Defending Oodua: A Yoruba Nation Apologist Confronts the Cowards!

By Taju Tijani

They certainly shall not see the land of which I swore to their fathers, nor shall any of those who rejected me see it – Numbers 14:23

Agitation for a sovereign Yoruba nation has taken a strident and emotional character among disparate set of people across the South Western Nigeria. Marginalized, traumatized, and thoroughly exploited Yoruba people are dreaming of a new homeland of fairness, equity, and justice. They are looking with wistful longing to a nation devoid of human suffering, inhuman privileges, big manism, cronyism, political suppression, and subjection to mass servitude under the overpowering, arrogant and dismissive Fulani hijackers of the Nigerian state.

As things now stand, debates, conversations and stories about Yoruba nation can no longer be socially neutral or primitively wished away by the Nigerian government. Nigeria, to millions of Yoruba, is dead. In its wake is the Oodua nation that is creeping out of obscurity to sit at the centre of our consciousness and everyday parlour discussions. Youths are rejecting Nigeria in droves. They are rejecting this Conradian heart of darkness called Nigeria.

Igbo youths now see themselves as Biafrans. Yoruba see themselves as Oodua citizens. Whatever runs counter to the newthink – Yoruba Nation – is not tolerated. The new slogan is tear it down. The political schism, Armed Forces partisanship, loss of patriotism and militant agitation for separatism over national unity, are all tinder waiting to be set alight by those who hold the lighters for a new separate nationality.

However, despite the euphoria for Yoruba independence, there are still some polemical, intellectual, and cultural resistance to the idea of Yoruba nation, or if you prefer, Oodua Republic. Each argument supporting the continuation of our unity seems persuasive to those who are still fooled by it. The only one realm these cowardly Yoruba consistently fail to explore critically is the idea of what happens if Nigeria dissolves into different nations in the next few years? So what? What is equally unravelling is the shameful list of individuals, politicians, political jobbers, Obas, and contrarians who are still defending One indivisible Nigeria irrespective of its imbalances, imperfection, crudity, lop-sidedness, and tyranny

These ignorant, cowardly, selfish, greedy, and hypocritical moderates often blur or collapse the potential gains, equity, and freedom of separate Oodua nation by speaking glibly of our shared bloodline and the strength of unity among competing tribes. What is conveniently forgotten is the fact that the Yoruba had been under lockdown by a tiny, cabal-affirming, Islamic-oriented and change resisting Fulani for over 100 years.

Yoruba people, despite their intelligence and intellectual ability, have been held down by less endowed Fulani through structural ethnocentrism which had been their stock-in-trade in politics. In a nation of gross and monumental inequalities dictated by a complex amalgam of tiny elite domination, resource cleansing, colonial authoritarianism, unending corruption, Fulani mentality of divine ruling mandate, religious impunity, tribal jealousies, banditry, herdsmen unrest, and distrust, a time must come when there would be a pre-emptive mobilisation of millions of Yoruba who had been made to understand that their paradise is perpetually postponed by internal oppressors from the North. That time is now!

I must confess that over the past few months I have been gravely disappointed with the Yoruba moderates. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Yoruba emerging stumbling block is based on their cautious stride towards freedom and not the oppressive Fulani hegemony. What I feared most is the cowardly Yoruba pacifists who are more prone to hang on to survival than to justice. What maddens me are the Yoruba moderates who prefer a united Nigeria with its burden of Fulani privileges and their oppressive injustice, to an equitable Yoruba nation that will shape its own destiny, promotes even development, progress, justice, prosperity, and fairness.

Their attitude, instead of being forward-thinking and change-driven, is stuck in a time warp, not minding the true reality of average Yoruba in Nigeria. The condition of these Yoruba appeasers has transformed from tragedy to farce. On the other hand, Yoruba agitatorial vanguard are in a breakneck speed to offer a comfortable alternative to the destructive and systemic Fulani oppression, an alternative which posits that a united Nigeria has not benefitted the limitless potentialities of the Yoruba people.

What seems to be catalysing Yoruba into a desperate action has been the helplessness of the Yoruba people who have been toiling away doggedly for years under Fulani dominance, terror and arrogance without any respite and broad support. Yoruba had become the pawns of privilege and exploitation. We reel helplessly under the blows and beckoning of our Fulani masters.

However, the pacifists want a system that is accommodating, less confrontational, yet within the contraption of One Nation that is imagined to be a bit kinder, a bit nicer, a bit more inclusive, a bit more united.

The Fulani have been chewing and screwing us for far too long. Fulani overlords now refer to Nigeria as their own property and seek to dominate it perpetually. There is now a super sensitivity that reflects the degree to which things have fallen badly apart. Fulani privilege has been made politically and socially acceptable in surprising number of places – hotels, airports, clubs, ministries and even in our military barracks. Fulani privilege has been legitimized.

The new Yoruba affirmative action is a kind of grassroots commitment for Yoruba emancipation from the prison of servitude and slavery. The clash at this point is whether the clamorous and deprived Yoruba underclass can take on the powerful, rich, and politically well-connected Yoruba elites and the supporting professional classes? Buhari’s nepotism and the larger Fulani agenda to Islamise Nigeria and make it the headquarter of Fulani territory have certainly propelled the issue of separate nationalities to the forefront of the national consciousness.

The seething unrest over Yoruba nation which is bubbling is also creating alternative universe of mass support, Yoruba nationalism, readiness to fight, clannish solidarity, class struggles, rejection of Northern oppression and their dominance of the political destiny of Nigeria. There is massive Yoruba call for total and complete divestment of Yoruba support from the corporate entity called Nigeria.

Yoruba merchandise like T-shirts, our bank notes, flags, anthem, and maps are surfacing while grassroots mobilisers are becoming superheroes raising awareness. The petition for Yoruba nation will form the litmus test for this democratic dispensation. The agitation for Yoruba nationhood will test whether we are truly democratic in terms of engagement, consensus and bridge building or a draconian, rigid, and dictatorial democracy.

However, my greatest fear is the character, temperament and disposition of the Yoruba middle-of-the-roaders and liberals with their symbolic silence and uncertainty. Their persistent habit to tread with care, trepidation and over cautious attitude that encourage discouragement and resignation. Also is the danger of the moderate and educated liberals to appropriate, domesticate and commodify the struggle surreptitiously through intellectual deceit, abracadabra, and befuddlement. They will do this to calm outrage, act as the voice of reason while holding the larger dream of Yoruba independence to the shackles of indecision, false accommodation, evil peace, and evil unity with internal enemies.

Meanwhile, the desire for Yoruba nation outweighs the delaying and outright rejection tactics of Yoruba appeasers who want to protect their comfort, investment, privileges, political connection, and social clout within a larger Nigerian space.

This perception of silence and noncommittal of Yoruba moderates and liberals is a loud protest against the larger Yoruba dream of a separate nation.

Worse, the moderates are not helping matter with their caveats and demands, positioning themselves (Femi Falana, et al) as the experts on succession discourses, referendum, and constitutional matters. The issue of Yoruba homeland and the problem of life and death it raises has never been the kind of conversation that is exerting the humanity of our moderates and peacemakers. Instead of seeking out equity, fairness, and justice in a devolved Nigeria, the Yoruba pacifiers are becoming shameless participants in shambolic condemnation of courageous individuals and groups who are daily honing in on self-determination, freedom, dignity, and the prosperity of all Yoruba in their own South Western universe.

Yoruba governors, senators, political appointees, and professional classes who are feeding fat on the rotten national cake that feeds the few against the hunger of millions are not troubled by Fulani rapacious appropriation of all the core national appointments. They are not worried about the blatant capture of Nigeria’s resources, the death of merit in public life, the inhuman overprivileging of the Fulani above other nationalities in appointments sharing and the brutal suppression of voices of dissent and other ugly fault lines that need to be demolished once and for all.

They worried more about losing their privileges, ill-gotten wealth, class excesses and oppression of the weak by the mighty.

