Niyi-Osundare

The undeclared winner of that election, Chief M.K.O. Abiola, insisted on his mandate. Disgraced out of power, General Babangida passed on the baton to a feckless Interim Government which soon collapsed under the weight of its own illegitimacy. Then came General Sani Abacha, maximum dictator, kleptocrat, and murderer who killed those democracy advocates he could lay his hands on and hounded the others into painful exile. Rather than see the annulment of the June 12 election as a rape of democracy and assault on our national will, many Nigerians soon naturalized it as a Yoruba problem. M.K.O. Abiola’s nation-wide mandate was driven into a tribal enclave. But NADECO and a body of other Civil Rights groups pressed on for the demand for democracy. Unfortunately, Chief Abiola never saw democracy when it came at last, having collapsed and died after that mysterious cup of tea offered him in captivity, during (we must never forget) General Abdulsalaam Abubakar’s tenure as Head of State.

The June 12 ‘debacle’ (a word deployed and made irresistibly popular by Nigeria’s foremost journalist, Olatunji Dare) brought to the fore once again, the Yoruba Factor in Nigerian politics. Under frequent assault by Abacha’s killer squads, left on their own by other Nigerian ‘nations’, the Yoruba started examining their own room in the Nigerian house. Slogans such as ‘Confederation is the answer’ flared up on prominent pages of newspapers (The last time that statement appeared with that kind of spectacular prominence was 1983, in the aftermath of the grossly rigged federal elections); ‘The National Question’, ‘Sovereign National Conference’, ‘True Federalism,’, ‘Self Determination’, etc. Not a few people started contemplating the idea of ‘Oduduwa Republic’. But most telling was the way the evocation of Yoruba ‘heroes’ came to be endowed with a prominent role in this ritual of ethnic self-validation and the retrieval of communal self-worth. Abiola, martyr of democracy, found a worthy predecessor in Adekunle Fajuyi: both being icons of gallantry and extraordinary sacrifice whose light shone beyond their ethnic base; Chief Obafemi Awolowo, unarguably the architect of Yoruba modernism whose place/stature in Yoruba mythology is only next to that of Oduduwa, the group’s primogenitorial avatar. At work here is what Wale Adebanwi has aptly delineated as the ‘political and cultural uses of memory’ (p.433); that is, the power of collective memory, through the instrumentality of remembrance, to bolster the communal psyche, salve and restore a wounded pride.

Yes, indeed, we know a country by the kind of people it chooses to remember; we also know it by the kind of people it fails, or chooses, not to remember. If Nigeria were a country with a sense of history, Col. Adekunle Fajuyi would be a prominent member of those ‘heroes past’ it crows so lustily about in its national anthem. But this ‘gathering of the tribes’ (Soyinka’s phenomenally prophetic phrasing in A Dance of the Forests, a play that was intended, most ironically, as a celebration of the country’s independence in 1960, but which ended up as a chilling disquisition on its imperfect union!) still totters on from error to error, with the possibility of genuine nationhood as a distant hope. The virus of this pathology of being has compromised the necessary health of becoming, as tribal (I am using that epithet in full cognizance of its pejorative anthropological accretions!) considerations continue to trump national imperatives, and a dreadful vice on the national stage may be an enviable virtue at the tribal level. The likes of Adekunle Fajuyi are not recognized as national heroes because there is as yet no ‘nation’ to be a hero in or of.

This is why the National Question in Nigeria is perennially in search of a National Answer as ethno-regional loyalties ossify into deafening walls, and each group is fixated on its own survival most times at the risk of the national collective. No country can ever achieve nationhood when its component parts are as incorrigibly heterogeneous and so mutually antagonistic as Nigeria now is and has always been. This is why those who blissfully aver that ‘Nigeria’s unity is not negotiable’ should quickly reconsider the dangerously complacent certitude in their avowal. This was one of the cheesy slogans which propelled the rhetoric of the Nigerian civil war, and it rode to victory in a crass, largely un-interrogated cavalry. But that was in another century, another millennium, another ideological ferment, long before Benedict Anderson’s idea of the Nation as an ‘imagined’ community, and the nation itself as a shiftable, shifting arrangement/artifice with its own unfair share of the profound indeterminacy that is so indigenous to the postmodernist/poststructuralist condition. Besides, those who talk so glibly about ‘Nigeria’s unity’ are under the perilous impression that there is a ‘unity’ to ‘negotiate’, in the first place. But a closer look tells us that we are still a thousand miles and a thousand moons from that unity, and that we need to work really hard and honestly for it to come within our grasp. General Alani Akinrinade said this (and much more) when he declared with authoritative candour in last Sunday’s Guardian: ’There is nothing like unity in this country’ (p.15). Closely related to this viewpoint are Professor Banji Akintoye’s numerous writings about the National Question, particularly his recent interventions in The Nation (July 14, July 21). Let’s tilt our ears in the learned griot’s direction:

