Nigeria may implode the way it is going if its problems are not addressed —Akintoye

Nigeria is moving closer to the 2019 elections, how would you assess the situation in the country now?

Thank you. l need to start by letting Nigerians know and understand the fundamentals of my political participation at this age. In a few weeks, I would be 84 and I should be resting, but I cannot because of what I know to be coming; what I know to be bad that is coming. And, particularly, my interest is the survival, the revival and prosperity of the Yoruba nation. I know from the studies many of us have done for many decades that the way Nigeria is going, it is going to lead Nigeria into serious, serious problem, even implosion. But before then,  it will lead many of the people of Nigeria into more poverty. That Yoruba nation, Yoruba people who have really not known poverty in their history are now knowing a deep level of poverty [is a serious problem]. And that poverty level would deepen more ferociously.

Professor Uli Biere, the anthropologist, lived and worked in Yorubaland between 1950s and 1960s. He later wrote a chapter in a book to which I also contributed that in all his years in Yorubaland he never saw a Yoruba begging in the streets. That even if a Yoruba man or a Yoruba woman is mentally challenged, his people will never let him or her go into the street. Then he left Nigeria and worked in other countries: in Australia and so on. In 1986 on his way to Germany (he is a German), he and his wife called to say hello to their friends in Nigeria and he said that evening ‘I had a shock of my life when I saw Yoruba women begging in the streets of Lagos and I wrote so in my diary, the life of Yoruba nation has crumbled’. That’s what we are dealing with and that’s what I’m doing now. I am not interested in Nigerian politics; I am only interested in things that will lead to survival, revival of and recreation of the  prosperity of the Yoruba nation.

 Yoruba nation is part Nigeria; why are you advocating for the Yoruba nation only? Why are you leaving the entire Nigeria outside such an arrangement?

Thank you. In the 1950s when the Yoruba ranked and was doing very well, bubbling with development, progress, prosperity, job opportunities, entrepreneur opportunities, good democratic governance and very decent professional and development oriented civil service and so on,  we impacted on the rest of Nigeria. It is inevitable. It is like a family and you have a boy there who is hardworking, and so on, he tends to infect the other ones. So that’s what the Yoruba can be to other Nigerians. That’s what Igbo too can be to Nigerians. The Igbo too are dynamic people and there is a lot they can give to Nigeria. And there are other people like that.

But the situation now is that all of these nationalities are being systematically degraded and destroyed.

Degraded by who sir?

By the people who control the federal power in Nigeria since 1960.

But these people are mostly not from one part of the country?

They are mostly from one part of the country. The British handed over Nigeria over to the council of Fulani in 1960. And they have been trying since then to establish control over all of the people of Nigeria. That’s what the Federal Government has been doing. The Federal Government is opposed to the independence of ethnic nationalities that make up the different people of Nigeria. And it is that philosophy that gradually under civilian, under military, led to the concentration of powers in the Federal Government until we had the disastrous constitution of 1999 which makes the Federal Government the ruler of Nigeria. All of these states and governors and so on are just agencies of the Federal Government. I think our politician who said it best in recent times is this man, this young man, the former governor of Ondo State, Dr. Olusegun Mimiko. He said after his eight- year term was over as governor, he said if there is any Nigerian, anywhere in Nigeria who is governor of a state, and thinks himself as governor as the executive governor of that state, he is deceiving himself. The only governor in Nigeria is the Federal Government and that’s the truth.

I am not interested in partisan politics and I do not see my Yoruba people in terms of APC, PDP or other parties. No… no. When I led the delegation of six people of Oodua Foundation with headquarters in the United States to Yorubaland in 2015, we visited all Yoruba leaders, all political parties, all civic organisations, traditional rulers and so on. We spent all night with Tinubu in his house. We spent another night with Bode George in his house. We went and visited Olu Falae; we went and visited the then Ooni. We visited the Alaafin. We were everywhere because we were out to do two things: to find out more what is happening back home and to advise our leaders a little, give our leaders some chance to peep into our thinking, our discovery. So I am not interested in partisan politics and nobody can drag me into it. I don’t see Yoruba people as APC or PDP. I see Yoruba people as a large team,  the successors of the builders of the greatest urban civilisation in the history of Black Africa: the men who can build their country into a great and powerful and rich nation in the world. That’s how I see them all together. I don’t see parties; I don’t see that one belongs to APC, the other one belongs to PDP. I just cannot see.  I refuse to see that. I see Yoruba people as a very large team of very capable people who can build a very great nation in the world, great civilisation in the world, who had done it before and can do it again.