Since 1960, Yoruba have been surviving on incremental concessions made to appease the Fulani, and those concessions are not enough to deny the reality that moderates, progressive and Yoruba liberals do not want to move away from a larger Federal Republic of Nigeria. They do not want to end systemic domination of the Fulani. Rather than dream of a wider freedom, they will rather reference the unity trope, suggesting that we are stronger as one nation than break into many nations.

The prescriptive parameter (unity is non-negotiable) has been crammed down our throats by the Northerners who are benefiting more from this evil unity than all the other sections of this nation. They will want to speak to our relief that we should avoid war and tragedy. They will go into panic overdrive and talk of Yoruba internal disunity, our mythic cowardice, unpreparedness for warfare, and deadpan pessimism. The Yoruba moderates and fearful liberals should come off the political fence. Deprived and marginalised Yoruba people are applauding Igboho Oosha as he rouses them to frenzy and drives them to attempt a crusade for separate Yoruba nation using any means necessary. Yoruba moment is intuitive. Igboho Oosha’s emergence is intuitive. The beauty of the struggle is that the critical mass leading the dance for Oodua nation are ordinary Yoruba with sound intuition!

Yorexit is an idea that its time has come. We must remake, remould, renegotiate, rejig, rejuvenate, and retool our shared existence. Reactionary and contrarian Yoruba moderates have been pulling the Yoruba away from nationhood out of pure greed, fear of war, sheer class interests, fear of losing influence, power, and privileges. In their blindness, they fail to realise that it is not the job of the oppressor to free the oppressed but that the job of the oppressed is to rise and free themselves from the forces of oppression. The Igbo fought the Nigerian state in a civil war for three years and came out better and stronger.

In the Nigeria of today, there is no connection between the Fulani political elites and the Yoruba people. The only connection is the Northern guided quadrennial ritual of electioneering which is often rigged to favour them and their elected/anointed station slaves in the South. This struggle for Yoruba Nation has been tagged the handiwork of a mighty resurrection authored by God. We might yet see a David taking on Goliath. We all know the outcome!

Akeredolu: From Hero to Villain; From Courage to Fear.

By Taju Tijani

Fear not, I am with you – Isaiah 41:10

Governor Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State has been pronounced a patient of behaviour modification syndrome. The news of his affliction is enough to make the blood run cold. He has been speaking the language of compromise, retreat, capitulation, surrender, and fear. These are not the vocabularies of a militant governor who recently stood his ground against rapacious Fulani herdsmen encroaching in his forests. Quite curiously people will struggle to reconcile his recent gladiatorial resistance against the Fulani herdsmen in Ondo forests, which, to many Yoruba, was a finest shot against the Fulani, their arrogance, and excesses in Ondo State. Today, Akeredolu, who, many have had in high esteem as a courageous defender of Oodua interests, is sleep walking into the trembling arm of fear.

In returning fire, Professor Banji Akintoye has carpet bombed Akeredolu and advised him that the agitation for Yoruba nation “is not that of a plot for secession as erroneously branded by Akeredolu, but a struggle for self determination which is bloodless, intellectually rooted and legally grounded.”

In another detonation of hand grenade against Akeredolu’s unguarded grandstanding, Professor Akintoye says, “We saw how he grandstands on the terrorists and murderous herdsmen illegally occupying the forest reserves in his state and we saw how he chickened out to the chagrin of all of us who staked our reputation to defend him.”

Yoruba nation has entered a moment of crossfire. Yes, cynics, sceptics, doubters, and cowards will begin to emerge with their fear. Yes, Yoruba agitation for autonomy is a political narrative that could both mobilise and polarise. By its rampaging volatility, it could breed a sense of solidarity and a sense of distrust among the entire Yoruba humanity. However, according to an emerging body of thinkers and activists, associated with, but by no means restricted to the anti-separation vanguard, the issues of Yoruba separation is purely related to the struggles for justice, fairness, and equity. Morally and legally, the argument for self-determination is anchored on freedom from one section of this nation who are overprivileged, arrogant, rapacious, selfish, gregarious, and oppressive.

The idea of a Yoruba nation is gaining positive momentum. Unravelling also is the growing defiance and defence of the movement from the learned to the commoner. You may call it a revolution between the majority poor and the few rich or between beggars and the prosperous. The strongest justification for the near universal embrace of Yoruba nation is the ongoing state capture, brutality, censor, social inequalities, political somersault, economic meltdown, geopolitical tension through banditry and insecurity, sectional superiority, and the emerging ruination of state resources by mindless, greedy, and blindsided politicians.

For far too long and most especially since the commencement of democracy in 1999, the state itself has been too fenced off from the common interests of the electorates; politicians are too fenced off from those who elected them to oversee their interests and fix the pathologies of their existential dilemma.

What is all too pervasive and morally damning is the rise of billionaire politicians and its ethical nightmare in a nation declared to be the poverty capital of the world. The visionary, pragmatic and nation building politicians are no more. What is at play is the drama of extractive governance being run and rerun by backward looking, demented, wicked, corrupt, and worthless people parading themselves as ‘dishonourable’ actors in the political arena.

Thus, it is no accident that in October last year, our youths seized the streets to demand for good governance and the retooling of our police force from the pandemic of brutality to civilised manner of policing. We can link the action of our youths to raw courage. We can link their action to heroism. We can link their action to valour in the face of the Nigerian state that is too enthusiastic to unleash terror on its citizens. In that unifying protests, social democracy was tested. It failed. Guns were used to kill protesting youths.

It is a common knowledge that we operate a plundering form of social democratic dispensation. Worse, our workbook, the 1999 constitution, has been described as Satanic Verses meant to keep one section of this nation happy, contented, and prosperous while making the other sad, unhappy, and poor. On April 11, 2019, the former Senate Chief Whip, Senator Olusola Adeyeye, in a passionate, scorching, and scolding manner says, “The truth is whatever a man sows, so he will reap. The Constitution cannot give us peace and security. The official name of this country is the Federal Republic of Nigeria, but we do not operate under a true federalist system.

We failed to federalize the police system in this Senate because we lack the courage and tenacity to start what is making other nations work.”

That iniquitous 1999 constitution allows the central government to take resources from the South – oil, revenues, gold, custom duties – to develop the North that contributes no known natural resources to the nation’s purse. That evil document allows the gold in Zamfara to be commodified as private and state owned, while the gold in Ibadan is seen as federal resources. This mixed messages of duplicity, cheating, deceit, robbery, and political oppression of one tribe over the other, accentuated provocatively, under the Buhari regime using dark pages of 1999 constitution, can never make for a cohesive, one nation as orated by Mr Olusola Adeyeye.

We live under a partisan leader whose idea of nation building is the abomination of Islamising a multicultural and multireligious entity like Nigeria. President Muhammadu Buhari is an ambivalent leader who treats agitations and protests as irrelevant distractions. The arguments and debates over devolution of power, restructuring, separate nationality, and other forms of collective activities to avert blood and fire have been proffered, but were regarded as distracting, diversionary and unworkable.

So, in the political milieu came the courageous Professor Banji Akintoye and Sunday Adeyemo popularly known as Igboho Oosha. They emerged as redemptive heroes to unbind the Yoruba trapped in the enclosure of Nigerian space that allowed Iskilu Wakilu and his band of Fulani terrorists roam free and wild in our forests.

Where are the security forces to offer protection to the law-abiding citizens of Igangan? Where are the Nigerian Army whose covenant is to defend the territorial integrity of Nigeria? Our Army and the Police are heavily involved in politics. They have sold their soul to the president in power. The security forces are fearful, defanged, demobilised and powerless to arrest the Fulani who are perceived to be superior, cocky, in power, untouchable and resistant. Igboho Oosha came as the antithesis of our security forces. He came as the Yoruba knight in shining armour to defend and protect his own people. He cuts the figure of a true born Yoruba man – fearless, fanged up, mobilising and powerful!

Governors Rotimi Akeredolu, Kayode Fayemi and Oba Adedotun Aremu Gbadebo summary rejection of the Yoruba nation bear the traits of people who are acting like a fearful, defanged, demobilised and powerless cowards.

