How did we find ourselves in this recession?

Oba Sunday Oladapo Oyediran was a banker before he ascended the throne of his fathers almost two decades ago. In this interview by YEJIDE GBENGA-OGUNDARE, he speaks on the perceived distortion of Yoruba history, development in Yoruba land, religious crisis and sundry issues. Excerpts:

 

A school of thought claims that the history of the Yoruba race has been distorted, what do you think of this claim?

It is difficult to ascertain which Yoruba history is authentic or which is not because in the early days, there were no written documents, history was passed from mouth to mouth and anything passed in this fashion is subject to modification because each person will narrate it the way it suits his own purpose. So it is possible that from one generation to the other, people have been polishing the history to suit their own ethnic within the Yoruba race. History itself is not stagnant, it is dynamic, that is why one cannot really say much about distortion unless you narrow it down to which aspects they think has been distorted or which is not distorted.

 

What are your thoughts about unity, progress and development of the Yoruba race?

Unity within the Yoruba race is a necessity if we want to forge ahead and have an impact in the nation’s political terrain but we are not conscious of our neighbors, because they know that in our unity lays our strength, they don’t want us to unite and will do everything to ensure we do not have unity. Unfortunately, the politicians who we think should be the rallying point are not interested in the unity of the Yoruba race. Rather, they are interested in their own political identity, once they can identify with the winning political party, they are contented. And anybody who wants to volunteer or champion the cause of this unification of the race must be a person of means, even if you are a traditional ruler, if you don’t have the means, people will not believe or support you, they will think you are a rabble rouser that just wants to be noticed. When you look at the government structure now, you can easily list the Yorubas occupying any significant position of authority, whereas, in almost every sector of the economy, you will find other tribes there competing favourably and even beating the Yorubas to it. So we need divine intervention. Unfortunately, we are even further being divided by religion but I believe in one thing, if you are a believer in one type of religion and I am a believer in another type of religion, if we have the same focus, we can come together, pray together and we will achieve what we want.

 

What do you think is responsible for contrary stands among religious leaders and the claim that a particular religion is under siege?

Well, there is no war against a particular religion because nobody has come out to say it though there had been some subtle manipulations here and there but we had our own opportunity, other religions too had theirs, so people that are supposed to be complaining now should be the traditional religious worshippers because they have not been given any opportunity at all. So if Christians are complaining, it’s like they don’t have enough knowledge of the weapon they have, and that is the weapon of prayer. I am a strong believer in the power of prayer, that if we know who we believe and the potency of prayers, then there is nothing stopping us from controlling the affairs of this nation. So I don’t think there is any war against any particular religion, it is just the fact that when people are in the position of authority, they want to surround themselves with the people of their own faith so that they can speak the same language and plan together in their own way and the moment someone who is not of their religion comes in, there is a tendency that the person will feel left out. But there is power in prayer, that is my belief.

 

How can the recent spate of increase in crime be curbed in the society, what do you do to curb it in your community?

Don’t forget the adage that says an idle hand is the devil’s workshop, when people are impoverished and don’t have what to eat, they will want to lay their hands on the available. Though the orientation we have is contributing to the problems of crime in Nigeria today. We believe in white collar jobs, we do not believe in putting our heads together to get things done. For instance, we have technical schools around; no government today is promoting technical education but if you promote technical education, people will be independent, they will specialize in trade and handcrafts but rather than promote that, what they are doing is go through your normal white collar training, then come back and obtain national employment vocational training, why do you waste people’s time to go through the normal school then you give them vocational training. I think something is wrong with us because that is what is contributing to high rate of crime in our community and how do we come out of this? If we can provide employment opportunities, yes, we are saying now that we are promoting farming and people should go back to the farm, it is good but what type of farming do you want them to do? Is it subsistence or mechanized? Where is the equipment? Combined harvesters, ploughs, tractors, bulldozers to remove trees, where are they? All these things are not available, yet, we are saying people should go back to farm, how do they do this? What have we brought out of our own farm settlements in Yoruba land? We are getting nothing. So in my own community, what we do is encourage people to go into cooperative societies and to learn one vocation or the other, in fact, all the children in school, we ensure they learn a vocation while in school so they can be independent. Farming is good, we cannot run away from it but we must be serious about farming and we are not in Yoruba land, why do I say this, from now till July, all our food products will be coming from the north, how are they doing it? They have irrigational system and we don’t have, and dry season farming is more lucrative than rainy season farming. So if we continue engaging in this conventional farming, we cannot make anything, we are just deceiving ourselves.

 

What is your opinion about traditional rulers settling rifts in court and in the media?

It is relative. It depends on which angle you want to look at it. Why are they in court? Why are they fighting themselves? Is one trying to trample on the interests and right of the other? Crisis is inevitable, In those days it is settled with inter-tribal war but now, rather than go to war, they go to court to settle matters, take for instance, if one traditional ruler wants to annex my own land, before, it will be an inter community conflict but now, I will challenge that person in court, we will both bring out our documents for the court to peruse and decide who has the better title to the land in question. But there are some fights that are not necessary, one claiming to be superior to the other is irrelevant, I do not support this because one traditional ruler will not go to another traditional ruler’s community to lay claims or give instructions to his people. We all claim to come from the same source irrespective of who you are, that is Ife but we have all left Ife and are now in our present positions.   Ooni can’t come to Ijeru and dictate to the people because he is from Ife where we all migrated from and Alaafin cannot go to Ife to dictate to the subjects. So we need to respect our boundaries, when we do this, we will not have cause to fight each other. Why do we even need to fight? Is it in the interest of their subjects or their selfish gains? You need to look at this, if is in their selfish interests, then it is uncalled for.

 

What are your thoughts on recession?

The recession that we are passing through is not limited to Nigeria but I have my personal perspective to recession and the approach of getting out of it. How did we find ourselves here? Has God not been faithful as a nation? God has been good to us, that is why we are endowed with so many mineral, human and material resources. In the early days, we grew up to know every region in this country as specialized farmers; groundnut in the north, cocoa in the south and the revenue from this was used to develop the nation in all spheres but what was our population? Very few, that is why we could embark on development and free education with cocoa proceeds, but when God discovered that our population was increasing, he gave us crude oil and we became self sufficient and believed we had arrived, the giant of Africa and father Xmas, we even went ahead to pay civil servants salaries in Trinidad and Tobago for eighteen months. We forgot that when you have today, you plan for tomorrow but we refused to plan, our population was increasing, yet we continued living large like when our population was few, that’s why we found ourselves in recession. One other factor is politics of hatred, we are not involved in politics of development and until we dispense with this, we cannot go forward. For example, there is no continuity in projects by successive administration, this is wasteful spending. We do not have a joint focus as a country; our focus is being dictated by the political parties we belong. Until we dispense with this, we will not go far or move out of recession. We are putting our hope of getting out of recession on increasing price of oil, if oil price is going up, is exchange rate going down? We allowed our economy to be destroyed by our economists who will be propounding theories. America did not allow her currency to be rubbished but we allow our own currency to be rubbished under the name of being tagged a developing nation. No country that leaves her economy to be manipulated by international agencies can survive. My position is the moment we allow our currency to be floating and subjected to market forces, we are deceiving ourselves about being ready to go out of recession. We missed it because Buhari allowed himself to be bamboozled by economists