The Ohinoyi as security threat

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Because Nigeria, like many countries of the world, is ruled by a blind political leadership, the practice of ignoring real security threats and pursuing trifles continues to stifle attempts to secure life and property. Last week’s query addressed to a foremost traditional ruler in Kogi State, the Ohinoyi of Ebiraland, Alhaji Ado Ibrahim, by the Kogi State government asking him to explain his absence at a public function attended by President Muhammadu Buhari and Mr. Yayaya Bello, the state governor, illustrates the message of this piece very poignantly. In the query dated January 5, 2023 and written by the Director, Chieftaincy Affairs, Enimola Eniola, on behalf of the Commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, Abdulsalam Deedat, the Kogi State government took the 94-year-old king to the cleaners for acts deemed “quite unbecoming of a revered Royal Father,” but failed to name those actions beyond his absence at the venue of the “glorious visit” of President Buhari to commission projects. Although I have, in the past, had occasion to defend actions taken by the Yahaya Bello government, the incident addressed here casts the government in extremely poor light. As a matter of fact, it borders on outright farce.

In accusing the Ohinoyi of “choosing to disdain the office of the Executive Governor with effrontery before the number one citizen of Nigeria,” exhibiting insubordination and disloyalty to the president and the governor,” laying “bad precedence (sic) to traditional institutions in the state,” and being of “grave danger to the security of the state,” the Kogi State government simply staged a comedy. Leaving the Ohinoyi’s claim that he had received no official letter informing him of President Buhari’s visit to the state aside, I find it interesting that it was the failure of a king to line up with other officials of the state to welcome President Buhari to Okene that portended “grave danger to the security of the state,” not the bomb blast that had heralded proceedings on the same morning of the president’s visit and led, as the Ohinoyi himself lamented, “to the loss of lives of innocent Ebira people, massive damage on my palace and rancour within my domain.”!

Beyond the question of the propriety of lining almost all the officials of a state up like school children to welcome governors and presidents, it is significant to me that Nigerian politicians see criticism or disagreement as of more serious concern to the state than actual acts of terror by outlaws. As a Yoruba, I am surprised that a letter dripping with such venom and disrespect for age/royalty could be signed by a Yoruba person. My people say that if one is sent on errands meant for a slave, one delivers it like a freeborn. Whatever the disagreement/miscommunication between the Ohinoyi and the governor, there is nothing as yet that portrays him as a threat to Kogi State, unless of course we are to assume that Kogi State and the governor are one and the same thing. Sadly, this is how politicians tend to see things.

It is common knowledge that in the last seven and a half years plus, the Buhari government has bared its fangs at critics and naysayers while allowing terrorists, bandits and kidnappers to have free reign across the country. On one occasion, the terrorists called bandits fed the twin babies just given born by one of their captives to dogs, but there was no outrage from the government. Time and again, the terrorists called Fulani herdsmen have committed carnage across the country, cutting up their victims like Salah meat. They rape women and then butcher them. They violate young girls before their parents and wives before their husbands and set up a life-long chain of anguish for survivors, but they have never managed to draw the fire of state response. Nigeria has a medley of intelligence agencies and secret police, but Nigerians keep getting killed like flies. It is impossible to forget the carnage staged by herders in Benue State on January 1, 2018, or the Igangan and Ishieke massacres they staged thereafter without any state response.

In July 2021, operative of the Department of State Services (DSS) raided the Ibadan, Oyo State residence of a Yoruba self-determination crusader, Mr. Sunday Adeyemo, a.k.a Sunday Igboho. The DSS men gunned down members of the Igboho household, destroyed vehicles and furniture and even abused his domestic animals. The action took place in the dead of night, leaving in its wake a trail sorrow, tears and blood reminiscent of the very worst of brutal dictatorships. Lamented the legal luminary, Mr Femi Falana (SAN), who likened the DSS action to a nocturnal coup: “People were arrested and abducted at 2a.m by so-called security agents of the government, yet the governor of the particular state where the operation took place was not aware of anything of the sort.”

What was Igboho’s offence? Asking killer herders to exit the South-West. Although he held rallies across Oyo State, Igboho was at no time associated with violence during his pro-Yoruba campaigns. And while in the case of Nnamdi Kanu, the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) leader, there was indeed violence, it is still a fact that he was extraordinarily renditioned to Nigeria. Even assuming that Igboho and Kanu are guilty as charged, where is the corresponding venom against the herders and bandits who have made countless numbers of Nigerians widows and orphans? Iskilu Wakili, a man accused of sundry acts of terror, was remanded in Abolongo prisons by a court of law, yet reports indicated that he was not in the facility.

In Anthills of the Savannah, the president of the fictional Kangan republic in which the novel is situated, asks his friend and Commissioner of Information, Chris Oriko, to fire another friend of theirs, Ikem, Editor of the National Gazette, based on trumped up charges. When Chris casts doubts on the allegations against Ikem, General Sam proclaims: “In this job Chris, beliefs are not my primary concern. I am no bishop. My concern is the security of this state. You should know that; you are Commissioner for Information.” What is this security of the state? The General’s plan to transform from a military to a civilian ruler. As Achebe seems to have noticed, hegemony works with leaders’ equation of their self-interest with the national interest. It is interesting that Nigeria as Kangan in fictional representation continues to reinforce Achebe’s thesis in his 1987 novel.

What Makinde must do in his second term

During his second term of office, the Oyo State governor, Mr. Seyi Makinde, must work vigorously with his colleagues to ensure that Amotekun is mobilized with the full complement of arms needed to perform its constitutional roles. He must, along with his strides in infrastructure and other sectors, pursue the restructuring imperative with vigour. I voted for him in 2019 and I have found no reason to change course by voting for megalomaniacs or clowns who think that bus terminals ought to be replaced with libraries.

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