “eekini, ijesu; eekeji, ijewura, eeketa, l’ajenjetan”; literally and loosely translated as in Ian Fleming’s “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and the third time it’s enemy action”. The recent face-off between the Yoruba and Igbo in the governorship electoral contest in Lagos fits perfectly into this scenario and reflected the culture-clash that had conditioned relations between the two Nationalities. It is one thing for an individual or some individuals, as citizens of a country, to reject a cultural-political norm in the environment they find themselves; it is another for a non-indigenous Nationality to assume superiority over the natives as the Igbo are doing in Lagos and other parts of Yorubaland. Their attitude is anchored on what the Igbo claim to be their “citizenship” where they claim they have the right to deny indigeneity as a necessity in their perception of “nation-building”. Thus, for the Igbo “citizens” the long and short of their Lagos gubernatorial gambit is to launch a direct assault on the political reality of the Yoruba in Lagos, whose ownership is an existential paradigm of the Yoruba, whereby Yoruba citizenship conditioned on her indigeneity would be rendered obsolete based on Igbo historical and existential perception.
The electoral race thus became a contest between the two opposing paradigms, albeit within the context of the Nigerian Republic; which must call to attention the definition of such a Republic as either a negation of the Yoruba existentialism or the affirmation of its Igbo negation. The Presidential election had been won and lost before this conflict, otherwise, the Igbo, as had so often happened, would simply have relied on the power of the Center to impose its negation on Yorubaland. The story of this electoral gambit need not be retold but its history must be told and retold otherwise the Yoruba Nation will fall victim to her own lackadaisical approach to her issues.

Eekini: The first time; the happenstance.
The Egbe Omo Oduduwa, formed in London in 1945, was formally inaugurated in Ile-Ife in June 1948 within the context of the then emerging anti-colonial struggles, with the control of and over Lagos being paramount. There were different responses to the formation by different Nationalities and political groups, including the Yoruba, as would be expected, but by far the most vicious opposition came from the Igbo in Lagos, directly as members of the Igbo Nationality as well as being members of the Nnamidi Azikiwe-led NCNC. This took the form of organizing street demonstrations against the Egbe; setting up of a rival “Yoruba Federal Union” etc.
It must be noted that while the Nnamidi Azikiwe-led NCNC was pulling the strings and throwing his weight behind the Ibo State Union to promote exclusive Igbo interests, he wanted other Yoruba to rise against the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, which was principally meant for similar purposes among the Yoruba thus beginning the trend whereby the Igbo would reject what it feels is not in their interest at the same time try to impose such rejection on the rest of the society under the banner of “nationalism” which made Charles Onyeama to state at the Island Club, Lagos, that the East(Igbo) did not require cooperation with the West as the Igbo represented the rising sun and the West represented the setting sun and that the Igbo domination of Nigeria is a matter of time.
Nnamidi Azikiwe also made references to machetes in a speech at an Igbo meeting in Lagos which made the Igbo rush to buy up all available machetes in Lagos markets in preparation for what the Igbo expect as the coming “Armageddon” on the Yoruba even as the Igbo decided that all personal attacks on Nnamidi Azikiwe should be regarded as an attack on the Igbo Nation with Azikiwe’s “West African Pilot”, declaring, in its editorial, that “henceforth, the cry must be one of battle against Egbe Omo Oduduwa, its leaders at home and abroad, uphill and down dale, in the streets of Nigeria and in the residence of its advocates. The Egbe Omo Oduduwa is the enemy of Nigeria; it must be crushed to the earth. There is no going back, until the fascist organization of Sir Adeyemo Alakija has been dismembered”.
In response, the Egbe’s then General Secretary, Chief Obafemi Awolowo charged the Yoruba to see all of these as a challenge, that if any attack on Azikiwe is an attack on the Igbo, then the attack should go on with unabated fury; that the Yoruba had thought that what was going on was an issue between individuals but if the Igbo made Azikiwe’s cause theirs, the Yoruba should make Alakija’s, Maja’s, Davies’ causes theirs also for to do otherwise would be to dethrone reason; that such a response would put this Igbo suicidal madness in its place and he declared unequivocally that Lagos was a Yoruba Town; and that the Igbo cannot terrorize its Yoruba inhabitants into a submissive silence. Thus, in 1948, the first salvo of war was fired; and Yoruba leaders at the time did not hide behind any attempt at diplomacy but took on the challenge head on.

Eekeji: the second time; the coincidence

The year was 1967, during The Nigeria-Biafra war and the Biafrans decided to invade Yorubaland under the pretext of capturing Lagos, since it was the Federal capital. Ordinarily, this may sound reasonable but a second look would suggest that Biafra, having already declared its sovereignty, made no attempt to negotiate either a “safe passage” to Lagos, even after the Yoruba had successfully negotiated the return of Northern soldiers stationed in Yorubaland back to the North or get the Yoruba nation become active participants in the overall war strategy. Rather, what Biafra did was to invest itself with all political and military decisions regarding Lagos and the rest of Yorubaland.