In Akeredolu’s resigned capitulation lurks the eternal dichotomy between the needs of the politicians and the people they governed. “We will, however, not subscribe to banditry and recklessness in putting forward our demands. We will not in Ondo State subscribe to that. So, if people are shouting out there at this time, Igboho will speak for you. It is not going to work and those who have not been speaking for us will not speak for us. Let us be clear on it. We will stay in Nigeria. We are not running away,” he said.

This polemical smackdown against Igboho and his dream of Yoruba nation is a product of fear. A product of losing the centre stage of political power. Akeredolu is retreating into laughable folly. He is going back to bread-and-butter survival politics. Igboho has begun a transformative mass movement for political change beneath and beyond the corrupt quadrennial election cycle which is always rigged for the moneybags. Nigerians are tired of political totalitarianism that puts the mass of the populace in persistent state of ignorance, poverty, powerlessness, underdevelopment, social deprivations, and oppression.

Akeredolu once again falls into Orwellian ways that seek to erase our memory or seek to invert reality. “There must be a common platform through which the demands for the most mundane to the sublime be presented. There must be general consensus. This must be articulated and presented after rigorous engagements on the level of intellection and agendum for the action.’’ Here is a staggering historical ignorance from a learned governor.

As recent as 2014, we had a ‘common platform’ where ‘consensus’ were ‘presented’ after ‘rigorous engagement’. The 2014 National Conference was inaugurated by the Nigerian President Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan on 17 March 2014 in Abuja, Nigeria. There were about 492 delegates that represented a cross-section of Nigerians including the professional groups. The Conference was headed by retired Chief Justice Idris Legbo Kutigi.

So, there you go Governor Akeredolu. We had the defining 2014 National Conference as a ‘common platform’ and important intervention, but the ‘rigorous engagement’ came to nothing. The conference produced the most comprehensive document that would have moved us forward and erased the toxic history of our ongoing forced unity, but complacent sectional interests and fear of losing unmerited Fulani privileges made the document dead on arrival.

The Nigerian nation and its actors have been contemptuous of our desire to resolve national questions through dialogue and civilised consensus. Rather government has erected institutional process that turns a deaf ear to what the people have demanded through the conference. That hollowing out had been our recurring decimal till today.

Governors Rotimi Akeredolu, Kayode Fayemi and other Fulani imposed South Western politicians cannot speak for the Yoruba people. Akeredolu cannot tell Yoruba in Ondo State how they want to be governed. Yoruba lands are colonised by Fulani armed blood suckers. Yoruba sons and daughters are jobless. They sit on okada at the juncture of all our streets. They are full of fury and anger at the very corrupt system that had forgotten them and turn them into motor park touts – agbero.

The monstrous, corrupt, and wicked animals we call Nigerian politicians have been walking over our sons and daughters with impunity. The politicians have turned our able-bodied youths into hoodlums. In compromising, Governor Akeredolu is returning to elitist folly. In calling Yoruba agitators frustrated, Governor Kayode Fayemi is shipping into executive shame. All Yoruba politicians who are benefitting from the system have lost touch with the current Nigeria’s social and political barometer. In Professor Banji Akintoye and Igboho Oosha, determination and courage have merged; truth and mobilisation have solidarized.

Nigeria has disappointed Nigerians. When would it be fixed? Who will fix it? Must agitators for self-determination be eternally accused of treason? In 2014, Scotland had a peaceful referendum. As early as this year, a series of recent surveys in Scotland are backing the breaking up from the UK with as high as 57 per cent of the nationalists demanding a fresh referendum and threatening to hold a ‘wildcat’ vote if Mr Johnson does not give permission.

On 28 January 2021, Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, had to travel to Glasgow to consort and persuade Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, in an atmosphere devoid of rancour. He persuaded Scotland to remain in the union.

British Army was not sent in to harass, intimidate, arrest, or kill Nicola Sturgeon. Like Sturgeon, Igboho Oosha has inalienable right under international law, equity, and justice to fight for the interests and defend his people against Fulani genocide if the Fulani imposed Yoruba governors are overawed and powerless to do so.

On his part, Professor Banji Akintoye has been packaging the self-determination question with professorial dignity, humility, legality, and due process. He believes that Yoruba agitation must be bloodless, intellectually rooted and legally grounded. He has argued that the right of self-determination is a guaranteed right in every nation across the world. That is the reason why Nicolas Sturgeon is yet to be detained. That explains why Scotland is still forging ahead and stubbornly demanding for independence without the British Army issuing threatening statements against the wishes of the Scottish people. What kind of political ponzy scheme do we practice?  Where is the freedom for the nationalities to ventilate their dream and aspirations? Why do we accommodate blockheaded tyrants in Nigeria?

In response to any threat from the government, governors and political jobbers, Akogun Tola Adeniyi the Chairman of Council of Yoruba Global Alliance has wade in saying, “We want to assure our Yoruba compatriots that we are working, but quietly, strategically and tactically just like the masterminds behind those devouring Nigeria have remained anonymous without vainglorious and attention-seeking noisemaking. Yoruba fighting forces, like in the tradition of soldiers all over the world are the ones who should do the chest beating to showcase their conquests.”

“We are convinced that Nigeria is already at war, and we are also not deceived by the shenanigans of those who embrace terrorism and cuddle banditry and seek to impose Stone Age mentality on all those who still erroneously believe there is a country called Nigeria.  Yoruba Global Alliance a.k.a Egbe Ominira sympathizes with our fellow African cousins in Sokoto, Zamfara, Kaduna, Borno and other states north of Rivers Niger and Benue who are being daily plummeted by pampered and officially emboldened terrorists, most of whom were imported into their territorial space by officialdom.”

We have come to the end of snobbish fatalism that wrings the hands and proclaims that Nigeria is indivisible. Everything of human creation has a life span. Everything created by man can be divided, changed, modified, or removed by the same human agency – slavery, colonialism, feudalism – they were all systems of human imagination. They came to an end. The Nigerian 1999 constitution has reached its sell by date. Nigeria, as one nation, has also reached its sell by date. Its wealth serves the interests of few politicians and cronies against the poverty of the majority.

What has been exerting our division is President Buhari’s constellation of political extremism that relates to neofascistic tendencies like empowering Fulani bandits, Miyetti Allah, freezing the accounts of protesters, banning protests, provocative nepotism and ethnic privilege that provokes our daily visceral rage and drives us into our ethnic cleavages.  

It is this haunting political castration that drove Alhaji Mujahid Asari Dokubo to declare himself as the leader of the new “Biafra de facto customary government” citing “injustice and marginalisation” on the Igbo found in various zones of the country as the reason for his aspiring for a “better life for his people.” Igboho Oosha, like Asari Dokubo, has seen Nigeria as a nation of deep inequality, iniquity, and injustice. Igboho Oosha has come to discover that the Nigerian state, by its nature and orientation, only exists to defend without compromise, the interests of the dominant class (Fulani) while the rest are held down by fear, intimidation and gun totting, heavily partisan armed forces.

In our fear Nigeria will remain a nation of idiots ruled by idiots. What matters in life is not what you want but how badly you want it. We must not fear. The Yoruba nation must not fear. Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is. Fear breeds lack of action. Lack of action breeds lack of experience. Lack of experience breeds ignorance. Ignorance breeds fear. And fear makes one afraid to do the very thing that would be beneficial to you, to your children and unborn generation.

Nigeria has entered a crisis moment and we need courageous men and women to navigate and move us forward. David Ben Gurion the founder of Israel and its first Prime Minister observed: “courage is a special kind of knowledge, the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared. From this knowledge comes an inner strength that inspires us to push on in the face of great difficulty. What can seem impossible is often possible with courage”

In conclusion, I will echo the courageous word of Akogun Tola Adeniyi, “Yoruba sovereignty is not negotiable, on course and irreversible.”

Yoruba Are messengers, Ndigbo Are traders and Fulani Are Rulers!

By Taju Tijani

The Yoruba liberation from the leprous hand of Northern domination is in ferment. The battle has taken the life of its own. The definers of the battle are unravelling day by day. Except we are blind as a roost of bats, Yoruba are the most defeated, the most hunted, the most pulverized, the most cheated the most abandoned in the mythic Nigerian project. They have been sidelined, silenced, subjugated, and snuffed out of the national composition mostly by the Northern obsession to capture, dominate and turn the contraption and empty entity called Nigeria into their Bedouin quarters.

