How does being in the saddle of the YCE make you feel?
I feel very humbled, and a bit jittery that an unexpected, huge responsibility has been entrusted to me. I know what the responsibility means: a huge expectation by not only members of the YCE but the whole of the Yoruba nation. At first, I couldn’t believe it. Then I thought, wow! How has God called me for this service! I believe this is a call to service by God. It is not a thing that I ever lobbied for. It is not a thing that I ever expected even though I played a very important role in all affairs of the YCE. I wasn’t doing it to benefit personally or to hold positions. In fact, I run from positions as a retiree and having gone beyond 80. I have worked so hard in my life that I thought this was now time to start resting. And I enjoy my rest. I enjoy travelling abroad. I travel abroad about three times a year. So, being entrusted with this duty is a thing that even calls for (can we start using the word?) restructuring. It starts from me. I have started to restructure my own personal life; I can no more be going abroad, to all sorts of continents, getting another form of education through travelling, three times a year, because I know I have responsibilities, duties to perform. I know I owe my Yoruba nation some responsibilities. I know how much my forerunners gave, because I was very close to all of them.
Buhari, Aisha and confusing orchestra
You have assumed the leadership of the organisation of elders of the Yoruba at a critical period in the life of Nigeria when we are preparing for another general election. What kind of leadership should the Yoruba nation expect from you at this time?
We at the YCE were getting wary about our togetherness. We were getting wary about our unity, because the Yoruba nation, in our view, has always been shortchanged. Despite the fact that this godsend nation has always led in all spheres of endeavour in this country but we are always shortchanged and efforts to emerge have always been thwarted by the competing forces either ganging up against it or the nation not making itself sufficiently relevant. So, our duty now is to educate and inform our people. Now, money is destroying our psyche in Nigeria. Money is changing people’s loyalty to even themselves, let alone to their communities or to the Yoruba nation. We are trying to do all we can to make them see beyond their noses; to not just consider the issue of money; to think well about our future in Nigeria; not to take any steps about money which they might regret later; to think about what has been happening to them and not allow those destabilising forces to overwhelm them this time around.
We are having 91 political parties, right? We are not adopting any of them. We are not siding with any candidate. All we are doing and are going to continue to do is to let them learn from the mistakes of the past. Maybe I will borrow Mr [Donald] Trump’s language. He usually says ‘America first’. I will say the Yoruba nation first. The Yoruba Council of Elders is non-discriminatory, non-partisan, non-political. It is not profit-making. It is there to serve the interest of Yorubas. We are the igbimo agba (council of elders), kii se igbimo ewe (not a council of youngsters). Igbimo Agba! And people have three or four classifications of agba. You have ‘agba’. You have ‘agbalagba’. You have ‘arugbo’. And you, still, have ‘kuje’ – what is called ‘arugbo kuje-kuje’. That is what we have in Yorubaland and the higher they go, the higher their authority. We have values, and how we project our tradition and culture is an assignment which we owe the Yoruba nation. The concept of ‘Omoluabi’ is very paramount in our culture and in the Yoruba Council of Elders and it is not an easy thing to entrench when you are having civilised youngsters. But they have a role to play.
So, in this present political situation in Nigeria, we have to urge our people to make the issue of money second and take the life of themselves and the future generation into consideration.
Do you want to throw some more light on the idea of the Yoruba nation having been shortchanged over time?
The coming together of different types of people, incongruous amalgamation of different peoples, of different characters, of different developments, of different knowledge, has always created problems right from the time of our Independence. Since Independence, things have not been going well with Yorubas. The military governments did not favour us. We were not there. The continuous creation of states in the country has never favoured us. Do you know how many states Kano was split into? About four. And Oyo – which is even if not bigger – was split into how many? Just two. It is a systematic thing that we are continuously being shortchanged. Some local governments in the North are not as big as Idi-Ishin and they are earning the same allocation. A local government in the Yoruba nation is as big as a state in some parts of the country. And the allocation of resources goes with the number of states, the number of local governments, so how can we develop? How do we develop if we are being shortchanged in all these areas? It is unfortunate. When you look at the structure of appointments at the federal level, you will cry. Successively, you will see that we are just not there. And when you are there, you are just given an irrelevant position. There was a time when among the service chiefs and the police and everything, no Yoruba man was there. So, these are the things that we are calling the attention of the Yoruba people to. The first Yoruba president was Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and the one that followed, no president, no vice president, no Senate President…nothing. So, where do we go? This is why we should put on our thinking cap now. We should sit down and assess situations very thoroughly before we take a leap, because we are not going to ask anybody to vote for A or B. We are not going to adopt any particular candidate but we will try and sensitise them [the Yoruba people] to open their eyes and look back into history and look at the present structure and then look at the forthcoming scenario to see which one will be better for the forward movement of the Yoruba. We will be calling for unity among us. Even if you are in party Z, you should ensure that you don’t sell the interest of the Yoruba there.
What exactly are those things that are being looked at regarding the question of the restructuring of the country?