The following was the essential Biafran conditionality for the “liberation” of Yorubaland:
After clearing the whole question with my Executive Council, I, as the Commander in Chief of the Biafran Armed Forces, have decided to place at your disposal Biafran forces, for the liberation of Yorubaland on the following clear conditions:-

(i) You will have nothing to do with the Military Administrator in the Mid-West Territory during your sojourn there prior to your move to the West.
(ii) The willingness and preparedness of Biafra to assist any part of the former Federation of Nigeria wishing and willing to liberate itself from the Hausa/Fulani domination, does not in anyway whatever imply any inclination on her part to compromise her sovereignty or preserve what remains of the defunct Federation of Nigeria. In other words, our sovereignty and break with Nigeria is irrevocable. Nothing must, therefore be said or done by you or any member of the Liberation Army to give a contrary impression.
(iii) Biafra is determined to maintain and safeguard her sovereignty and ensure that her integrity and safety are never again threatened.
(iv) Biafran troops will, after the liberation of the Yorubaland, remain in that territory only for as long as we in Biafra consider it necessary for the Yorubas to consolidate their position and sovereignty against any external threat.
(v) On the liberation of the Yorubaland, you will be appointed as the Military Governor of that territory.
(vi) The liberation of Western Nigeria will be a prelude to the liberation of all Yorubas up to the River Niger and the severance of all connections between the West and the North at Jebba.
(vii) During the period of Biafrans troops’ presence in your territory, all political measures, statements or decrees shall be subject to the approval, in writing by myself or on my authority.
(viii) Should our troops arrive and liberate Lagos, the government of the Republic of Biafra reserves the right to appoint a Military administrator for the territory. Such an Administrator will remain in office until a merger of that territory with Yorubaland is effected by Biafran troops.
(ix) As soon as possible after your appointment as the Military Governor of Western Nigeria and separation of that territory from Nigeria, you and I must meet to discuss:
(a) the duration of stay of Biafran troops in your territory;
(b) the areas and subjects of cooperation between the liberated sovereign states of Western Nigeria, or by what name it may call itself, and Biafra.
From these, it is very clear that Biafra’s aim was not “liberation” but annexation and control of Yorubaland. However, Yoruba leaders, learning from both the Yoruba historical as well as the more recent experiences, checkmated the move causing the famous Battle of Ore.

Eeketa: ajenjetan; enemy action

The April 11, 2015 Lagos Gubernatorial election, which formed the background to this Editorial, easily constitutes the third attempt by the Igbo at taking over Lagos, and ultimately Yorubaland. In the process, decorum was thrown to the winds; our cultural existentialism was rubbished under the altar of “citizenship” along with such pomposity recalling what Chief Awolowo, in 1948, referred to as “suicidal madness which must be put in its place”.
“ooduapathfinder” says this is the time to put this “suicidal madness in its place”. The main reason for the advocacy of Federalism in Nigeria (and indeed Africa) is the plurality, expressed in the various multi-cultural and multi-lingual entities. Therefore, putting this recurring “suicidal madness in its place” must mean the recognition of the social and political spaces of all Nationalities in Nigeria based on a correct and real definition of what and who makes up Nigeria, famously referred to as “Components” or “Federating Units”, territorially and socio-culturally, via the Constitutional Re-Formation of the Nation-State.
As a first step, new forms of electoral methodologies must be adopted where all elections(even within a Union electoral time table) are the prerogatives of the Nationalities who will elect their own local and Union legislative and executive representatives on their own terms thereby contextualizing representation as a function of peculiarities of the Nationalities. Furthermore, the bloated recurrent expenditure currently accounting for over 70% of all revenue generated for Nigeria will be greatly reduced, as such representation will go hand-in-hand with responsibility of and from the Nationalities. The Executive of the central leadership of the Re-Formed Nation-State will be collective and rotating among the Nationality representatives so chosen.
Re-Formation of the Nation-State must thus be the priority of Nigeria’s new found hope in the election of the APC as Nigeria’s dominant political party. The roadmap towards True Federalism, which is recognized by the APC in its Manifesto is no rocket science; for all the Nationalities can organize themselves into arriving at such solutions which will form the basis for negotiating a Truly Federal Republic. This will be the first and necessary step.