Since our independence we have been treading the path of infamy because of Northern greed to conquer and colonise and turn us into willing slaves of their stock. We have been living with recurring nightmare of bloodbaths through Northern inordinate entitlement mentality to Southern Nigeria resources that feed their ego, worldview, and humanity. From the 50s what had dominated and shaped us as a nation had always been political violence, coups, civil war, assassinations, police brutality, jungle justice, judicial murders, oppression of the poor, banditry, Boko Haram, and kidnappings. This path of sad trajectory had been marked by the Northern colonialist agenda and our confused and uncoordinated resistance to their state capture.

We had the 1953 Kano pogrom unleashed as a reprisal for the booing of Northern leaders by Lagos crowd over Chief Anthony Enahoro’s motion in 1956 for self-governance. We had the Tiv uprisings of 1960 and 1964 against the tyranny of the Fulani in their midst. Also, in 1962, the Western Nigeria Crisis was Northern inspired. The 1964-65 Fulani-rigged elections which triggered the UPGA’s Operation Wetie of late 1965 snowballed into the Jan 15, 1966 coup which then led to the September 1966 pogroms to today’s murders, rape, kidnappings, herdsmen banditry and nationwide insecurity.

The 1967-1970 civil war was to consolidate the Northern military conquest of Nigeria as their entity. Since the end of that inglorious and genocidal war, extreme Northernisation of Nigeria started as an experiment first under Murtala Mohammed coup of 1975 in which he quietly removed Southerners in Federal Public Service and replaced them with mostly Northerners.

The 13^th February, 1976 Lieutenant Colonel Buka Suka Dimka coup was a rejection of Mohammed’s extreme nepotism in his short-lived administration. The 1983 Buhari’s coup was staged to preempt a seemingly loss of power through the scheduled NPN rotation of the presidential candidacy to a Southerner. Maddened by the senseless distortion of our national character by the North, Major Gideon Orkar staged a coup on 22^nd April 1990. What made his coup so unique was the summary exorcising of the North from Nigeria. Alarmed and troubled by such affront, the North rose and crushed Orka within hours of his coup. 

On June 12, 1993, Chief MKO Abiola, a Yoruba politician, won a nationally recognized free and fair election. A Northern inspired leadership under General Ibrahim Babangida annulled that victory. That political heist led to many assassinations, imprisonment, rebellion, and unrest until leadership fell into the hand of another Northern maximum leader, General Sanni Abacha.

From 1993 until his assassination in 1998, Abacha’s ethnocentric administration went full circle. Yoruba leaders were hunted, and majority sought refuge as exile in foreign lands. On the 7^{th of} July, 1998 Chief MKO Abiola died under the regime of another Northern leader, General Abdulsalam Abubakar in mysterious and questionable circumstances. From the classical period, Northern vision of Nigeria had been one of feudalism, caste system, apartheid, and master to servant relationship. In 1992, late Maitama Sule, an unrepentant and unhinged Fulani politician exposed Northern Nigerian project through an apartheid classification of what was expected of each tribal region.

To the narrow vision of Maitama Sule, Yoruba in Nigeria must stay within their natural gift of diplomatic messengers, the Ndigbo are classed as technicians and traders and Fulani as the rulers of both. Today, Nigeria’s political appointment landscape has not shifted from this primordial dominant mentality as we continued to see its provocative resurgence under President Mohammadu Buhari. The Chief Justice of Nigeria is Ibrahim Tanko Mohammed from Bauchi State. The Attorney General and Minister of Justice is Abubakar Malami from Kebbi State. The Minister of Finance is Zainab Shamsuna Ahmed from Kaduna State, the Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, is from Katsina State, the Minister of Agriculture, Sabo Nanono is from Kano State, Minister of Education Adamu Adamu is from Bauchi State and Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Umar Farouk is from Zamfara State.

Minister of Petroleum is President Muhammadu Buhari, Chief of Army Staff is General Attahiru Ibrahim from Kaduna State, Chief of Naval Staff is Rear Admiral Anwal Zubairu Gambo from Nassarawa State, Director of Department of State Security (DSS) is Yusuf Bichin Magaji from Kano State, National Security Adviser is Babagana Monguno from Borno State, Commandant of Nigerian Defence Academy is Major General Sarham Jamilu, Secretary of the Federal Government is Boss Mustafa from Adamawa, the Chief of Staff to the President is Prof. Ibrahim Agboola Gambari from Kwara State and Head of Police College is Deputy Inspector General of Police Danmallam Mohammed from Katsina State.

We also have a constellations of other embarrassment to national character in the recent appointment of Abdulrasheed Bawa as Head of EFCC who is from Kebbi State, Comptroller General of Immigration Service is Muhammed Babandede from Jigawa State, Commandant General of Nigerian Security and Civil Defense Corps is Abdullah Gana Muhammadu from Niger State, Executive Chairman of Federal Inland Revenues Service is Mamman Nami from Niger State, Comptroller General of Nigerian Customs Service is Col. Hameed Ali from Bauchi State, the Managing Director of Nigerian Ports Authority is Hadiza Bala Usman from Kaduna State and the Inspector General of the Nigerian Police Force remains Mohammed Adamu from Nassarawa State. The Comptroller-General of Prisons is Mr Ahmed Ja’afaru from Kebbi State, Minister of Police Affairs is Alhaji Maigari Dingyadi from Sokoto State and Minister of Communications and Digital Economy is Dr Isa Ali Ibrahim from Gombe State.

Not forgetting the Chairman of Independent National Electoral Commission is Mahmood Yakubu from Bauchi State, FCT Administrator, Mohammed Musa Bello is from Adamawa State, Director General Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency is Dr. Bashir Jamoh from Kaduna State, the Registrar-General and Chief Executive Officer of Corporate Affairs Commission is Alhaji Garba Abubakar from Bauchi State and the Chairman of National Population Commission is Hassan Bashir from Bauchi State. Most of the permanent secretaries are now populated by Fulani.

Yoruba being the most maginalised tribe in Nigeria watch as a minority Fulani tribe controls our seaports of Apapa and Tin Can Island. We watch as the Fulani tighten their hold on the judiciary, the military, the Police, the air force, civil defense, taxes, immigration, prisons, finance, electoral body, agriculture, and digital economy.

Minority Fulani of probably 10 million people now controls the Yoruba nation that is over 60 million. Any society with this lopsided and unjust pillaging of privileges can never see peace and progress. This collection of Northern privileges is nothing, but the worst form of insult and extreme rape on One Nigeria and federal character. Had the leaders of West, East and Middle Belters knew or had a glimpse of what was to come, they would have resisted committing to one Nigeria which today has reduced these three component partners into third class slaves. In 1962, the Northern provocateurs instigated crisis in Western Nigeria. Obafemi Awolowo’s resistance against the Northern plan to render the West desolate led to a trump up charge against him. He was tried and imprisoned.

By 1999, the Northern hegemons had fostered a lopsided federal structure legitimized through the 1999 constitution – a thoroughly offensive document – that allows the Fulani to dominate and exploit other Nigerians under the pretense of democracy. Since 1999, the Northerners have resorted to all kinds of makeshift measures to hang on to power, at times ruling through their members, and at other times through “their proxy” from the Northern minorities or loyal lackeys from the Southern Nigeria.

In 1992, the late Chief Anthony Enahoro canvassed for a Sovereign National Conference to fundamentally restructure Nigeria. That rescue mission morphed into PRONACO which campaigned vigorously for a replacement of the 1999 constitution, a pseudo-democratic parchment designed to allow a permanent Northern domination and exploitation. Today, and in line with that vision, we have Pa Olu Adebanjo, Professor Banji Akintoye, Prof Wole Soyinka, Prof Pat Utomi, Yinka Odumakin and many other prescient patriots beating the drum of restructuring, but the Fulani have been dismissive.

