Yorùbá South-West - Balkanised and Besieged: The Western Region's Painful Political History
Yorùbá South-West - Balkanised and Besieged: The Western Region's Painful Political History
The Whipped but Unyielding Stabiliser of Nigerian Unity
I was not in Lagos that day.
I watched it on a phone.
The way we watch everything now.
A shaky clip.
Voices off-screen.
A convoy.
And then that chant.
Thief. Thief. Olè. Olè.
And I sat with it.
Not because it surprised me.
Because of where it happened.
Not in Enugu.
Not in Aba.
In Lagos.
On the way to Bourdillon.
In the city that made the man.
So I keep asking myself the same questions.
Could this happen in their jungle they called their own state?
Has he taken anything from their soil?
And what kind of person eats another man's food,
sleeps under his roof,
and then stands at his gate calling him a thief, Olè, Barawo?
The questions are multiple and they are not new.
I have been carrying them since before I could read.
1963.
1964.
1965.
My father counted them.
Now I count them.
Sixty years of a siege.
My father used to talk about cocoa the way other men talked about gold.
He was right.
The Western Region of 1956 to 1966 sat on a tropical savanna climate.
Bimodal rainfall.
The August break.
Soil so rich you could almost smell it.
The North had groundnuts.
But the North was always one bad year from drought.
The East had oil palm.
But the rains came too hard and the soil gave too little.
Only the West had the climate that kept giving.
And that wealth went somewhere.
In January 1955, Awolọwọ launched Free Universal Primary Education.
He told the region that education was a national emergency.
Second only to war.
By 1960, over a million children were in school.
Female enrolment in Elementary One rose by 374 per cent.
In Ibadan, Muslim aparty to western education caved in and enrolment jumped from 78 to 110 per cent.
The West was becoming the most educated place in Africa.
That brought the envy, the jealousy and uneven competition.
That was the beginning of the problem.
That was the problem.
But it was not the first siege.
I did not learn that in a classroom.
I learned it from old men in Ibadan who still spoke of Osogbo the way soldiers speak of a battle they survived.
The Fulani jihad came down through Ilọrin.
Taken by proxy.
After Afọnja invited the cleric Alimi into his house,
and was killed for it in 1824.
Eleduwe in 1835 killed the last effective Alaafin, Oluewu.
Ọyọ Ilé fell.
But in 1840, at Òṣogbo, Fulani cavalry met Ibadan riflemen.
And broke.
They never came that far south again.
We have always resisted.
That part of the story we tell ourselves.
The other part we do not.
After 1959, the NPC in the North and the NCNC in the East came sinisterly together.
The Action Group was left outside.
And the NCNC - the party founded by Hubert Macurley, a Yorùbá man, highjacked by the Igbos, led by Nnamdi Azikiwe - did not stand aside.
It was there.
Willing.
Useful.
This is the part I struggle to write calmly.
In May 1962, a fight broke out in the Western House of Assembly.
Akintọla's men started it.
The NCNC backed them.
Emergency was declared.
Majẹkodunmi, the physician to the Prime Mister was sent to run the West.
Awolọwọ was arrested that September.
Charged with treasonable felony.
Convicted in 1963.
Given ten years.
Then they took the map.
In August 1963, the Mid-West was carved out of the West.
Only the West.
The North kept its monolithic bloc.
The East kept its own.
Only the West was cut.
The NCNC took 53 of 64 seats in the new region.
I have heard people call that a fair reward for minority rights.
My father called it thirty pieces of silver.
In 1965 they rigged the election.
And the West burned.
Operation Wẹti'ẹ.
Men doused in petrol and set alight.
The 1966 coup finished it.
The Prime Minister and the Western Premier were killed.
No Eastern leader was touched.
And then came the administrators.
My father used to say the worst thing that happened to the West was not the emergency.
It was the men they posted afterwards.
Men who had never set foot in our towns.
Sent to govern them.
Lagos.
Ogun.
Ọyọ.
Ọ̀sun.
Ondo.
Ekiti.
They looted the treasuries.
They broke up the cocoa boards.
They let Awolọwọ's schools rot.
They governed us like a conquered people.
And I am not sure they were wrong about that.