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“ooduapathfinder” congratulates the vast majority of the Yoruba who refused to be bought, goaded or intimidated into the opportunism represented by those gathered together as Afenifere in Yorubaland. This congratulations is for the victory in a battle well fought and won. Next in line are the Governorships on April 11 and we are also sure of victory. This victory has opened a new door for progress and development and Yoruba Nation’s particular contribution to socio-economic development of the world as entrenched in our collective memory and practicalized through our various interventions on the crisis of development and underdevelopment of and in Nigeria. The new dawn that was established at independence now has a new lease of life–thanks to your steadfastness and that of our political leaders in the APC, for giving all of us a hope in our various little corners of activity. While continually soaking ourselves in this celebration, we must also recognize the fact that our political trajectory had been bastardized by Afenifere, hence the necessity to reclaim it from them, while leaving them to remain in the dustbin of history to which they have consigned themselves.
“Afenifere”, for the Yoruba, philosophically, means “freedom for all, life more abundant”; which was why its original quest, encapsulated in “Freedom for all” was for “True Federalism” in Nigeria which would allow all of the Nations/Peoples that make up the entity to develop its own inherent potentials to the utmost limit without being hamstrung by any overarching apparatus, in line with the best practices of multi-lingual and multi-cultural countries in the world.
“Life more abundant” became the platform for the social, cultural and economic well-being of the society whose foundation was laid in the Western Region of Nigeria through various forms, notably Economic development agencies and industrial nurturing establishments, educational promotion via the Universal and free primary education as well as provision of educational scholarships topped with the all-round development of the physical and spiritual well-being of the individual. All of these were possible because the Yoruba Nation, as well as the non-Yoruba resident in the Western Region, were able to have political authority over themselves in the form of Regionalism that ushered in Nigeria’s independence; a Regionalism that not only benefited the Western Region, but also the Northern and Eastern Regions as well; for they also embarked on political and economic activities their political leaders at the time thought not only feasible but also necessary.
Unfortunately, the unresolved conclusion of the anti-colonial struggles, which failed to define the nature of Nigeria as a country of Nationalities/Peoples preferring to see it as a single “Nigerian” object created room for the negation of this Regionalism/Federalism such that attempts were made to subject all of the Nigerian peoples into “one” entity which eventually led to the Nigeria-Biafra war and its consequences. Thus, the problem of Nigeria became the problem of definition of “one”; either as a singularity or a plurality; for “one” in this instance, is not a mathematical but a social concept. Its reduction into its mathematical component created the problem with Nigeria as a concept.
Similarly, “Afenifere” as a philosophy became transformed into an organizational framework with the end result of neutralizing the philosophy itself; for a philosophy can be applied to any given situation without losing its philosophical essence, in terms of questioning or defining its environment, but an organization will certainly lose its essence, by definition, since it may have to adapt to changing circumstances, which changes can also be brought about by the interaction of philosophical exchanges in the society.
Thus, when “Afenifere” became an “organization”, it had to jettison one or the other; just as the various Communist parties of old, choosing to be called communist parties only because of their espousal of social democratic objectives by which their political platforms were generally known and based on their advocacy of communism as the preferred political goal; “Afenifere” fell into the same pit.
Since its organizational creation, during the Abacha dictatorship, Afenifere had been unable to sustain the promotion of the historical philosophical objectives while navigating its political positions within the existing political organizations that abound. Hence, by the return to civil rule in 1999, it rode on the Yoruba political existential paradigm, without which it would not have even been recognized to contest in the then emerging political scenario, by setting up the Alliance for Democracy as its political platform.
Just as “Afenifere” was the Action Group’s philosophy; the Alliance for Democracy sought to make it its own philosophy. But while the AG, even while transiting into the UPN retained the philosophy, the new leaders, now identifying themselves as “Afenifere” determined it as both an organization as well as a philosophy.
Its history from 1999 saw a gradual demotion of the philosophy in favor of the promotion of the organization; hence, “Afenifere” turned or attempted to turn itself into the voice of the Yoruba Nation, as an organization, and with it naturally came all of the political somersaults and even wrong-headed political decisions that could only end up where it is now; a major example being the decision to make “Afenifere” a home to any one, irrespective of one’s political affiliation thus diffusing its philosophical essence.
By the time of Goodluck Jonathan’s preparations for his re-election, Afenifere, the organization, was the first to overturn the philosophy it originally existed for. Being the definition of the Action Group, itself being based on the Egbe Omo Oduduwa’s promotion of “True Federalism”, there can be no Afenifere philosophy outside True Federalism.
It will not be necessary to go into full details of the Egbe’s proposals here, but suffice it to say that the Egbe embarked on historical, cultural and political moves to ensure its goals of value-driven Regional development within the context of one Nigeria. Prominent among the Egbe’s objectives was its major role in promoting the notion , through its memo to the Regional Committee on the amendment to the Richards Constitution established by the then Governor MacPherson, in which the Egbe advocated the “grouping of Nigeria into various Autonomous States or Regions purely on ethnical basis” and that Regional Autonomy should be the prerequisite for a Central government and that if there was any area in which the colonial government wanted to experiment in giving Nigerians complete control over internal affairs, that area should be in the Regional Administration.