The new phase of President Muhammadu Buhari’s dedication to tyranny, extreme ethnocentric and religious agenda, lawlessness, cluelessness, silence in the face of marauding bandits, abhorrent nepotism, support for police brutality and divisionary tactics should now compel the Yoruba to fight these emerging separate nationalities battle to the finish. Now that the Yoruba have known the hidden dynamics that had dominated power in Nigeria from the 1950s, we must present a common front to defeat and get rid of this recurring pandemic.

The current controversy about banditry and kidnapping which superbly fingered the Fulani as the main perpetrators have received all kinds of tacit support from the Presidency to state commissioners of Police who have refused to arrest, arraign and mete out justice on the Fulani criminals roaming illegally in Yoruba and Ndigbo forests.

Fulani criminals are becoming untouchable, no matter their bloody crime across Southern Nigeria. Yoruba traitors in uniform are now fully at work defending Fulani criminals and punishing Yoruba who apprehended them. Iskilu Wakili’s capture has left a sour taste in the mouth of any right thinking Yoruba. This demented, aging extortioner who had committed heinous crimes against the Yoruba humanity was captured alive. He was cared for and handled with utmost sensitivity. According to Mr. Sunday Oluwole, the Federal Capital Territory Coordinator for Odua Peoples Congress (OPC), three of his men who arrested Wakili were summarily detained by a Yoruba DPO called Ajayi Mark acting on order from above.

The OPC captors of Wakili were subjected to offensive questionings by the Nigerian Police which bordered on total abnegation of their oath of service. They asked the OPC operatives who gave them permission to invade the forests in search of Iskilu Wakilu? The three gallant, heroic and fearless OPC guys were mistreated and thrown into the cell. They have been released, but their arrest was the usual travesty of Southern subservience to please the North at all cost! The Nigerian Police has been exhibiting the worst form of partisanship under President Muhammadu Buhari. They have become private security outfit for the Nigerian elites

Yoruba police officers in Oyo State are now desperately working round the clock to serve the interest of Fulani over and above their own people. This is the Yoruba curse that needs deliverance!! If Wakili were to be a Yoruba kidnapper captured in Gombe forest, his captors in the North would have chopped his body like a cow destined for the abattoir!!!

Against the above background, the election of 2023 is a huge joke. There are many political clowns in the South West who could not care a hoot for the liberation of the Yoruba and their dignity. Their cosmic mission is greed, self-interest, and power. As I write, blind followers of Chief Bola Ahmed Tinubu are preparing for his ultimate dream – to rule Nigeria. Jokers!!! Abdulrasheed Bawa, the new Chairman of Economic and Finance Crimes Commission (EFCC) is about to deliver an atomic bomb on Tinubu’s bunker.

Tinubu will be publicly disrobed, disgraced, dehumanized, and defanged. It is a time-tested trick of Fulani that is readily deployed effectively to checkmate uppity personality like our Tinubu who would rather abandon his own people at their critical hour of pain and punishment from internal Fulani warlords. Rather than offer moral support, the Jagajaga of Borgu has been exhibiting cowardice in the face of Yoruba genocide. Rather, he has appealed to God for answers to Yoruba’s travails in the hand of murderous Fulani bandits!!! His latest long winding statement sounded like a tale told by idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing! Yoruba have memory. We shall remember!!!

We should remember that Fulani commodify power and they create and distribute this power within their tribe. What happened to Chief MKO Abiola is about to visit Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Like Abiola, Tinubu has set too much faith on naira power. He should remember the riposte of late Umaru Dikko to Abiola – democracy is not for the highest bidder! The die is now cast. Yoruba Obas, elders, intellectuals, Yoruba in diaspora, warriors and activists must unite to reverse the unmerited gains of Fulani since 1950s.

Fulani know that the Yoruba are well endowed and could fight and win. We must fight and return the South West to a path of honour, greatness and prosperity. We must reject the insulting stricture that classifies the North as the husband and South as the wife. Again, we must resist the ethnic profiling of Yoruba as messengers. Since 1960, the South have been holding the cow by the horns while the North have been doing the milking. Enough is enough. Otoge!!!

Patami, I’m Upset! I paid N26, 000 to register for NIN in London!

By Taju Tijani

The National Identification Number (NIN) which is designed to check our identity and tie all our records in one giant database is running into controversy. This demographic exercise that captures all our physical make up like fingerprint on 10 fingers, head to shoulder facial picture and digital signature are uniquely generated, and once the eleven digit number is assigned to an individual, it becomes your lifetime digital footprint. It stays with you beyond the grave. The magic NIN number is so precious like a Hatton Garden diamond we are advised to guard it with our muscle and never divulge it to anybody except interested authorities. 

The NIN is mandatory for all Nigerians and eligibility is a dash to the enrolment centre where all your bio data is captured through a series of clicks on the computer mouse. Once your data is collected, you are given a transaction slip and depending on where in the universe is done, you are either given a NIN slip indicating enrolment, or you submit your phone number and email address for further communication. The purpose or agenda of the NIN is multilayered. In a world of reducibility where innovators are racing to package our lives in bytes through our phones, NIN is designed to do that, and more.

The idea of NIN is to allow citizens obtain national e-ID card, travel (using international passport), bank account opening, getting driver’s license, obtaining permanent voter’s card, registering for the National Health Insurance Scheme, payment of taxes, contributory pension scheme, access to welfare schemes, transactions with social security implications, land transactions under Land Use Act and any other transactions as may be ordered and list in Federal Government Gazette. This one shop harmonization of citizen data is quite encouraging and laudable. Whether it will live to its billing, time will tell.

Abike Dabiri-Erewa, Chairwoman/CEO of Nigerians In Diaspora Commission (NIDCOM) is media savvy, proactive and quite enthusiastic about the welfare of her citizens abroad. She puts the figure of sojourning Nigerians abroad at a galactic 20 million. 

She is known for her touchy-feely relationship with Nigerians and has learned to cope with all our arrogance, rebellion and anger against the inanities back home. In 2019, she was at the forefront agitating for the amendment of the Electoral Law to enable us vote in Nigeria’s general election. She recognizes that we are contributing enormously to the development of Nigeria, including its helpless and forgotten people. Yearly we contribute, via digital transfer, over $25billion to the Nigerian economy.

When diaspora NIN registration was the talk of the town some few months ago, Dabiri-Erewa made a casual remark caught on audio. She affirmed that NIN registration centers have been created across the globe for all diaspora Nigerians. “Once you get to the registration center and they take your details and pay a small token, they will give you your NIN.” That was Dabiri-Erewa assuring us that the exercise was not going to cost an arm and a leg. Today, I am calling out Dabiri-Erewa for misleading Nigerians on the cost of NIN registration abroad.

Armed with this assurance, I visited a registration center called VFS Global located at 66 Wilson Street, London. I was given a ticket and advised to return at 2.30pm. Once ushered in, I saw many Asian/Indian faces across the huge building. I sat in an interview cubicle, and there, the digital bio metric data capture was done. Then the jaw dropping cost of the whole civic exercise came to £40. In exchange rate, that is a staggering N26, 000 to complete the process.

Reluctantly, I made the payment. I came out burning with palpable anger against both the Minister of Communication and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Patami and the fallacious impression of the cost of the exercise never imagined by Dabiri-Erewa. One very huge disparity here is this. On the queue outside VFS, majority of us are Southern Nigerians. No Northerner among us. Of the 20 million Nigerians in the diaspora, I can hazard a guess that Northern Nigerians are probably less than 500,000.

It is abuse of tribal demography to burden Southern Nigerians abroad to collectively pay N52billion to get National Identity Number (NIN) that is free in Nigeria for everybody. The Nigerian government has become an extortionist institution dedicated to extracting revenues through its citizens abroad.

The cost of renewing an expired Nigerian passport is the highest in the world. Our embassies abroad are places of sorrow, tears and pain. This policy of extracting rent from diaspora Nigerians is becoming a shameful, scandalous and tribally-driven enterprise. Southerners abroad have to remit money home to develop Nigeria, yet we receive no free service from our government in the diaspora. Our contribution towards the welfare and betterment of relations and friends are huge, yet we have an insensitive communication minister who probably think that money is not an issue with the diaspora Nigerians.

