2023: Yoruba and The Political Race of Our Lifetime
By
Wale Alonge
What is it that Yoruba want. To them Tinubu is a Boudillion robber and now Fayemi is a back-stabbing traitor and a Fulani stooge. Why don’t we then just wake up Saint Peter from his glorious grave in the Roman Basillica to represent our political interest in 2023?
Again let me repeat that politics all over the world and from antiquity has never and will never be a celestial, puritanical, moralist enterprise. It is a group self-interest driven enterprise in which competing group and personal interests (political, financial, economic, both domestic and international) duke it out for dominance. It is the reason Russia, China and Iran are meddling in the US election. By the way foreign interests have since before Nigeria’s independence in 1960 and till now have and continue with to meddle in ours. It would be geopolitical malpractice if they don’t!!!! It is shocking but so true.
In that life and death, most consequential of all board room games that politics is, every candidate for the highest office is a stooge of competing interest. Tafawa Bello was a stooge for Ahmadu Bello. Shagari, Jonathan, Shonekan and Buhari were stooges for different interest blocks. Our OBJ was the stooge of all stooges otherwise he wouldn’t have had the distinction of being probably the longest serving president in Nigerian history.
That is the simple, foundational and fundamental principle of politics that highly educated but political pea-size brain Nigerians from the south have failed to understand.
As great as Awolowo was as a leader, that was one fundamental lesson he never learned. And it cost him and our country the greatest president we never had. Politics is not a moralistic game of unyielding and uncompromising principle. Anyone who has that misconception had better signed up for the seminary. Even now we are learning that that tending the Lord’s vineyard was anything but moralistic. We now know that the clergy was sexually abusing children. We live in an immoral world if truth be told.
Politics is a game of horse-trading and morality bending. It is the reason it doesn’t attract the best of us. If you are unwilling to bend your moral compass don’t enter the political arena.
The Hausa/Fulanis understand this fundamental Politics 101 like a chess master while we Yoruba and other ethnic groups sanctimoniously play our crude ayo game in twelve crude holes dug on the ground with pebbles and stones.
No wonder for sixty years we have always held the losing hand.
We need to get off of our losing sanctimonious horse and smell the political coffee. I have news for us. Nigeria is not breaking up and Oodua Republic is not happening if ever. Even it’s most jaded and ardent proponents must know by now that it is not happening before 2023. So the only game in Nigeria now is the 2023 presidential race and other ethnic groups are already out of the gate on the pitch strategising while we are busy beating and pummelling our potential candidates to death.
The 2023 Nigerian presidential contest will probably be the most consequential races of our collective life. It has to be after this disastrous Buhari regime and the upheaval and discontent enveloping the entire political space. It is obvious to anyone that the current Nigerian political structure is an unsustainable house of card that will ultimately collapse on its own weight of incompetence, inequity and injustice to be replaced by something different.
So whoever and frankly in Nigeria nativist ethnocentric world of politics, which ever ethnic group controls Aso Rock (the Nigerian presidency) in 2023 will play a prominent role in shaping the debate and negotiation of the future of the country.
The Hausa Fulani realises this and knows that unless the south, especially The Yoruba who put Buhari in power, are totally dumb to allow them to screw us, that a northern candidate might be a bridge to far. So they are doing what master political chess players do, size up their opponents and anticipate their chess move and checkmate them before they are able to. That exactly is the permutation we are seeing with the Arewa Show and gbe invitation of Governor Fayemi of Ekiti state. The Hausa/Fulani political brains might in fact be selling the rest of the country the dummy.
So we better engage our political cerebrum or whatever is left of it before it is too late.
My people, let’s wake up from our death slumber before it is too late. The Yoruba penchant for treachery, pettiness, envy and small mindedness will cost us heavily in 2023. If any Yoruba is under any illusion that they share a common political interest with the Southeast or that there is a unified south working together against the north, then they are more stupid and naive than they realise.
It is to your tent Oh Israel. It is every ethnic group to the drawing board to strategise towards 2023. Tinubu had probably been so damaged now by his formidable opponents. Although being the cat with seven lives that he is, I won’t count him out yet. But he is a horse in the race of his political life with a bruised hoof. So as it were, we Yorubas are already behind out of the gate while others especially the north is advancing the ball pass mid-field.
The Yorubas misfortune as an ethnic group is that they are like a herd of stubborn sheep without a decisive shepherd. There is not one single Yoruba alive who has not yet compromised their value. The Yorubas do not have an Awolowo who can tell us to jump and we all say “how high”. We have so much damaged all our potential leaders, we are now rudderless. Let’s hope it’s not too late for us