Thirty years on, it happened again.
June 12, 1993.
Abiọla won the cleanest election this country has ever held.
And Francis Arthur Nzeribe - an Igbo politician - founded the Association for Better Nigeria. (ABN)
And got the court order that stopped the result.
He later said why.
Abiọla had boasted he would win with or without Igbo votes.
Truely, he won without them.
Abiọla was arrested in 1994.
Same scenario with Awolọwọ.
Four years in solitary.
Kudirat was shot dead in 1996.
He died in detention on 7 July 1998.
And Ojukwu is said to have told Abacha to hang him.
That June 12 was not real.
That there was nothing like it.
A One Million Man March was staged for the dictator holding him.
I was not a young then, in my thirties.
I remember the silence in our street.
Thirty years after that, Tinubu ran.
The South-East did not merely vote against him.
It rejected him.
All five states.
5.85 per cent.
I have heard it described as politics.
It did not feel like politics.
Before then came October 2020.
EndSARS began as something honest.
Young people tired of being beaten by men with guns.
I believed in it for a week.
Then it turned.
Lagos burned.
And when the smoke cleared, the Army confirmed that most of the businesses looted in Lekki, Ajah and Sangotedo belonged to either Yorùbá or Igbo traders.
They had burned their own shops in a rage aimed at our economy.
I still do not know what to do with that.
And now this.
A WhatsApp group, they say, coordinating the ambush of a President's convoy on his own streets.
Not spontaneous.
Organised.
Lagos is not the South-East.
Lagos is the South-West.
He is not a guest here.
He is a son of this soil.
Soyinka wrote that the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.
We have not kept silent.
We will not keep silent.
We built.
We taught.
We prospered.
And for that we have been besieged.
Fanon wrote that the colonised man turns his aggression first on his own people.
I think about that line more than I should.
It is easier to call a Yorùbá man a thief than to build your own region.
And I think about Hubert Ogunde.
In 1964 he released Yorùbá Ronú.
Yorùbá, think.
The Western Region banned his theatre for two years.
He was not asking us to hate anyone.
He was asking us to stop being fools.
Òtítọ́korò.
Truth is bitter.
I know how this sounds.
I know there are Yorùbá who will call me a tribalist for writing it.
Many Igbo will come here to label me a tribalist, a bigot.
Two words I doubt they know the meaning.
Two words readily available from them if you're not supporting their own.
And I know some of them mean well.
But I have watched us cheer while others dismantled what Awolọwọ built.
And I have never once seen that kindness returned.
The West was balkanised.
Its leaders jailed.
Its prosperity envied.
Its hospitality abused.
Its states handed to men sent to break them.
Lagos set alight in 2020.
Awolọwọ jailed.
Abiọla annulled and killed.
Tinubu exiled, opposed, heckled.
Now as the president being bullied in his backyard - Lagos.
And each time, the Igbo nation was somewhere in the frame.
The NCNC in 1962.
Nzeribe in 1993.
Ojukwu in 1994.
Nnamdi Kanu in 2020 Endsars.
The hijackers of 2020.
The WhatsApp coordinators now.
I could be wrong about the last one.
I am willing to be wrong about the last one.
But the pattern is not mine.
It was here before me.
We survived.
We are not cowards,
Cowards don't win wars,
They died many times before their death.
We are still the most educated,
the most industrious,
the most stubbornly resilient people in this federation.
The siege continues.
So does the resilience.
The real question is not whether the Yorùbá South-West will survive.
It will.
The question is whether this country can ever let a Yorùbá man lead and succeed without labelling him wrongly.
And the harder question is for us.
Will we finally listen to Ogunde?
Yorùbá Ronú.
Think.
When the chips are down, when it will be all Israel to your tent mantra, - your own tent, your ancestral land is Yorùbá land, Southwest Nigeria.
Deny your land now and the Alálẹ̀ will deny you when you needed them most... nor be cürse ooo....
#YorubaHistory #WesternRegion #NigeriaPolitics #Awolowo #Abiola #Tinubu #June12 #NigerianHistory #Osogbo1840 #BalkanisedAndBesieged #YorubaRonu #EndSARS
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