There is no country on earth that is beyond being dismembered or dissolved. Throughout human history, countries have arisen, flourished, and then lost some parts, or broken apart. (The Nation, p. 19)

Adekunle-Fajuyi

Some of the eminent scholar’s views on this matter are decidedly controversial, and many readers might be constrained to see Professor Akintoye’s statements from the prism of his passionate Yoruba nationalism, but the intellectual sagacity and sheer un-ignorable force behind the historical antecedents which inform his submissions make them so compelling for those interested in a genuine discussion of Nigeria’s National Question. Time to hold the bull by the horns; you do not solve a problem by wishing it away, or by denying its conspicuous existence.

As yet, Nigeria has no ‘unity’ to negotiate or not to negotiate. Which is why President Muhammadu Buhari must not only read the reports of the 2015 National Confab; he owes himself and the country a critical duty to read, digest, deliberate on, and identify its implementable parts- beyond all partisan and ethno-regional considerations. To wave off the lingering call for a re-structuring of this country is to risk the possibility of suicide through denial. Fredrick Lugard’s expedient contraption has been aching in every joint since 1914. If the house has not fallen according to Karl Maeier’s apocalyptic prognostication, it is simply because Nigeria has been extraordinarily lucky. The Avenging Angels of the Niger Delta, the resurgent Biafra agitators, the increasingly violent clashes between nomadic herdsmen and native populations, and other ethno-regional and religious eruptions in different parts of Nigeria are all pointers to the cracks in the walls of the house that Lugard built for the glory of the British Empire. The component parts have never met on any genuinely democratic platform to negotiate the terms of their co-existence. We cannot afford not to do something about this imperfect union. To refuse to re-structure is to prepare to de-structure.

But there is a vital need to scrutinize the word ‘restructure’ and interrogate its promiscuous connotations in our current political lexicon. For that term has become a mantra, a miracle code, and sound bite in the mouths of political opportunists, and some vengeful incantation in the arsenal of those temporarily out of power – but trying to scheme their way back to it. In other words, the Nigerian union is perfect if you are in the saddle, and out of joint only when you are out of control. Besides, the ‘re-structuring’ we need must go beyond the surface structure of the polity and reach far into the deep structure of the economy. For it is absolutely impossible to establish any political stability on the foundation of the present consumptive, prebendal, and pathologically unproductive economy with its suicidal dependency on oil. Is anyone talking about the moral structure of a country with a few bloated billionaires and millions of impoverished, disarticulated people? The way things stand today, every corner of Nigeria is a potential den of hungry Avengers.

The Yoruba strand of the National Question narrative deserves a thorough, hard-nosed, and visionary appraisal. Those who call for a relative autonomy that would allow Nigeria’s federating units appreciable room to develop their own way have their fingers right on top of the problem. For that, indeed, is the substance, soul and spirit of true federalism. But we need to find a way of doing this without allowing it to degenerate into a good-we vs bad-they; civilized-we vs primitive-they; advanced-we vs backward-they Manichaeism that ends up trumpeting the false superiority of one ethnic group and the assumed inferiority of the other(s). In other words, we must make sure that our ‘Yoruba Agenda’ does not bottom out as ‘Yoruba Exceptionalism’ with its attendant triumphalist provincialism and hubristic extremisms. For the separate ‘Yoruba Nation’ that is being canvased in certain quarters can never hope to be a nation of Angels. In other words, there is hardly any virtue or vice in the larger Nigerian body politic that is not in the Yoruba part of it. Much like other ethnic ‘nations’ in Nigeria’s ‘multi-national’ arrangement, the Yoruba have their own fair share of virtuous nation-builders and vicious nation-wreckers, consummate democrats and unrepentant ballot-riggers, conscientious citizens and conscienceless cesspools of corruption.