Chief Obafemi Awolowo drew extensively on the global models of shared governance between national and sub-national governments in arriving at the Federalist option when the anti-colonial struggle was at its peak. In 2013-14, when a similar situation presented itself, Afenifere relegated this global imperative to the background in conceptualization and implementation by denying Nationalities the freedom to choose who to speak for them thereby alienating most delegates from the Nationalities whose direct voice was needed on such crucial aspect of restructuring the polity in Nigeria.
Afenifere not only negated this fundamental premise but has gone ahead to accept further unitarization of Nigeria, thus entrenching the country’s foundational crisis, which also runs counter to what the Yoruba had always advocated as being the basis for freedom for all.
Afenifere’s refrain, throughout the period in question, was for us to accept whatever it is that emanated from the Jonathan Conference. And what was being offered? According to Afenifere, “States can now create employment and develop their own states. Each state can have its own constitution, its own police force, can have its own prison service, can create its own local governments and in addition, in the economic domain, solid minerals that had been the exclusive preserve of the federal government since independence, have now been brought to the concurrent list; self-funding regional institutions “in order to encourage developmental efforts among cooperating states”
“ooduapathfinder” briefly takes a look at these issues:
(1) Self-Funding Regional Institutions among cooperating states:
In the Western Region, the Action Group government created the Western Nigeria Development Corporation, which, among other things, was responsible for the industrial and economic development of the Region through the mechanism of the various industrial and residential estates as well as other economic entities. It was also directly involved in human development via the provision of educational scholarships.
When the Region was turned into Western State, as the successor entity to the Western Region, the WNDC continued its historical mission and when the State was further carved up into the three States of Oyo, Ogun and Ondo, as successor entities, the then Secretary to the Government of Western State, the late Mr.C.S.O. Akande led others to set up a holding company known as “Oodua Holdings” in order to prevent the outright collapse of the institution, as such was what the then military administration in Nigeria favored. That holding company is what we now know as Oodua Investments Ltd, with all of the Yoruba successor States as shareholders.
Some of its companies went into the doldrums, especially when Nigeria’s economic policies came under the hammer of the Structural Adjustment Program(SAP), which among others, saw to the demise of the Marketing Boards, which was loudly hailed by an Afenifere leader who also happened to be SAP’s chief enforcer, Chief Olu Falae, as an important element of economic liberalization but which in the end turned out to be an avenue to economic suicide via making local production unattractive at a time which privileged proliferation of imported substitutes, thereby turning a formerly productive sector into an absolute consumer of imported, finished goods which also led to our political and cultural strangulation. In spite of these, some of the ventures retained their viability while some that went under are now being resuscitated by the current APC Governments in Yorubaland. This brief excursion is to let us know that what Afenifere is selling is nothing new as a self-funding Regional Institution already existed in a very functional form in Yorubaland, in spite of efforts to destroy it or take it over by interests sympathetic to the Center.
The WNDC concept was part of a political paradigm that saw to the combined and even development of a Region just emerging from colonial underdevelopment and midwifed by the Action Group as its core demand for decolonization. Whereas Afenifere’s acceptance denied this core political necessity in its approval of further balkanization of the Region via creation of more states which are no longer successor entities of the Western Region and giving us a sop in the form of any form of cooperation between and among the states and which cooperation is dependent upon an approval of the National Assembly.
A “self-funding economic agency” without its political basis is a non-starter, a priori; and a denial of economic self-actualization for an economic platform in a center of antagonistic political configuration is a panacea for economic failure. Recommending a self-funding economic agency without fiscal federalism that makes revenue raising and collection Regional is nothing more than self-deception. A country in which the states or federating units depend on allocation from the center cannot call itself a federal system. None of the Federations in the world: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, United Arab Emirate, and U.S.A., operates on the model of state dependency on allocations from the center being touted by Afenifere.
(2) States as“federating Units” that can have their own Constitutions
Afenifere, the organization, already assumed the singularity of the geo-political space called Nigeria and all of its solutions to its problems are relegated to maintaining that singularity while turning issues of Federalism into an administrative convenience even when it is obvious that the problem is exactly in that singularity. That is why this Afenifere will promote the ridiculous position that “states are federating Units”. States, as we have them in Nigeria, are administrative entities, which were not even created by the residents but by military fiat. A country can have any form of administrative unit, which was why Aguiyi Ironsi replaced the Regions with “groups of provinces” which are now more or less the “states” and more so when it is increased from the present 36 to 54.
When the Egbe Omo Oduduwa rejected the Richards Constitution, it was based on the principle of a Union or Federation based on the Peoples and not as administrative units. Indeed, every Union or Federation in the world is based on a Union of Peoples which may now be administered either as states (as in the US) or regions as in Germany. For a federation or Union to exist, therefore, the Peoples inhabiting a geographical space must make that decision. That Afenifere rejected this point underscores its opportunism as well as its flawed understanding of the concept of federalism in a post-colonial State like Nigeria.