VFS as NIN agent or procurer also has Dantata Universal Service as a partner. This huge diaspora NIN registration windfall of N52billion will be shared between VFS, the Federal Government and Dantata Universal Service Nig Ltd. This is a clear case of robbing the poor to pay the rich.

Greed and the myth surrounding how easy it is to make money abroad has made our government over reliant on the remittances from diaspora Nigerians. The ‘Naira 4 dollar’ scheme that pays five naira for every $1 sent by Nigerians abroad is a case in point. This is a policy of tribal exploitation. Southern Nigerians who work abroad are now the proverbial monkeys while Northerners who hardly work abroad sit as baboons and squander the proceed on their own corruptible fancies.

How could a country plan its economic recovery from proceed from diaspora Nigerians? This digital rape on the resources of diaspora Nigerians is scandalous, ignominious and totally ridiculous. Who bankrupted Nigeria? Who now wants to make diaspora Nigerians pay exorbitantly for a common NIN registration that is free in Nigeria? Who set this preposterous amount of N26, 000 for NIN registration for the overburdened and overworked Nigerians living abroad? Why this recalibration of an outworn social order that screws so many to reward the few?

Patami, I’m Upset! I paid N26, 000 to register for NIN in London!

By Taju Tijani

The National Identification Number (NIN) which is designed to check our identity and tie all our records in one giant database is running into controversy. This demographic exercise that captures all our physical make up like fingerprint on 10 fingers, head to shoulder facial picture and digital signature are uniquely generated, and once the eleven digit number is assigned to an individual, it becomes your lifetime digital footprint. It stays with you beyond the grave. The magic NIN number is so precious like a Hatton Garden diamond we are advised to guard it with our muscle and never divulge it to anybody except interested authorities. 

The NIN is mandatory for all Nigerians and eligibility is a dash to the enrolment centre where all your bio data is captured through a series of clicks on the computer mouse. Once your data is collected, you are given a transaction slip and depending on where in the universe is done, you are either given a NIN slip indicating enrolment, or you submit your phone number and email address for further communication. The purpose or agenda of the NIN is multilayered. In a world of reducibility where innovators are racing to package our lives in bytes through our phones, NIN is designed to do that, and more.

The idea of NIN is to allow citizens obtain national e-ID card, travel (using international passport), bank account opening, getting driver’s license, obtaining permanent voter’s card, registering for the National Health Insurance Scheme, payment of taxes, contributory pension scheme, access to welfare schemes, transactions with social security implications, land transactions under Land Use Act and any other transactions as may be ordered and list in Federal Government Gazette. This one shop harmonization of citizen data is quite encouraging and laudable. Whether it will live to its billing, time will tell.

Abike Dabiri-Erewa, Chairwoman/CEO of Nigerians In Diaspora Commission (NIDCOM) is media savvy, proactive and quite enthusiastic about the welfare of her citizens abroad. She puts the figure of sojourning Nigerians abroad at a galactic 20 million. 

She is known for her touchy-feely relationship with Nigerians and has learned to cope with all our arrogance, rebellion and anger against the inanities back home. In 2019, she was at the forefront agitating for the amendment of the Electoral Law to enable us vote in Nigeria’s general election. She recognizes that we are contributing enormously to the development of Nigeria, including its helpless and forgotten people. Yearly we contribute, via digital transfer, over $25billion to the Nigerian economy.

When diaspora NIN registration was the talk of the town some few months ago, Dabiri-Erewa made a casual remark caught on audio. She affirmed that NIN registration centers have been created across the globe for all diaspora Nigerians. “Once you get to the registration center and they take your details and pay a small token, they will give you your NIN.” That was Dabiri-Erewa assuring us that the exercise was not going to cost an arm and a leg. Today, I am calling out Dabiri-Erewa for misleading Nigerians on the cost of NIN registration abroad.

Armed with this assurance, I visited a registration center called VFS Global located at 66 Wilson Street, London. I was given a ticket and advised to return at 2.30pm. Once ushered in, I saw many Asian/Indian faces across the huge building. I sat in an interview cubicle, and there, the digital bio metric data capture was done. Then the jaw dropping cost of the whole civic exercise came to £40. In exchange rate, that is a staggering N26, 000 to complete the process.

Reluctantly, I made the payment. I came out burning with palpable anger against both the Minister of Communication and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Patami and the fallacious impression of the cost of the exercise never imagined by Dabiri-Erewa. One very huge disparity here is this. On the queue outside VFS, majority of us are Southern Nigerians. No Northerner among us. Of the 20 million Nigerians in the diaspora, I can hazard a guess that Northern Nigerians are probably less than 500,000.

It is abuse of tribal demography to burden Southern Nigerians abroad to collectively pay N52billion to get National Identity Number (NIN) that is free in Nigeria for everybody. The Nigerian government has become an extortionist institution dedicated to extracting revenues through its citizens abroad.

The cost of renewing an expired Nigerian passport is the highest in the world. Our embassies abroad are places of sorrow, tears and pain. This policy of extracting rent from diaspora Nigerians is becoming a shameful, scandalous and tribally-driven enterprise. Southerners abroad have to remit money home to develop Nigeria, yet we receive no free service from our government in the diaspora. Our contribution towards the welfare and betterment of relations and friends are huge, yet we have an insensitive communication minister who probably think that money is not an issue with the diaspora Nigerians.

VFS as NIN agent or procurer also has Dantata Universal Service as a partner. This huge diaspora NIN registration windfall of N52billion will be shared between VFS, the Federal Government and Dantata Universal Service Nig Ltd. This is a clear case of robbing the poor to pay the rich.

Greed and the myth surrounding how easy it is to make money abroad has made our government over reliant on the remittances from diaspora Nigerians. The ‘Naira 4 dollar’ scheme that pays five naira for every $1 sent by Nigerians abroad is a case in point. This is a policy of tribal exploitation. Southern Nigerians who work abroad are now the proverbial monkeys while Northerners who hardly work abroad sit as baboons and squander the proceed on their own corruptible fancies.

How could a country plan its economic recovery from proceed from diaspora Nigerians? This digital rape on the resources of diaspora Nigerians is scandalous, ignominious and totally ridiculous. Who bankrupted Nigeria? Who now wants to make diaspora Nigerians pay exorbitantly for a common NIN registration that is free in Nigeria? Who set this preposterous amount of N26, 000 for NIN registration for the overburdened and overworked Nigerians living abroad? Why this recalibration of an outworn social order that screws so many to reward the few?

Evil Gestures: Has Gormless Gumi Gone Gaga?

By Taju Tijani

Sheikh Ahmed Gumi the go between negotiator for the bandits and the President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration is a man who wants to reduce the temperature of our heightened hysterical sense of siege mentality from Fulani bandits. He is the image of a hardcore, ultraconservative, Islamic fundamentalist, abrasive, bandit defender, peacemaker, paradigm breaker, fearless malam, caliphate defender and fiery preacher. His grey bushy beard evokes the image of a Mujahidin fighter from the rocky mountains of Afghanistan. He looks like the archetypal and medieval figure of kolanut chewing Fulani warlord from the arid and empty quarters of Sokoto caliphate. He enjoys the limelight and seems to have a covenant with controversy.

Recently Gumi stirred up national uproar by some of his outlandish ideas about banditry, the Military and the tacit sympathy he has been nursing for the Fulani murderers. The whole social and commentariat space has been driven to a hysterical sense of utter disgust, anger and helplessness watching actor Gumi on stage as he draws our opprobrium. His pedigree as a medical doctor has come under rigorous scrutiny. Brand Gumi is collapsing every sale paradigm and making eccentricism the newest fad in our search to combat the raging anger hounds of perdition let loose in our forests.

To Gumi, bandits are Nigeria’s most eligible bachelors. They are the most misunderstood and the most vilified. To Gumi, bandits have a justified reason why they took to a life of fearless, extorting, raping and killing existence. To Gumi, it is the system that made them into Rambo outlaws roaming Northern forests for human bounty to satisfy a bloodlust lifestyle. To Gumi, bandits are the Martians who inhabit the alternative universe of Hobbesian morality where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Sambisa forest is life outside society and it fits Thomas Hobbes description perfectly.