Specifically what is the message your organisation is bringing home to the Yoruba now that 2019 polls are fast approaching?

Our conclusion is what I am telling you now; we came with the message. Our nation [Yoruba] is perishing in this country. We need to change that;  we need to lift up our nation and we visited obas, the traditional rulers and politicians and leaders of civic organisations. We visited Baba Fasoranti and everybody. So, that’s what I am doing. I have been sent home as servant of my group, Oodua Foundation, to do this and return back often and often to report back to them. So I am not tilted towards the politics of Nigeria, except if there is something in Nigeria that I see in that is likely to bring the type of change that would impact the Yoruba nation and other nations of Nigeria positively. Then, I could give my support to that only because of my people.

What have you seen so far now?

So in 2013/2014, our leaders in Afenifere, the very powerful Yoruba voice, decided that they had discovered that President [Goodluck] Jonathan would restructure the country if he was given a chance. He had close to six years, and had not done anything about restructuring. He was good at persuading our leaders that he would do it and so they became persuaded. You can’t blame them. You can’t blame them for that. I don’t expect to be as sharp as we were because we saw Jonathan more fully, more nakedly abroad. He was not going to do any restructuring. He had in fact said things against restructuring in his six years of presidency. Yes, he had.

Things like?

On one occasion, listen, he said all these talks about restructuring and so on, the people who created the federation in 1914 should have done the restructuring. We knew and when he called reluctantly, under pressure the National Conference, we were watching all the time. He didn’t come before the National Conference on the opening day to say my dear countrymen, I am your president. I see that the direction our country has been going is wrong; we cannot continue to have concentration of powers in the Federal Government like this. It is hurting the development of our country and hurting the different parts of our country, he didn’t say that. He just said I called you to sit and do few things, there is one no- go area, don’t talk about breaking up the country, and so forth.

After listening to that speech, we gave up on him. We knew that he was not serious. So that is it. So when elections came,  some two months or so before elections, I don’t know how he came to hear about us,  he learnt about us, the Oodua Foundation.  He sent a delegation to us to ask us to support him.  He sent Colonel Tony Inyam (retd.), a nice person, a good friend to many of the young men in our group. After we met him for three days, the majority decision was that we should not help Jonathan, that we should give our support to the experiment that our own men under Tinubu were putting up.

We supported Tinubu and his experiment in creating APC and Buhari and when Jonathan sent some people to come asking for our support, we refused to support them. We decided to support our own men back home-Tinubu and co. And when Buhari came to America after he was sworn in as President, he impressed us a lot with his speech against corruption but very quickly he decided to disappoint everybody. He decided to turn the Federal Government to peculiarly ethnic government for his own people. He made a disastrous statement. He was appointing into positions only the people he knew and it has turned out to be only his brothers and uncles and so on. So, what it meant to us is that men who have spent political energy and expertise and enormous amount of money from our region to make Buhari president were kicked out of the government. But for the appointment of Ministers. There is nothing he could about it because it is constitutional. But the ones he could do something about, he did something about it. Suddenly, we found our own political leaders, who upheld Buhari and brought him to power, were behind the door. They are no longer important in the government and they have been behind the door ever since.

And when Buhari became president, and came to visit America, we were in the large crowd; our men were in the large crowd of Nigerians that he addressed at the Embassy in Washington DC and that address impressed a lot of us abroad very much. It was clear, we could see it was clear that this man is going to destroy corruption in our country. Other things, maybe he wouldn’t be able to do them, but if he can do that one thing, that is good. I wrote an article as a result of that visit for one of the columns I was writing, I think Tribune or Nation newspaper at the time.  We welcomed him, but it didn’t take long for us to discover that he doesn’t have a clear idea of what corruption is. He doesn’t have any intellectual perception of how to handle a deep disease like that. He is just arresting one or two people and harassing them and putting them in prisons and so on and so forth. And he is using war against corruption as vendetta against former political opponents and enemies and so on and so forth. When we look at, particularly, the way he is treating this Dasuki man, I am ashamed that my country is keeping one of its former top leaders in prisons after the courts have said again and again that he should be given bail. If the courts say don’t give him bail, that’s fine, but the courts have said again and again, we grant this man bail and Buhari chooses to keep him in prison. I am ashamed of that. It is obvious, it is not only I that know this, that Buhari’s idea of fighting corruption is to use it to fight people. And now that elections are around, we can see it happening. People are coming under the hammer. You know, and so, their accounts are being seized.

