Unity within the Yoruba race is a necessity —Onpetu

Oba Sunday Oladapo Oyediran, the Onpetu of Ijeru land was a banker before ascending the throne of his forefathers. In this interview with YEJIDE GBENGA-OGUNDARE, he speaks on Christianity, polygamy, challenges of development, perceived distortion of Yoruba history, development in Yoruba land, his vision for Ijeru and sundry issues.

What was your growing up like?

Just like that of any other person, just that though I came from a royal family, I was not born with a silver spoon, I must confess to you, I was born in a village, I grew up in a village called Idi Opele in Surulere Local Government of Oyo State, I attended my primary school in that village, I left the village at the age of 12, I came back to Ogbomoso where I stayed for a while before I left for Igbeti where I went to secondary school, you can see that I moved from one end of the village to another end of the village but don’t call Igbeti a village, it is no longer a village because by the time that I was leaving in 1980, they brought pipe borne water and electricity. So my five years in that place, we were using ‘generating sets’ powered by kerosene

 

As a born again Christian, how do you balance your faith with tradition?

Very simple; there is no conflict; it’s just like any other occupation. They way you balance your journalism with your faith is the same way we balance our traditional institution with our faith. You see we are always making the mistake that traditional institution is synonymous to idolatry, it is not so, yes there is traditional religious belief just the way we have Christianity and Islam. You may decide to choose which one you want to follow. If you decide to be a traditionalist, there is no problem; if it’s Christianity, no problem. But as for me, I choose to be a Christian.

 

Why?

One, I was born into it but that is not enough, I encountered Christ myself and I got to know the truth. So, having known the truth, I saw that there’s no contradiction between your role as a traditional ruler and a Christian but we often make the mistake of trying to mix traditional institution with traditional religion and belief. They are two different things, therefore being a Christian and being a traditional ruler; none can obstruct the other. When it is time for me to perform the duty of an Oba, I know when to do it and when it is time excuse myself, I tell my people, look, it is time for me to go for my religious activities, they understand me and release me to go. And I thank God, few of my chiefs are getting to know the truth, some of them are joining me to pray because they see that there is power in prayers and there’s nothing secret in Christianity. I left it open for them to see and they see that my belief does not affect my duty as a traditional ruler, when it’s time for traditional festivals, I do it and when it’s time to go for any activity like state functions, I attend. It doesn’t affect my faith just like any other occupation.

 

Does your duty as a king restrict your activities as a man of God?

I think I explained that earlier, it does not because the Bible says in Ecclesiastes Chapter three that for everything there’s a season, so there’s time as a man of God, there is time as a king even if you are not a man of God and you are a king, you have your own leisure time. You can decide to use your leisure time to evangelise, take your holiday or go for mission assignments. You have to plan your schedule so that one will not affect the other and as a man of God, every opportunity calls for preaching even while you are performing your traditional assignments, you can still preach to the people. There is no limit to when and where you can preach the word of God.

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Some claim that the history of the Yoruba race has been distorted; is this correct?

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 on the 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. If the Yoruba race does not unite, we cannot have an impact in the nation.

Forget about what people have been saying; that Yoruba people are well educated, they are industrious, they control the financial sector, they say that when they want to deceive us, other races are coming up; some have even overtaken the Yoruba race. 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 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 a waste of resources, 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.