Sheikh Ahmad Gumi has some sterling laurels around his groin. He is Fulani, a medical consultant, bandit broker, deal maker, Islamic cleric, scholar, former military officer and current Mufti and mufassir at the Kaduna Central mosque. Mohammedan quest has taken him to Saudi Arabia’s Umm al-Qura University where he graduated in Islamic Jurisprudence and Tafsir. He is becoming famous for striving hard to punch above his weight on or off the ring.

He is the author of a would-be bestselling, but yet to be published book called, “The Gumification of Banditry in Nigeria.” In many of his public outbursts he has been proselytizing for a major amnesty for armed bandits and he readily gaslights those who oppose his ‘noble’ move as ignoramuses. Hear one of his effusive pleas: “I see no reason why we cannot give bandits who repent amnesty. You ask why do we give them amnesty but they told us specifically that they are ready to drop their arms and they don’t want to be pursued with legal actions after they repented. If the country could pardon coup plotters who committed treasonable offences in the era of military administration, the bandits can as well enjoy similar forgiveness even better under democratic rule.”

“These people in the bush who have taken arms, they are criminals. I wonder who is not a criminal. Since Nigeria forgave coup plotters, forgave those that killed. Even those that instigated civil war; civil war that millions of people died, I see no reason why we cannot accept their repentance. Since that is the bottle-neck and it is only the federal government that can give them that leverage. And strangely we found out that they are victims too. They were victims of profiling. So many of them were arrested and punished just for looking like herdsmen.”

He went further and announced that it is indecorous and uncharitable of all Nigerians to call bandits criminals. “You’re emphasising on criminality, even the press are criminals too because they are putting oil into fire. These people are listening to you, you should not address them as criminals if you want them to succumb,” he said.

He added: “Youths are ready to put down their weapons, now you are calling them criminals. How do you want them to cooperate? So you have to show them they are Nigerians, that they should not hurt children, be law-abiding. This is the language we want to hear, the press should assist us in getting the boys. You see when we talk with them with nice words, they are ready to listen to us, put down their weapons but when the language is about criminality, killing them, then this is what we will keep having. Let me show you something, I don’t wish you harm but if you are stopped by armed robbers on the road, you will not use the word criminal on them. Tell them good things so that you will save yourself. We are trying to save the nation from these youths that have a false sense of authority. The language we use is very important,” he said.

“We have a problem now, proliferation of arms, and there are drugs and semi-illiterate population. How do you deal with it? By castigating them and abusing them in the media? You’re talking to yourself, they don’t even listen to you so the best for us is the clergymen, the respected people and elderly try to reach them. Put sense into them, when you go, they lower their heads, they will listen, they will start giving excuses, accept their excuse but show them the way out. We are trying to nurture them out of this criminality. You have the power of media, you should use it to bring people together not try to spread things that divide people.”

A whole universe of condemnations have followed the above cuddly and liberal gibberish from the crusading Gumi whose idea of evil peace with the bandits is amnesty. The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA asked the military to arrest Gumi for prosecution over his unholy dalliance with the forest beasts called bandits. The Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), the Northern Governors Forum and the Northern Elders Forum have all carpet-bombed the incinerating devices of Gumi. A backward glance on Gumi showed that he once threw a deadly grenade on the military. His target was to polarise the military on religious line and tarnish its integrity. Hear him: “We have seen how some Christian elements in the Nigerian security apparatus have been killers of innocent Muslim leaders for political reasons”.

On Monday the Nigerian Army returned fire and warned Gumi not to drag the image and reputation of the Army into the murky mud of disrepute. Gormless Gumi may have gone stone cold but there are salient and probing questions for the Buhari administration.  Why are Fulani people like Gumi prone to be loose cannons with rights to drop inciting comments without any consequences? Why has Gumi remained free and unchallenged and uninterrogated by the military? Why is Gumi not tried for the sin of a double agent? Why has he not led the military to the bandits’ hideouts?

If Odua People’s Congress foot soldiers who nabbed the notorious bandit called Iskilu Wakilu could be detained and sent into Police cell, pray what is supposed to be the fate of a sheikh who not only knows bandits hideout but was also prepared to plead and negotiate on their behalf?

One cannot pretend not to know the answer. Gumi is a privileged Fulani from Northern Nigeria. The nature, character, sybology and orientation of President Muhammadu Buhari administration, exists only to defend and shield without compromise the interests of certain ethnic stock to the exclusion of others. Gormless Gumi may have gone gaga but at least we could all watch his clerical eccentrics with resigned endurance.

Cultural Genocide: Why Lai Mohammed Stole National Arts Theatre?

By Taju Tijani

Lie imprisons life but truth releases it. We live in a world of supermen – the supermen in APC – who are now drunk on hubris and going about in a kind of ferocious, rapacious and mass appropriation throughout the length and breadth of our cultural landscape. In a torn and conflated space called Nigeria, might is becoming the currency of the realm and there is nowhere where this obnoxious orthodoxy find a vexatious presence other than the Iganmu unique edifice called National Arts Theatre. Hyenas and wolves have laid siege on this sepulcher of national heritage and are about to eat it to the bones!!!

Vulture capitalists are now steaming ahead in their attempt to bowdlerize our National Arts Theatre, leaving a tower of commercial mush in its wake. Mr. Lai Mohammed, the Minister of Information and Culture, in spite of the demonology around his name, is the disingenuous cheerleader who wants to cancel, erase, obliterate and desecrate the inner grove of our Iganmu cultural monument through a mindless irrationality that speaks to capture, cultural desecration, depravity, political opportunism, manifest lies, vulgar commercialism and superman mentality. Once again, the National Arts Theatre cultural landscape is about to be redrawn by wolves, hyenas and sharks who could not allow that gem of a spot – bang in the center of Lagos – stand without tearing it down limb to limb.

The National Arts Theatre was initially designated as Creative Industries Park and the extant documents of Jadeas Trust Consortium showcased this potential. The Concession Management of the National Arts Theatre and its surrounding land mass had been technically concluded through due process. This was based on Public Enterprise Act that mandated the BPE and ICRSC as the only MDAs responsible for the Concessioning and Regulation of Federal Assets. The regulatory body had originally endorsed the MOU signed by the two preferred bidders thrown up by the two MDAs.

This approval followed an intervention of stakeholders meeting that was brokered by the Vice President Yemi Osinbajo as the Chairman of the National Council on Privatization at which Lai Mohammed was in attendance. On this, Mr. Boss Mustafa, the Secretary to Government of the Federation also reaffirmed the federal government position on the concession programme.

He reaffirmed that the Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE) is the only MDA authorized to conduct concessioning of the Federal Government assets and that it can conduct concessions with or without the Supervising Minister of the relevant Ministry whose asset is to be concessioned. That instruction is as clear as the sound of a bell. But our stubborn petrel and wannabe Fulani, Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information and Culture has allowed a permissible deviance to cloud his ministerial remit. He not only refused to endorse the MOU of the two preferred bidders but also proceeded to circumvent due process and extant laws by going ahead to secure “Presidential Approval” to hand over the National Arts Theatre to the Central Bank of Nigeria and Bankers Committee in July 2020.

Lai Mohammed recapitulation was a shocker. He was part of the stakeholders meeting conveyed by the National Council of Privatization that served to broker an initial resolution and the signing of MOU between the two preferred bidders that were thrown up through the parallel transactions of both the BPE and ICRC. Worse, the Central Bank of Nigeria has deposed a sworn affidavit in court in response to an injunction taken by one of the concessionaries. The CBN argued that the purported handover never happened. The CBN also opined that its remit did not include the renovation of the heritage building but was concerned with monetary policy.

What is unravelling here is the abuse of office and total disregard of legal processes in the disbursement of government assets under Mr. Lai Mohammed. The general consensus was that the Presidency and Federal Executive Council (FEC) did not give Lai Mohammed approval to derail the original privatization process. Another consensus was that probably the federal government is ignorant of the subsisting concessionary process. Why would Lai Mohammed who helped to midwife an earlier stakeholders meeting now dredged up another patently flawed process that seems to bypass the constituted privatization agencies like Council of Privatization and the Technical Committee on Privatization?