And it is now obvious that a person who had been found to be corrupt and whose houses had been seized and so on, if they go and join Buhari’s party, they have everything returned to them; they are no longer seen to be corrupt. And one thing Buba Galadima said yesterday [Wednesday] that is in the news today, is that poor relations of Buhari have become multibillionaires in the space of three years and he is talking of corruption. What sort of corruption is that?

We have always accused the North of being in control and making it difficult for Nigeria to move forward. Can we continue to blame one section of the country and what is the blame of Yoruba nation in this whole thing?

I have written a chapter in a book on that. The blame of Yoruba, I have taken the three major nationalities in Nigeria and have zeroed in on them. What is the blame of the Hausa/Fulani? They have had this destructive ambition of being the controller of Nigeria, that is anti-democratic and anti-development. So I blame the Hausa/Fulani for that.

I blame the Yoruba for not knowing how to unite, to propose good ideas. They have good ideas; they are a democratic people; they are a liberal people, a progressive people, but have allowed themselves to be scattered and divided and fighting one another. So the good message that the Yoruba nation carries in its culture and in its behaviour is not coming out, because the Yoruba don’t have unity among them.

For instance, look at restructuring, the Yoruba people have become the intellectual army for restructuring in Nigeria. But the army is scattered all over the place and they are not united in bringing it forward. The result is that they have achieved nothing. They carry in their culture, in their modern philosophies of life and so on, extremely good principles and ideas, but those principles and ideas have no impact on Nigeria because the bearers of it are not united among themselves. That’s all. That’s my blame for the Yoruba people.

And I blame the Igbo people, because they are another dynamic people, but they think that scattering around the place is the answer and the result is that their own homeland has become poorer than it was in 1960. Yes. And where they have gone in the other part of the country, they have not learned to make themselves harmoniously part of the society there. So that there are always complaints about the Igbo, even in Yorubaland and Yoruba people don’t complain against foreigners, it’s against our culture. We don’t hurt foreigners among us, no. Look at when former Governor Fashola took some jobless young men and went to dump them in the East. We Yoruba fought Fashola for it. We fought him, that we don’t do such.

Various groups in Yorubaland have been meeting and have been coming out with different positions against 2019 elections and Afenifere has endorsed Atiku.

Yes the Afenifere is moving in the direction of Atiku. Listen! I look at two people, the two people who are likely to be the principal candidates and there are tens of candidates. It is a pity we have constructed a country in which the proper sort of men, who may be the best for their country, can never make it to the top in the presidential election politics considering the amount of money you will need. I am told of 900,000 polling stations. You are going to appoint at least one person to represent you in a polling station and you are going to pay them maybe about N5,000. How many of these young men running around can put the amount of money needed to contest election as president in Nigeria? I have listened to some of them. I have listened to two of them sitting in one meeting and I have been sad these boys don’t have the chance to bring all these brilliant ideas into the leadership of our country.  So, we end up with two candidates who have the means to stand up in the last hours for us to vote for. The first is the current President Buhari and the second is the former Vice-President Atiku. Both of them are able to stand up there at the top and I look at them.

Again, I am talking dispassionately from research that we have done over the years. Atiku is the one Nigerian politician when it comes to talking of restructuring, he has been doing it for many years. We have record of what he said in 2004 and what he has consistently said ever since. We have every single article that Atiku has ever written and every single interview he has ever granted just as we have the same for all the other politicians. But there is none anywhere who has come close to me in explaining restructuring  better than Atiku, and he knows the advantages of restructuring. At least, from his speeches, articles and interactions, he knows the danger of the continued over-concentration of power in the Federal Government. He knows and he says it. And, very importantly too, he has been going to his Northern leaders too, the Northern political elite and trying to persuade them that restructuring is even more useful to Northerners than to the rest of Nigerians. I am not saying he is succeeding, but I know he has been making the efforts. We have the records of it.

• Killings: Time for Yoruba nation to stand for truth, fight for justice

Providentially, I ran to him where a big event was happening and we were all there and when we came out, we were able to discuss with him. Again, he did his usual thing talking about restructuring and so on and so forth. He had never met me and said to me Professor what do you think? And I said I know what you have been saying about restructuring and I am impressed by your consistency and persistence on the matters of restructuring and I am particularly impressed that you have been trying to persuade your Northern political elite to accept restructuring. So, I commend you.  But I have a problem and the problem sir, Mr Vice-President is that I believe if you become President you will not carry out restructuring.

And what was his response?