And when the case is made that the current states are now a reality which we cannot run away from, the short answer to that is, Yes, we can run away from it, in the sense that the political and economic circumstances that make for their creation is the root cause of Nigeria’s problems today, such that their retention or changing can only be by the Peoples affected themselves and not by fiat from the Center. Thus, the Yoruba Nation may decide to make every Yoruba town or city an administrative center—that will be our choice based on our economic and political imperatives.
A Constitution, being the “basic law”, the grundnorm of a society, embodies the socio-cultural essence of the People; it aggregates their existential paradigms; therefore, it is not simply a series of legal codes that can be altered at will. Arbitrary operation of Nigeria’s Constitution has been a regular practice in the country and always without reference to the people who are to use the Constitution. But for the Western Region, its political space is also a Cultural space with time-honored values, and this was why the People of the West did not really respond to the 1964 Federal elections but chose to respond decisively to the rigging of the 1965 Regional elections, because they had something to defend; their grundnorm and the values that drive the Region’s civilization.
We can relate this to the situation in today’s Ekiti State, where we now have 6 legislators in “control” of the State Assembly as the “majority” while the remaining 17 are considered minority, all because the Center is supporting that abnormality. The question “ooduapathfinder” asks is, what type of Constitution will emanate from Ekiti State, for example? A Constitution passed by a minority in the State Assembly imposed on a majority? Would such even be considered a “Constitution”? We can therefore not accept a situation where our Constitution will depend on the whims and caprices of a governor. So, to promote “states having their own Constitution” through a process that is not authorized by the people or their chosen representatives is to deny the People as the makers of such Constitution.
Besides, there is no correlation between a state constitution and Federalism. Having a state constitution has nothing to do with Federalism. In the Ekiti example, what unity would there be between a Fayose State Constitution and Osun State Constitution in order to form a Region, as we are being told? Or are we saying that state constitutions will depend on changing political circumstances or that the Central Government will determine how and when a state Constitution will come into effect, which will also be dependent on the political forces at the center? So, whichever way this is cut, a state constitution is meaningless outside the definition of the Federating Unit in and of itself. In other words, the issue is not about “state Constitution” but about the Peoples that want to create a Union. Such that if we are talking about federating units being in existence, such federating units are not the states, but the PEOPLES, who are already in existence and can decide to administer themselves as they deem fit, be it as states, regions, cities, etc.
(3) Each State can create its own Local government.
The Central government will retain and disburse all the funds for Local Government; yet Afenifere is telling us that each state can create its own local government.
(4) State Police
State Police is a consequence and not the cause of Federalism as Afenifere wants us to believe. Right now, States depend almost entirely on federal allocations to pay their workers’ salaries; and it is this allocation that will be saddled with funding state police. The state police is to be funded from received allocations when the number of states are increased to 54 such that the revenue allocation will have minimal or no change from the existing allocation structure which translates into such state police being underfunded and unable to achieve its maximum potential in terms of training and professional advancement. Once a state police is under the control of the sole Inspector-General who is responsible only to the President, such arrangement is not stronger than the one that says that the federal government should fund exploitation of mineral resources in states, without any consideration for the centrality of fiscal federalism to a federal system with integrity.
Afenifere also says that the allocation accruing to the center is reduced by 10%. But we know that the increase in the number of states would have already made nonsense of the increase as more states will now share in this increase. Reducing or increasing the amount of allocations is not Fiscal Federalism by any stretch of imagination. Such determinations are precisely what is wrong with the unitary system. Fiscal Federalism proceeds from the control of economic and fiscal policies by the communities whereby it is those communities (Federating Units) that will determine what is to go to the Center for its operations as negotiated.
Derivation by definition, even as practiced in the First republic, presupposes that the center does not “give”; the “owner” gives and the center “takes”. The issue about Federalism is thus not about reductions or increases in such allocations–for even if the “state constitution” recommendation is acceptable, there would be no need for such constitutions if these allocations can be reduced or increased at will by the center or its agency; otherwise such State constitutions would have to be adjusted every time an increase or decrease in allocation is effected.
This Afenifere organization hinged its continuous political trajectory on the implementation of these and other recommendations from the Goodluck Jonathan Conference; and having shown that they are contrary to the age-long Yoruba demands and pursuits, “ooduapathfinder” calls on the Yoruba Nation to follow up on their rejection of Afenifere at the polls by rejecting it as an organization capable of representing Yoruba National Interest in any form or capacity. It could keep its name, that will be its prerogative, but we must not allow it to rubbish our philosophical legacy and political praxis on the altar of its opportunism. Ise Ya

www.ooduapathfinder.com
By adminadmin



PDP’s Afenifere, through its reported Communique issued at the end of its Akure meeting has provided the Global Yoruba Nation with its historical imperative within the current political circumstances. It says: “The Yoruba nation is committed to a united and indivisible Nigeria based on the principle of justice, equity and rule of law with ample respect and understanding for cultural, religious and linguistic differences; we resolved to fully back and work for the reelection of President Goodluck Jonathan in the Presidential election as only this could guarantee the implementation of the Confab recommendation”
Two issues arise from this: on the one hand, the concept of the “Yoruba Nation” along with “justice, equity and rule of law” and on the other, canvassing support for Goodluck Jonathan based on his sole capability for implementation of the Confab recommendations.
