Opposition Without the Yoruba

Dialogue With Nigeria By AKIN OSUNTOKUN

Nine months to the January 2027 D Day general elections, this electoral cycle is distinguished by the poverty of the opposition platform. It was predictable. The moment they could not commit to the prescription of the North /South power rotation principle, the opposition lost its most potent instrument of political mobilisation. Says the scripture “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal…. “.

Borne, more or less, of an entitlement mentality, the political elite of the North is quite angry with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for disregarding their status quo claims to preferential treatment. This anger is deepened by the fact that the region is the least prepared for grappling with the harsh living conditions spawned by the twin economic policies of the floatation of the Naira and the termination of the oil subsidy regime.

Whatever the degree of disappointment with the incumbent government, those proposing its exit must meet with two conditions. One is measurable commitment to constitutional reforms with emphasis on decentralisation and devolution of powers. The other is the adoption of the North/South power rotation principle under which dispensation, the presidency is ceded to the South until 2031. So far, I have not seen any serious commitment to either on the part of the putative grand coalition platform of the African Democratic Coalition, ADC.

A historical perspective

In post colonial Africa, the argument has been repeatedly made that multi party pluralism is culturally ill suited to the African society, that the concept of institutional opposition is reckoned as enmity. It is viewed as emblematic of colonial rule whose artificiality is written all over the Berlin conference in which Africa was partitioned without regard to the sociocultural reality of the peoples of the continent. National coherence and cohesiveness was discarded at the whim of imperial power politics. The colonies had no say in the creation of the states to which they were enjoined and enforced to pledge loyalty and citizenship.

Typically, Nigeria, for instance, did not organically evolve from a prior Nigerian society. Nigeria was corralled from the culturally and nationally divergent and disparate societies of the Yoruba, Hausa, Tiv, Fulani, Ijaw and others. The amalgam was as alien to these societies as it was alien to its colonial progenitor. The inherent tension of pulling them together to engage in a multi-party system confrontation had the element of dysfunctional double jeopardy to it. Nigeria and its constitution (to which multi party pluralism is integral) amounted, ab initio, to making the best of a difficult incoherent situation.

Yet, according to Richard Sklar, there is the isolated instance of the Oyo empire which thrived on an in-built concept of checks and balances.

Argues Sklar, “In theory and in practice, the powers of the Yoruba kings were regulated by custom and limited institutionally by countervailing organs of the state. Unlike the Northern emirates, the Yoruba monarchies were constitutional rather than despotic. All decisions of the Alafin (King) of Oyo required the approval of his council of chiefs. In former times, a gift of parrot’s eggs from the leader of the council was a sign to the Alafin that his death was desired by the chiefs and the people. Invariably the Alafin complied by taking poison, so the threat of a dread gift was a safeguard against tyrannical rule. As remarked in an authoritative study, the proscription of this custom by the British “dislocated the checks and balances of the old constitution.”.

It is intriguing to note that in post colonial Nigeria, sustainability and viability of national opposition political platforms has tended to be anchored on the Yoruba political elite as a core element. In the First Republic, from 1960 to 1966, formal political opposition was synonymous with the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo and the Action Group, AG. The Second Republic (1979-1983) followed suit and featured Awolowo and the Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN, as the opposition. In the Fourth Republic, all the Yoruba comprising states of the South West uniformly belonged to the Alliance for Democracy, AD, in ‘opposition’ to the federal government spawned by the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. The attenuated AD continued with the mutations of the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN and the All Progressives Congress, APC.

In the First Republic, the AG was not just the national opposition, it equally constituted the leading opposition platforms to the ruling parties in the Eastern and Northern regions. This pattern of political display coincided with the design of the British colonial government to foster an entitlement mentality for the Hausa-Fulani political oligarchy leaving the two dominant parties in the Eastern and Western regions in play for the role of the junior partner to the former. The apparent indifference of the Yoruba to opposition politics may find explanation in various factors.

First (not in order of significance ) is the sociocultural flexibility enabled by the cross-cutting cleavages of religion in which the Yoruba is almost evenly split between Christianity and Islam unlike the mono religion dominance of Islam in the Sokoto caliphate and Christianity in the Eastern region (now comprising the South East and the South South zones). “In the Western Region, in 1953, 37 per cent of the population professed Christianity, 33 per cent espoused Islam and the two faiths coexist in amicable rivalry” .