He was shocked. He said ah, Professor you have just commended me. So, why did you say that? And I said there are many reasons. One thing is the record of the past. Jonathan comes from a region where a lot of young men have died in the quest for restructuring, for a proper federation. So, when he became president, we were all hopeful that oh, here comes the messiah, he will do restructuring. Did he do it? The moment he came to power, he was so captivated and the worst of it all, he didn’t want to talk about restructuring. So, I said it is not a question of whether somebody knows it or believes in it or he’s convinced by or he is persuaded about it. It is about whether we can ever produce a Nigerian who will do something that is almost unnatural, because you will be sworn in as Nigerian president and you find yourself in endless money and you find yourself in endless power. Is it like that you will then wake up  from that morning and you will say let’s form a committee to break this whole thing up because that is what restructuring is demanding? All this accumulation of money and power in my hand, I want to set up a committee that will break it up (Laughs). I said is that natural? It is not. We Nigerians have to decide what we want to do. So, I gave him those reasons and he then said Professor, I want to ask you to trust me and I will do it. So, I said okay, I will trust you and we shall see.

Yes, that is my attitude now. Atiku says he will do this thing; he has been talking about it; he has been doing very unlikely thing like going to talk to Northern political elite about it, persuading them in one conversation and he said listen you these people when I was young, our Northern political leaders told us to go and fight for regional autonomy and now this same region is opposed to restructuring. It is not logical. That is Atiku talking to his fellow Northerners. Now, restructuring means autonomy for our region and we are opposed to it. Why? What is the logic behind it? I am impressed by that. As I said, he said I should trust him.

Now, among the Yoruba, you still have people who still believe it is Buhari that can do it because he has been talking about financial autonomy. Do you agree with that sir?

I said there are two candidates. I have just finished with one. Let me go to Buhari now. Buhari is perhaps the most prominent Nigerian political leader in opposition to restructuring. In 2016, he said I have not read the report of the National Confab of 2014; I do not intend to read it, I have not asked for a brief on it and I do not intend to ask for a brief on it. All I have done is to toss it into the archive where it properly belongs (laughs). But the pressure for restructuring continued. It continued until his party felt it had to give a response in some way. So, they set up a committee under the chairmanship of the Governor of Kaduna State and they went around the country. I spoke before that committee in Abeokuta. They invited me. They were meeting in Abeokuta. I went before them and I spoke before the committee and many other Nigerians spoke before the committee and they went back and wrote a report which in the whole suggested that the party should find some way to restructure and so on and so forth. Buhari has suppressed even that report. You now want me, because I am your friend, I do not see you as an APC or anything you are just my brother because that is the way I see all these things and people in politics. But you are my brother and you are asking me to believe what is totally unreasonable? Buhari has said and made it clear through his actions that he is opposed to restructuring, that he wants the situation as it is. I cannot support him and I cannot go before any people who are in contract with me and say let’s support Buhari. Why would I say a thing like that? It will be dishonest of me and irresponsible.

Even the reports we read yesterday showed that APC is  so determined that come 2019 Buhari is going to win the election irrespective of what you might say regarding the outcome of the election. What do you perceive from that statement?

From all appearances and according to the observation of many Nigerians and according to the many observations of international agencies and persons, Buhari is so fiercely determined to win, that it looks like it would be impossible to have a free and fair elections in 2019. That is what the world now thinks about the elections of 2019 and that is why governments are warning: ‘We want free, fair, peaceful, credible elections in Nigeria and so on and so forth’. It is out of fear that they are saying that. The United Nations wrote a report saying that there are many nationalities in Nigeria. From time to time, they are crying out that they are threatened or even targeted for extermination by the government of their own country and that Nigeria has become one of the poorest and most unequal countries on earth. That is the language from the United Nations. That is what the world now believes about Nigeria. I don’t see how we can have free and fair and credible elections in Nigeria in 2019. I don’t see it. It is very unlikely. There is nothing that God cannot do. May be if our God, the creator and ruler of all nations, can intervene, the situation might change. But as things look now and Buhari and his people are determined, it is impossible to imagine free, fair and credible elections in 2019. I know more and more powerful people are rising up against Buhari to ensure free and fair elections.

A young man says in a meeting that I attended two weeks ago. He said it is almost impossible to imagine that there is any human being anywhere on earth who will stand in 2019 on the soil of Nigeria and announced that Buhari has lost. Who is going to do such a thing? That is how fearful people have become. That is the kind of atmosphere Buhari and his cabal have built up.

And what should your group and other groups do if such should happen?

We are looking at it. Of course, it’s our country. We won’t just look and allow evil to take over us. Of course, we will do something, but what we will do is yet in the hands of God.