When it referenced the “Yoruba Nation”—the question that immediately crops up is its definition since, according to Segun Mimiko, during his second term run for Governor of Ondo State, the Yoruba living outside Ondo State are considered as foreigners. If there was no “Yoruba nation” at that time, when did such a Nation come into being? Are those Yoruba foreigners part of this new-found Yoruba Nation? Or is it that Yoruba nationhood is dependent on political circumstances and not a reality in and of itself?
It goes on to say such a nation is committed to a “united and indivisible Nigeria based on the principle of justice, equity and rule of law.” This obviously implies that the authentic Yoruba Nation has forgotten that this PDP’s Afenifere itself, as well as Goodluck Jonathan, are serial violators of all of these.
For record purposes, these violations need to be repeated, for, being already in the public domain, there is no insult to our collective intelligence higher than what PDP’s Afenifere people are doing while hiding behind the mask of these principles.
Segun Mimiko was the promoter of 16>19 in the Governor’s Forum election; his changing over from his Labor Party into the PDP after the PDP had extensively rigged the Ekiti State election, which proof is now evident via the audio recording by one of its participants and where the PDP Governor not only beat up and harassed sitting judges but also tore up court records whilst also ending up with making 6>17 in the Ekiti State Assembly; it is also in the same Ekiti that a police officer detained the person of the Governor and also demeaned the office of the Governor by claiming “orders from above”; such that questions would be asked of the “rule of law” when a Constitutionally protected official is subjected to the whims and caprices of an official, who, ordinarily, is subject to existing Constitutional order which makes no provision for any “orders from above”.
Similar scenarios also played out in the State of Osun, with the ante being upped by the presence of Ijaw terrorists performing supposedly security duties on behalf of the PDP while the official security agencies looked the other way when they are not themselves terrorizing the people.
Furthermore, Goodluck Jonathan’s Presidency has continuously flouted the Constitution and rule of Law, not only in his treatment of Justice Salami, but also that of the then CBN Governor and recently, hiding behind security to violate the electoral laws of the land. Hence, on justice, equity and rule of law, the PDP in general and the Afenifere in particular, are as guilty as they come and they cannot now hypocritically proclaim their adherence to the values they had serially violated.
Goodluck Jonathan had made it a point of duty to negate all of what the Yoruba had historically lived by and promoted as a way of life, and doing so in an in-your-face manner and PDP’s Afenifere found these as necessary.
When Goodluck Jonathan, in the presence of Afenifere Elders, proclaimed that Nigeria does not need old people to run her affairs, these Elders kept mute, even when one of the existential paradigms of Yoruba People hinge on the concept of the mutuality of the old and the young in social advancement. Goodluck Jonathan has now also made a “promise” to create Cooperative Universities in Yorubaland, again, with the connivance of these Elders; when, even from their own experience, cooperative societies in Yorubaland had always been not only a product of, but an integral part of economic development which was negated when the general economic conditions in Nigeria became relegated to merely buying and selling which turned the cooperative societies into some sort of lending institutions. Even at that, such lending operates within the downward spiral of Nigeria’s economy which is now in tatters, such that a Cooperative University with no direct impact on economic productivity among the graduands is simply playing to the gallery.
PDP’s Afenifere based its support for Goodluck Jonathan on his supposed ability to implement the report of his National Conference yet, there is nothing in the Jonathan Conference recommendations that faintly resembles “True Federalism”; even as one of its leading members, Sir Olaniwun Ajayi, stated that they went to the conference to play. A plaything has now become a historical necessity.
“ooduapathfinder” cannot find any recommendation in the report of Jonathan Conference that resembles True Federalism in any form. The report is a public document, which can be accessed here:( 2014 National Conference Report: www.premiumtimesng.com/…conference/…/National-Conference-2014- Report-August-2014-Table-of-Contents-Chapters-1-7.pdf)

The authentic Yoruba Nation had always hinged its demand for Restructuring/True Federalism on what the Egbe Omo Oduduwa had earlier proclaimed as “the propagation of the ideal of a modern Yoruba State and Federal State of Nigeria through the agency of reliable persons who share our ideals”, which was further enunciated by the Yoruba Agenda, settled since 1994, as the “ pursuit of “True Federalism” with “the right of the Yoruba of Nigeria (living in Ekiti, Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Osun and Oyo states) to live under a Regional government within the Federation of Nigeria. The Yoruba Region shall have the right to negotiate with other nationalities of Nigeria along the laid down principles of true federalism, justice and equity”.