The other possible predisposing factor is the unintended consequence of the monarchical rivalry between the Ooni /Aláàfin rivalry . Although no survey has been conducted, the likelihood is that intra Yoruba supporters of both camps are nearly evenly spread. The capacity to contain this division has developed into an inherent skill to manage the house of commons style division culture. Relatively easy adaptation of the Yoruba to formal opposition mentality hacks to this kind of pedigree.

There is the element of geopolitical centrality and concomitant capacity for autonomous action. At the level of socioeconomic development and continuity to globalisation, the Lagos (coast)-Ibadan-Ife axis is the predominant locus in Nigeria. It embraces the pan Nigeria economic conurbation status of Lagos and the contiguous Ogun state industrial corridor. This economic powerhouse status is complemented by significant revenue remittances and disbursement from the Yoruba diaspora. In pre-colonial Nigeria, the cosmopolitan accretion of the returnee Yoruba diaspora played a similar role.

Another possible facility is the factor of urbanisation..”the proportion of urban dwellers in Yorubaland is higher than among any other people in tropical Africa. In 1953, nine of the eighteen cities in Nigeria with populations exceeding 50,000 were predominantly Yoruba communities of pre-commercial origin”. My thinking is that It is to this urbanisation and urban centres that the National Council of Nigerian Citizens, NCNC, owes its electoral success and foremost political opposition status in the Western region.

The Tinubu Emergence

The viability of a Nigerian political opposition platform attained a peak in the accomplishment of the unprecedented defeat of an incumbent president by the opposition in the 2015 general elections. Central to this feat was the role of a certain Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the ultimate kingmaker. How he managed to recreate and sustain the pre APC opposition platform is deserving of a critical case study in any fulsome account of the political development of Nigeria. The unlikely journey began with the rout of the AD governors in five of the six states comprising the South West in the 2003 general elections. The only surviving state was Lagos state where Tinubu was governor and he remained as one till 2007. His subsequent efforts to recreate and rebuild the AD legacy party benefited from the facility of two institutions, the Media and the Judiciary.

With an element of plausibility, the story was propagated in the media, that the AD governors were rigged out of office by the machinations of President Olusegun Obasanjo and the PDP. This belief fostered and perpetuated the perception of the victorious PDP governors as illegitimate usurpers. It created a conducive atmosphere for their subsequent removal through any means. The Judiciary, apparently, took a cue from this propagation to oust three of the PDP governors in an aggressive display of judicial activism. The campaign for the delegitimisation of the PDP and the  mobilisation of institutional and public sympathy for ACN would amount to little without the means to prosecute the realisation. Did the scripture not say ‘faith without works is dead’ and that money answereth all things? And so it became the utility of Lagos state which towers above all other states in financial muscularity.

The state of the race

At the last count, the waves of an ongoing political capitulation to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in his reelection bid has resulted in the swelling of state governors in the ranks of the APC to thirty one. Given the resources, power of patronage, government and party structures at the beck and call of the governors, it is difficult to exaggerate the instrumentality of the governors to the potential victory of the President.

For the governors as well as Tinubu, it is a case of you rub my back, I rub yours. The former are vulnerable to the latter on two accounts. Those seeking reelection do not believe that the presumption of a free and fair election is enough to guarantee victory for them at the polls. Many of them know that they do not merit reelection on account of their  records in office. Those who do (merit reelection) would not want to take chances with possible subversion by the federally controlled agents of the state.

Less amenable to specification but nonetheless consequential are the following. One is the political deduction that Tinubu will receive a bloc vote from the Yoruba in the forthcoming January elections. His philosophy of Emilokan (projecting his presidential aspiration as synonymous with the turn of the Yoruba back in the 2023 presidential campaign) has proved brutally effective. If the allegations of Yoruba lopsidedness in his appointments and patronage is correct, it will be unrealistic to believe he will not get a commensurate compensation from the latter in the 2027 elections.

Another one stems from the controversy generated by the intervention of President Donald Trump in the security crisis of Nigeria which he framed as the persecution of the Northern Christians by the wielders of Islamic hegemony. To the long suffering peoples of the Middle Belt, Trump’s intervention and the frame of Christian persecution in particular is like manna from heaven, a once in a lifetime opportunity to break free the Fulani Islamic yoke. Following the logic of my enemy’s enemy is my friend, they seem to have cast their lot with the President.