I have listened to several positions on restructuring and they are so much multidimensional. To me, we have involved so many meanings to restructuring. Some people are thinking of going back to the 1963 constitution, which is their own sense of restructuring. Some people are talking of things that are tantamount to confederation. Some people are glibly talking about restructuring purely for their political programmes and campaign which, when they get what they want, they will abandon and there is nothing you can do about it. The YCE truly supports restructuring. But realistically, what type of restructuring do we want? I was, first and foremost, a professional, a chartered quantity surveyor before I stumbled into the military. And, luckily, in the military, I had some training up to Staff College level, so I have a good idea of what is happening and what can realistically be attained.
Going back to the 1963 constitution is a good thing but can it be achieved? Will it be allowed to be achieved? Is it practically feasible at the present state of our nation called Nigeria? Will everybody embrace it? Will people who feel they will be disadvantaged allow it? Freedom is sweet but can you achieve it by smiling and dancing? I have never known anywhere in the world where freedom is achieved on a platter of gold. We are still having problem in Kwara. There is problem in Kogi – with even allowing them to join their kith and kin. It is becoming a mirage, let alone going back to the 1963 constitution where we would come back as Western Region, Eastern Region and Northern Region. Will the caliphate like it? The Yoruba nation is a peace-loving integral part of Nigeria. We always sue for peace; we are always a peace-loving people. Even President [Muhammadu] Buhari admitted that the Yoruba nation is the most peaceful and broad-minded part of Nigeria. It is highly accommodating, welcoming to everybody. But in being so, se alejo o ni le onile jade bayi (will the guest not chase the host out of his own house now)? Because we are peace-loving; we have no weapons but you hear of containers of arms and ammunition going to some parts of the country. What do they want to do with them? What are they going to do with those things? I have never heard that those containers went to Ekiti or Osogbo, or to Ijebu or Abeokuta but they were disappearing. And those were the ones they could track down. I have never heard of any armoury in the Yoruba nation.
What are we supposed to do? So, our own mild way of asking for restructuring is to let the Federal Government consider devolution of power. Let’s start letting people develop, if possible, their own natural resources. It is most unfair that you work hard doing your farm and after harvesting your yam, they say bring it for all of us to eat. It is not fair. Nigeria is such a blessed country that there is hardly any part of it that has no solid minerals. I just happen to know that. There really is nothing that people should be afraid of. Let us start from somewhere – just devolution of power. Let them release some powers to the states and start from there and see how it gets on. That is part of restructuring. But the hardcore restructuring of going back to the 1963 constitution, I don’t know how practicable it is. I don’t know which president will want to do it. We happen to have had a president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, for eight years. Did he do it? He has put us in a very weak position. Did [Goodluck] Jonathan do it? He couldn’t do it. He didn’t do it. So, we have problems but there is no reason not to appeal to President Buhari to shed some of those loads the Federal Government is unnecessarily imposing on itself. That will be a way forward for us and we will start to emerge from that point forward. And who knows? We can even say let’s have a confederation and we will carry on that way. We are for restructuring. There is no doubt about it.
Since election time always presents a good opportunity for renegotiation, is your YCE considering a synergy with other Yoruba interest groups like the Afenifere and the Yoruba Unity Forum to forge a common ground to ask for a better deal for the Yoruba nation as we go into 2019?
That is part of our ambition. I spoke earlier about unity among all the different groups in the Yoruba nation. Although we have different objectives, it is a thing that we have commitment to, to see if we can do something to link up with all these groups and say, brothers, let us sit down. We are not stopping you from having your own agenda but the core of the interest of the Yoruba nation, to have a common ground where we can say, okay, this is how we can achieve it, this is how we can forge it ahead and this is how we can present it. Because the Afenifere you mentioned is socio-political, while we are socio-cultural. Most of their agenda in most cases go to the political sector. Our own is more social, cultural. We are concerned about the future of our people and the generations yet unborn. That is our own objective. And we want to entrench love. Let us love ourselves. Let us see our future, our progress, our development as a commitment which we all owe, particularly to the youth.
You said earlier that so much money is unnecessarily involved in politics today and the reality of that played out in the recent governorship elections in Ekiti and Osun states. How did that make you feel and what kind of mindset would you want the people, especially Yoruba, to go into the next elections with?
That is very tricky because the people’s mindset, coupled with the issues affecting our general environment makes things very difficult. You will admit that there is terrible poverty in the land. While some people are wallowing in obscene wealth, others are eking out existence from the dustbin. How do you tell people like that not to take an offer of N50? The chorus in Ekiti, di’bo, k’o s’ebe (vote and cook soup), you don’t want it to come to di’bo k’o ra moto or di’bo k’o ra jet; because from the grapevine, we are learning that an avalanche of money is going to descend on us. But we will plead with our people not to, even if they take money, forget their future. If people have, one way or the other, acquired this huge sum of money that belongs to all of us, captured it in their bank accounts and they are now giving the money to you back, if you cannot stand the temptation of taking it, you can still go and vote for the future of your children and the coming generation. It is difficult to convince a person who does not have N100 in their household if they are being offered N5,000. If you can’t resist the temptation of taking their money, you can still go ahead and vote for the person you feel will give you a good future, because after all said and done, this money these people are hoarding belongs to all of us. The government has given room for plundering. They have cornered our resources and channelled them into private pockets. Until we have a system that will make people do the needful, pay their dues to the nation and stop channelling our resources into private pockets, we will not be able to solve a lot of our problems, particularly the issue of avalanche of money being thrown into the political system, which will compromise people’s future.
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