But PDP’s Afenifere enumerated the following as its own conclusions from the Jonathan Conference, which it now wants us to support: “state police, state constitutions, zonal commissions etc” as if these constitute the essence of True Federalism.
“ooduapathfinder” says that having a State Police is only a consequence and not the cause of True Federalism; especially when states in Nigeria depend almost entirely on central allocations to even pay their workers’ salaries and PDP’s Afenifere wants to saddle the same states with a police force when issues of fiscal federalism, resource control/derivation and devolution of powers are left to some imaginary “technical committee” to sort out.
The essence of Federalism is based on a Constituent generating its revenue while also being able to determine how such revenue is spent, which translates into such Constituents not being dependent on allocations from a center thereby making its economic and political outlay independent of that center which the Jonathan Conference did not even address.
PDP’s Afenifere turned Federalism on its head when it promoted the idea of states having their own constitutions as an achievement of the Jonathan Conference, when, by definition, a Federation implies that some entities have agreed to Federate–meaning those who wish to federate must, ab initio, determine what they are to give up for the sake of that Federation. A “federation” cannot therefore exist before the Constituents determine what they are to give up. The Constituents must first have their Constitutions or agreement on what they want to give up which will be the basis for negotiating a Federation.
If PDP’s Afenifere is now saying that there is a 1999 Constitution that needs to be amended for this to happen, such amendment must only recognize the existence of these Constituents, as a precondition, either as states/zones/Regions etc for these already exist; hence in the true spirit of Federalism, a “Federal” Constitution cannot mandate a Constituent Constitution, the violation which made PDP’s Afenifere promote the notion that there is need for a “zonal commission” in a Federal set-up; when, by definition, a Constituent Unit is already a political/economic contiguity that makes a “zonal commission” superfluous.
When PDP’s Afenifere therefore says it wants the Yoruba to support Jonathan because he will implement the recommendations, it is obvious, from the recommendations of the Conference, that Goodluck Jonathan is not in pursuit of “True Federalism” but the strengthening of his presidency contrary to established concepts of Federalism and PDP’s Afenifere has now formally turned everything the Yoruba had historically championed into its exact opposite; hence both PDP’s Afenifere as well as Goodluck Jonathan must be rejected at the polls. This is the historical imperative for the Yoruba Nation.

www.ooduapathfinder.com
February 7, 2015



The Jonathan Presidency has finally come to its neo-Fascist full term by turning the Nigerian State against the Peoples of Nigeria via the ridiculous reasons given for the postponement of the elections; a Federal High Court had previously pronounced a judgment to the effect that it is illegal for soldiers to be used for security purposes in elections. To now hinge the postponement of elections on the inability of these soldiers to provide security for elections because the military says it will begin an offensive against Boko Haram on the day of the elections is not only an affront to the judiciary, but a direct attack on the Sovereign Will of the Nigerian Peoples.
The Boko Haram insurgency is not a recent phenomenon; the Jonathan Presidency and this military once announced a spurious ceasefire with the Boko Haram insurgents; Goodluck Jonathan, as president, looked the other way when the Chibok schoolgirls were kidnapped, went on a dancing spree in Kano when the insurgents struck and refused to acknowledge the Baga massacre by the same insurgents, instead, he went all the way to Paris to commiserate with the French Government over the terrorist attack against a French newspaper.
The security forces, especially the military, have been ineffectual in its operations against the insurgents, with various stories about its unpreparedness due to lack of arms and ammunition and low morale leading to various forms of resistance within the military itself; yet the same military now wants to end the insurgency in six weeks, starting from February 14, the day of the now postponed Presidential election.
Goodluck Jonathan swore to uphold the Nigerian Constitution and every act of his had violated this oath. He had enabled high crimes as proved in the recent expose via the video and audio recording of the presidency’s involvement in the Ekiti electoral heist; aided and abetted the massive losses in Nigeria’s economy via the handing over of coastal and maritime security to a private contractor resulting in massive theft of crude oil as attested to by the Finance minister; subsumed the Presidency to the threats and antics of his own Ijaw Nationality armed groups through his acquiescence to their threats on the opening of a Free Trade Zone as well as their latest demand that his presidency must continue whether the rest of Nigeria likes it or not, a demand which was fueled and being implemented by the various schemes perfected by his presidency on the elections which has now materialized in the postponement.
