What is your take on the plan by a parallel Afenifere to organise a summit in Ibadan to adopt President Muhammafu Bubari, the All Progressives Congress presidential candidate as the South-West choice for 2019?
Where did you get the idea of a parallel Afenifere?
We know of two factional leaders; Ayo Fasanmi and Reuben Fasoranti. Isn’t it so?
How can you call the Ayo Fasanmi-led group a faction? Where did they form their own Afenifere group? Some people just woke up in their homes, got put together by Bola Tinubu and called themselves Afenifere and you describe them as a faction?
At all the times that Fulani herdsmen attacked people in Yorubaland, did you hear a word from any of them? When they were kidnapping Chief Olu Falae and others all over the place, did you hear a word for them?
We know that the Fasanmi-led group is behind the planned January programme. Does that not say something?
But in the last eight years, have you heard about Ayo Fasanmi attending Afenifere meetings? Go on your goggle.
Where does this lead the Yoruba in 2019?
They are just Tinubu’s men. They will fizzle out because they represent nothing positive for the Yoruba race. When Yoruba people were arrested in Ile-Ife over a clash with Hausa-Fulani boys resident there and they were taken to Abuja by operatives of the Buhari-led government, did you hear Ayo Fasanmi or any of them talk? What did they say?
These are election time agents of Bola Tinubu; no more, no less. They just want us to spend another four years under Buhari. Today, human blood has no value. People are being killed. Go to Ondo State now; people are being kidnapped on a daily basis in Akure, the state capital, under their government’s watch and they call themselves Afenifere.
Governor Fayemi, who is the governor in Ekiti State as a result of vote buying… is he the one that will call himself Afenifere; or Bola Tinubu or who? They represent nothing. They are part of the Buhari forces.
The Afenifere led by Fasoranti has been saying that it is supporting the PDP candidate, Atiku Abubakar, because of his pledge on restructuring. What is the assurance that Atiku will redeem his pledge?
Atiku has been committed to restructuring all along; he isn’t just doing it because of election. Go and check the late General Sani Abacha-led government’s 1994 Constitutional Conference, Atiku was the chairman of the committee on devolution of powers. Go and check the report of that committee. Today, you can’t compare him with Buhari who has vowed never to touch restructuring. The killings going on under Buhari now is scary. The national conversation under this administration has been Fulani herdsmen, grazing land, Miyetti Allah.
Under Atiku, we shall be talking in economic terms, not cow terms. So, our national conversation won’t be about cows; it will be about economic indices; how to grow the economy, create enabling environment and so on.
That is the difference. No country can go through another four years under this experience and survive it.
Let us make a voyage into history. We know that Afenifere and Action Group (AG) were mutually inclusive; same with Afenifere and Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN); and to a very large extent, the Alliance for Democracy (AD). Now, which political platform can you say shares the vision and ideals of Afenifere for the Yoruba race in Nigeria?
If you look at the parties in Nigeria today, the whole idea of party system has been destroyed. The parties are so fluid now. You can see Taiwo in the PDP in the morning and see him with the Social Democratic Party (SDP) later. The party of Afenifere today is restructuring. Let us reorganise the country and then, we can talk about proper policies and proper political parties. That is the agenda for now. We have to restructure Nigeria. The country is not working and it can’t work. Therefore, our major political goal for now is to return Nigeria to true federalism.
Will it be valid to say Afenifere ran into troubled waters right from the formation of the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE)?
Well, the YCE, under Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, was Chief Bola Ige’s revenge for losing the presidential ticket of the AD to Chief Falae. Interestingly, at that time, Tinubu was one of the people who mobilised against Bola Ige at D’Rovans Hotel in Ibadan. That dealt a fatal blow to the idea of collective approach to issues in Yorubaland.
When Ige’s cold war with some Afenifere leaders heightened, Tinubu joined forces with the same man he undermined at D’Rovans Hotel.
But as I said, Afenifere remains the brand. Why is it that the people gathered together by Tinubu are not calling themselves ‘Jagaban Front’ or any other name? Why is it that it is Afenifere brand is what they want to steal? That tells you that Afenifere will continue to wax stronger, no matter what anybody does.
At a point when Tinubu lost out at the Villa and the APC national secretariat, he tried to romance the Reuben Fasoranti-led Afenifere, before the Ondo State governorship election. The romance didn’t last. As an insider, can you tell us what happened?
You know Tinubu is a trader. The night of that day, recently, when Tinubu went to Fasoranti’s house in Akure, he ended up in the Villa where he went to tell Buhari that he had taken over the South-West with Afenifere’s support.
I was there when he came to thank Pa Ayo Adebanjo in his house. But today, he has seen that Afenifere won’t sell out. Now, he has moved to organise some set of people to begin to call themselves Afenifere. He is a political trader. But he doesn’t want a settled Yorubaland. The last time that everything was normal; in 1999, when there was no division in Afenifere and he was embroiled in certificate forgery problem, he was asked to bring his certificate to Pa Onasanya’s house in Surulere, Lagos, he refused to show up. Then, we had the crisis.
For as long as there was crisis, nobody could talk about his certificate. He knows what he is doing.
Finally, there has been this agitation for long that Afenifere should insulate itself from politics and play the role of socio-cultural group for all Yoruba, irrespective of political affiliation. Don’t you think it is high time it reviewed its role?
Those who are saying that should go and wake up Papa Awolowo from his grave and ask him to renounce politics, because he was the founder of Afenifere and he was political all through his life.
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