SPEECH IN DEFENCE OF CHIEF S.L.A. AKINTOLA

CONTINUED FROM LAST WEEK

I now come to the fourth and last ground. In his recent broadcast on the subject matter of this meeting, the lieutenant governor said, inter alia, as follows: “That responsibility is no easy one. For it affects not only the Western Region but the whole of Nigeria, and in making recommendations I deem it my clear duty to stick to that first essential which I have so constantly stressed in this talk – the need to form a team; to ensure so far as possible that each member of the team shall be a person who will be able to work for the good of Nigeria with each and all of his colleagues. That, in my view, must be the guiding principle and that is the principle by which I have been guided in making my recommendations.”

In other words, by disregarding the resolutions ‘of our legislature, by rejecting my advice, and by recommending and proposing the names now before us, the lieutenant governor and the governor are in effect saying that Bode Thomas, Prest, and Akintola are temperamentally and otherwise incapable of working harmoniously in a team, and that they are not persons who will be able to work for the good of Nigeria with each and all of their colleagues.

The lieutenant governor’s broadcast was not the first occasion when the character of these trusted countrymen of ours has been attacked and impugned. The lieutenant governor himself has on previous occasions told me that the reasons why the gentlemen mentioned were not wanted back in the Council of Ministers were that they had on several occasions been rude to the governor and that in any event the ministers from the North and the East were not prepared to work any longer with them. The Northern and Eastern ministers feel so strong and adamant about the matter that they have threatened, so I was told by the lieutenant-governor, that if the resigned ministers were sent back they would resign. I must stay in this context that I was not told what the governor would do if they were returned. But there is no doubt that he himself feels so bitter about what he considered to be rudeness to him that he would probably prefer to pack and go rather than have our revered friends back.

The position in which we now find ourselves in this region, Mr President, is the extremely humiliating one in which not only the governor but also the traitorous elements dictate to us who and who shall not be our representatives in the Council of Ministers. The governor has alleged rudeness to himself, but no concrete instances of this act were been given at any time. No one has yet told me why the Northern and Eastern ministers do not want our resigned ministers back. One is therefore left free to examine all the available evidence and to make his own deductions.

Ever since Sir John Macpherson started his whispering campaign against Bode Thomas and others, I have taken steps to find out the facts.

And what are the facts? From the inception of the Council of Ministers, our four resigned ministers have constituted themselves into indivisible and unyielding champions and defenders of the rights and liberty of our people. Without them on that council, the British enslavement of this country would have become more grinding and oppressive. Many a diabolical measure has had to be shelved, withdrawn, or deferred because of the strenuous, relentless, and intelligent opposition of our Ministers.

It must be generally known by now that Sir John Macpherson is a die-hard imperialist of the deepest dye. I have no doubt, Mr President, that it is also notoriously known that the ministers from the East are spiteful and treacherous, and that the Northern ones are unsophisticated and extremely pro-imperialist. Above all, Mr President, it is widely acknowledged that the resigned ministers are brave, independent, progressive, patriotic, and anti-imperialist to the core.

Now, Mr President, because Chief Bode Thomas and Mr. S.L. Akintola have been the chief spokesmen of this formidable team from the West, the governor and his Northern and Eastern allies have marked down the heroes of our freedom struggles for utter destruction. To achieve their end, they have invented this story of rudeness to the governor. If that were all the offence, one would have thought that it was insufficient for the evangelist, who preached that others should forget past animosities and think the best of others, to resolve not to have anything more to do with them. Mr President, I assure you, Sir, that, knowing the truth as we do, the more the governor and his allies hate these four stalwarts of ours, the more will our affection for them grow. For it was due to their heroic and unbending efforts that the conspiracy to enslave this country in perpetuity has not been hatched by the Council of Ministers. As an earnest, therefore, of our unshaken confidence in the four resigned ministers, and in pursuance of our resolutions to the same effect, it is our bounden duty here this morning to reject this proposal. More so, because there is the added imputation that, if appointed, this gentleman who is one of our foremost nationalists would lend himself to the diabolical machinations and conspiracy of the Council of Ministers.

Mr President, today we are being forced against our wish to take part not in a drama, but in a burlesque – a burlesque which not only depicts the incapacity of Britons to rule this country any longer, but also brings vividly home to us the humiliation, insult, and degradation which we will continue to suffer as long as we remain under alien rule.

‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’ All human beings are born free and equal as to their rights and dignity. Our enslavement today is the outcome of our weakness in military might as well as in the effective application of our spiritual power. The former we have not. But the latter we have in the fullest measure, because we are images of God just as the whitemen are. I have no doubt that if we apply our spiritual power, we shall be free; and by God’s grace, we will then put an end to this type of infamy.

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