The Peoples of Nigeria did not swear to uphold any Constitution; rather, they submitted, voluntarily, to the common purpose of Nigeria in the belief that those who are representing them will allow such Constitution to assist them to manage the affairs of the country to the best of their ability. In the process, the People expect the Nigerian State to reciprocate this confidence by adhering to the letter and spirit of the said Constitution. When certain sections of the Nigerian peoples, aided and abetted by the Presidency as exemplified by the Ijaw Nation begins to blackmail the rest of us, it is the reserved right of every Nationality in Nigeria to decide whether to accept or reject it.
Under normal circumstances, this election, planned since 2011, and Constitutionally recognized, represents the Sovereign will of the Nigerian Peoples via the State and aimed at creating an avenue for any possible changes or continuity in the political and economic trajectory of the country hence, any move to change or truncate it must also derive from the Sovereign will of the Nigerian Peoples, also via the State, based on what the Peoples perceive to be an inimical situation; such situations will necessarily be based on unexpected Natural Disasters, like terrible earthquakes, ocean tsunamis and the like.
Any non-natural disaster, like wars or rumors of violence or insurgency are man-made and hence cannot constitute a condition for truncating the Sovereign Will of the Nigerian Peoples and State unless we are being told that the Nigerian State has succumbed to such man-made disasters; especially when the agency saddled with conducting the elections openly stated its readiness for its conduct, even when the security agencies balked.
These non-natural disasters have been happening in Nigeria, notably the Boko Haram Insurgency, which is now being used by the Jonathan Presidency as the excuse to truncate the Sovereign Will of the People, such presidency having become the State by itself and for itself.
“ooduapathfinder” is not unmindful of the fact that former National Security Adviser, the late General Andrew Azazi, shortly before the helicopter crash that killed him, stated that Boko Haram is a PDP affair, while Goodluck Jonathan, the President also publicly admitted that Boko Haram is in his own Government.
Thus the handling of the insurgency, where the military flee at the slightest Boko Haram incursion; where soldiers accuse their officers of massive corruption; the army itself being accused of massive human rights abuses and where the Presidency pay scant attention to the atrocities committed by these terrorists, it is obvious that the lackadaisical handling of the insurgency by the Goodluck Jonathan Presidency is following a laid-down script aimed at truncating the Sovereign Will of the Nigerian Peoples, in this instance, postponing the elections which leaves room wide open for anyone or force to truncate any future Sovereign Will of the Peoples as the Nigerian State would no longer respond to its own raison d’etre as the representative of this Sovereign Will, but to the conditions imposed by anti-State elements, which is another definition of State failure.
Since there is no fool-proof mechanism in place that will show that the Boko Haram insurgency will be fully defeated in six weeks, unless the Presidency had always known Boko Haram’s strength and weaknesses to such an extent that it can definitively calculate its final end, there remain the possibilities of further postponement ultimately translating into a formal annulment of our democracy in a permanent way.
The beneficiaries of this scenario would include the current President, which is an affirmation of his own admission about Boko Haram; for, not only would he retain his office via the annulment of a democratic order, he would also bring to bear on the replacement government his experience in allowing terrorism to overwhelm the State under his watch.
The current situation has also shown that the current Nigerian Constitution, the grundnorm, is now dependent on arbitrary considerations anchored on the interests of the dominant faction of the ruling elite at any point in time; with no direct input either by the Constituting Nations or the citizens in general, which is why the negation of already agreed Constitutional provision of holding periodic elections, of which the February 2015 elections form a part, are being forcefully imposed.
Because of this arbitrariness, “ooduapathfinder” calls on, at least, the Yoruba Nation, to claim the rights enshrined in the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; where Article 1, paragraph 1 of the Covenant provides that:
All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
The Nigerian State which is now the Jonathan Presidency cannot deem this claim illegal or illegitimate since there is no law for or against this reserved right. The Nationality and her people must be formally and legally recognized for a law to be made for or against it. The only recourse for the Jonathan Presidency in this instance, is therefore the use of brute force, anchored on the same set of security forces that had not been able to rout the insurgency but are willing tools to maintain the superiority of the State over the peoples/citizens by force. Hence, the issue cannot and is not about legality or illegality but the Presidency’s use and application of force to achieve its predetermined objective.
The Yoruba Nation had expressed her engagement with the other Nations in Nigeria through a variety of platforms, including electoral platforms based on a perceived reciprocity by the State as a collaborator in abiding with the provisions of the grundnorm. When those supposedly sworn to protect Nigeria’s grundnorm, Nigeria’s Constitution, deliberately set out to subvert it as we have witnessed in Ekiti and are now witnessing, it falls on us to discard the same grundnorm and proclaim the legitimacy of our actions anchored on this subversion.
In furtherance of this, “ooduapathfinder” calls on the Yoruba Nation to begin the process of advocating for International sanctions against these subverts, both civilian and military; engage the Nigerian National Assembly to rise up to defend the Sovereign Will of the Nigerian Peoples by beginning the process of impeaching Goodluck Jonathan as President and actively pursue and claim our reserved rights under the UN International Covenant.