Furthermore, we must never underestimate the inevitable perils of homogeneity, the debilitating sameness in the cultural and socio-political gene pool that often breeds one-party states and their attendant despotic life presidencies, the kind of sameness that precipitated Somalia’s implosion prior to its eventual explosion. Forgive my skepticism as you consider this poser: if we cannot make Nigeria work together, is there any guarantee that we could make it work apart/in parts? The poet who sings an ode to diversity and difference couldn’t have chosen her/his Muse more judiciously. The avid Snooper Tatalo Alamu sums it all up so cogently with this characteristically brilliant remarks:

President Buhari needs not to be afraid of restructuring, but he should be wary of those who use the slogan of restructuring to preach hate and the summary dismemberment of the country. He should also be mindful of those who scream against restructuring as a strategy of keeping the nation in fossilized underdevelopment and Stone Age depredations simply to perpetuate an unjust system and its entrenched privileges. (The Nation, p.3)

Without a shred of doubt, there is so much in the life and legacy of Adekunle Fajuyi, the great man whose memory we celebrate, that speaks to the inward-rooted, outward-looking philosophy, the plural, tolerant, accommodating Omoluabism that is the core and guiding principle of Yoruba culture and science of being; that amplitude of spirit, that unstinting magnanimity that has always lifted our gaze beyond the parapets of jingoism and ethnic chauvinism. These are the virtues that have seen us through the turbulent upheavals of the past; they are the sure path to our ability to survive – and thrive – in the future. We are celebrating a Yoruba man who chose to go down with his guest and Commander-in-Chief who was Igbo, a true leader who saw office as service, who regarded the entire country as his political and moral constituency. A man so proud to be Yoruba yet so proud to be something more than, something beyond, that. We remember him well when and if we keep his enlightened, ecumenical spirit in focus, this man who placed such vital premium on loyalty and integrity, this man who taught us all a new way of being human.

The Road to Lalupon (seven hearty cheers to the authors of that title and its touchingly polysemic evocation!) is still long and snared, its palm trees pock-marked by the bullets of the mutineers of an unstable polity, the green leaves still droop with the blood of akoni ogun (brave warrior); the wind is still astir with the mad music of the gun. And there are still big questions begging for answers: is Lalupon a little comma in the sentence of our national discourse? Is it a terminus or a starting point; a cardinal spot or mere stop-over on our mapless search for nationhood? Is it a theatre or a temple, a well-paved path or a thorn-benighted crossroads? Whatever the answer may be, from Ado Ekiti to Lalupon is, no doubt, a fateful distance. From the heroic sacrifice of a long-gone Akikanju to the monstrous sacrilege of contemporary moral cretins, a long insufferably disturbing stretch. Once there was a soldier; now we are saddled with cannibalistically corrupt mercenaries in military uniform. The incomparable Fajuyi must be wincing in his grave today.

Yes, indeed, you know a country by the kind of people it remembers; you also know a country by the kind of people it chooses not to remember. Remembrance is an enabling companion of Memory; and also its handmaiden. So there goes Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, the soldier-leader for whom valour was a prime virtue, brave in battle, brave beyond it; paragon and parable. First true Nigerian to attempt that proverbial handshake across the Niger – with his own life. But so far, Nigeria has shunned that handshake, forcing that generous, idealistic hand to coil back to its startled pocket. Yes, were Nigeria a nation, the likes of Fajuyi would have their statues in every state capital in the country. But Nigeria is not yet a nation, not even a country if by that we mean an organized, coherent entity with mutually respecting parts bound by a set of identifiable (positive) values. Omoluabi Adekunle Fajuyi lived for that dream. It was for its sake he gave his life. His dream challenges our despair; his idealism upbraids the crass ordinariness of our leap of faith. We owe this great man a memory unencumbered by petty politics; a remembrance beyond the strictures of tongue and tribe.

I thank the Think Tank of the Association of Yoruba Professionals (Egbe Majeobaje), Egbe Majeagbagbe) for inviting me to deliver this lecture; for making sure we do not forget.

I thank you all for listening.

Osundare delivered this as guest lecture at the 50 YEARS AFTER FAJUYI Celebration, organized by the Yoruba Think-Tank; July 29, 2016; International Conference Centre, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.