Even the MOU between the bankers and the Minister of Information and Culture, Mr. Lai Mohammed, is shrouded in secrecy. Before the renovation of the National Arts Theatre begins, we must ask these questions. Why is Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) a government entity paying itself and the Bankers Committee N21billion to renovate the National Arts Theatre?

According to the Minister, 44 hectares of the land surrounding the National Arts Theatre are billed to be developed into Music, Film, Digital and Fashion (garment factory) hubs at a whopping sum of N20billion. What then happens to the remaining 100 hectares of land bordering National Art Theatre? In a meta universe where the creative and entertainment industries are outstripping resource based economy, why would our CBN threw N21 billion to refurbish the Theatre? In Nigeria, Paystack recently raised $20million from offshore investments and lately Funke Akindele’s film Omo Ghetto grossed N500million within couple of weeks of its Netflix release.

According to Lai Mohammed, the Bankers Committee will manage the Theatre and its 100 hectares of land for a period of 21 years following a refurbishment jamboree paid for by the Central Bank. What actually are the Bankers Committee bringing to the table? The global best practice is to allow competent private investors with expertise to invest in dormant assets and turn them into profitable entities and later recoup  their monetary investment while ensuring and holding as sacred the socio and cultural benefits of such assets to the community they serve.

FESTAC 77 will be remembered through the lens of nostalgia, especially by those who enjoyed the cultural jamboree as the greatest global collection of African arts and culture that showcased our budding continental creative genius. Therefore, National Arts Theatre should be saved from the grip of hyenas and wolves who are out to desecrate our heritage through ferocious and mindless commercialization of a place of culture. National Arts Theatre is a protected heritage site and we must not allow Mr. Lai Mohammed and the CBN consortium turn our jewel into a white elephant of commercial slum. Today, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, Mr. Godwin Emiefele and the Bankers Committee are out to expropriate, balkanize and capture our premier cultural edifice for elite enrichment. Period!

As we slide into the slime of cultural genocide, Ghana, our competitive neighbor, is on the verge of building its own Pan African Heritage Museum that is envisaged to be twice as big as our National Arts Theatre at a cost of $30 million. This project has been endorsed by UNESCO and its endowments and sponsorship are being raised all over the world. By contrast, our government wants to spend $50 million just to refurbish National Arts Theatre and turn it into what Mohammed glibly tagged, “the biggest event center in Africa.”

The potential of a properly modernized National Arts Theatre has the capacity to transform the cultural fortune of Lagos and by extension Nigeria, only if we could wrestle it from the hands of a superman like Lai Mohammed, the Central Bank of Nigeria, Bankers Committee and other hidden stakeholders who received their legitimacy through Lai Mohammed’s bogus narratives, subversion of due process, official impunity, personal graft and corruption. The National Arts Theatre is a monument of cultural heritage not meant for desecration. Its original character as a holding place for our collective artefacts must not be traded off for the inordinate ambition of latter day hyenas and wolves who could not resist the temptation to capture a prime land for personal enrichment.

Igboho Oosha: Yoruba Traitors Are After Me. Break and Scatter, Shandaraba!

By Taju Tijani

“You can jail a revolutionary buy you can’t jail a revolution,” – Fred Hampton.

In the winter of 1969, a heavily armed, FBI-backed team of police officers stormed an apartment on the West Side of Chicago and killed one of the sleeping inhabitants. The man killed in that wintry night was the 21 years old Fred Hampton, the prodigious revolutionary and a potent force of the Black Panther Party. Like Igboho Oosha, Hampton was fearless. Like Igboho Oosha, Hampton’s galvanizing leadership was to champion the struggle of the black community in the face of virulent racism, poor housing, black poverty, police brutality, political suppression and racial injustice in all areas of life.

Like Igboho Oosha, Hampton was a very relatable person who had talismanic and superhuman power. Like Igboho Oosha, Hampton was protective and showed zeal and commitment towards black people who had suffered discrimination, domination and injustice all through their history. As Hampton was organizing, empowering and sensitizing his people, a secretive counter force was taking stock. Alarmed by the power, followership and messianic messages of Hampton and the Black Panthers, the FBI began a race to tear apart and bring Hampton down. The levers of power then concluded that Hampton was a radical threat and if allowed to grow could feasibly overthrow the current order.

The FBI then had Fred Hampton in its sight. A Judas, traitor or saboteur must be sought within the black community to bring down Fred Hampton, clip his wings and possibly kill him. FBI, through painstaking patience, found a traitor in the murky and convoluted heart of William O’Neal – the man who would betrayed him. O’Neal was courted, funded and groomed by FBI. He rose through Black Panther Party and became Hampton’s bodyguard. Every minute, he plotted and schemed on ways to destroy Hampton. Through his unrivalled access, O’Neal knew every move of Hampton.

Before the midnight raid and assassination of Hampton on 4^th December, 1969, O’Neal had drawn a detailed plan of Hampton’s apartment for the FBI including his bedroom. On the day of the FBI’s clandestine mission, William O’Neal (the odale ore) secretly spiked Fred Hampton’s drink with barbiturate in order to sedate him and make him a sitting target for the FBI assassin.

At 4.00am, the FBI assassination squad stormed Hampton’s apartment and shot him twice. He died through the collaborative forces of evil, saboteur, subversive, traitor, betrayer, informer, apostate and a turncoat. Years later, William O’Neal committed suicide. The echo of Matthew 10:36 could be heard in my head: “A man’s enemies will be those of his household.” Igboho Oosha be careful!

In Biblical time, Jesus Christ, the Messiah, came from heaven to offer salvation, freedom from oppression and tyranny of the religious Jews and the Pharisees. He was seen as a radical, a revolutionary and a disrupter of the religious status quo who had placed the people in perpetual ignorance and exploitation. The race to destroy Jesus Christ ignited a mad competition for his life. Herod had wanted to destroy baby Jesus but for the divine intervention of the Almighty. The plan was aborted before execution. Before long, an inside traitor had to be cultivated to betray the young, unknown, radical preacher called Jesus Christ, the King of the Jews.

Caiphas the chief priest, the scribes and the elders of the people began a manhunt for a traitor inside Jesus circle. A bounty was set on his head. Thirty shekel of silver was the price for the life of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. A taker in the traitorous mould of Judas Iscariot had to emerge. With a mortal kiss from Judas Iscariot, Jesus was sold out to his enemies. Pontius Pilate the governor, the chief priests and elders of the people jubilated that they got their troubler. Jesus was crucified through the deft hand of Judas Iscariot. Like O’Neal, Iscariot also took his own life.

Please tell Igboho Oosha to note this very well. Bible recorded that once Jesus was caught in the fork of his enemies, “all disciples forsook him and fled.” As I write, debate on Igboho Oosha’s life is being plotted by our DSS just as the notorious COINTELPRO, the shady, counter-intelligence arm of the FBI brought about the downfall of Fred Hampton through William O’Neal who was the wolf in sheep clothing inside the Black Panther inner circle.

Social media talk heads, trend analysts and chattering classes are behaving like feral animals. They are digging deep into the trenches and demanding action against the despoliation of the Yoruba land. Like everything with the Yoruba, opinions are polarized on the way forward. However, what is faultless in all their ethnic effusions for the liberation of the Yoruba fatherland from Fulani capture and killings, is their collective agreement that Yoruba governors, Obas, Chiefs, elders, Yoruba apologists for Buhari, office seekers, contract hunters, cowards, Yoruba looters and ambitious Yoruba politicians are far more deadly enemies of the Yoruba than even the so called Fulani bandits.

That is, the jomi-jokes, jegudujeras, olote, the agbabodis, the seku-seye of Yoruba land are all calculating, scheming, plotting and working to undermine the gains and consciousness of the Yoruba people triggered by the rise of Igboho Oosha and his followers. Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the Jagaban and Asiwaju of Lagos has been conveniently silent. He has lost his balls. His action is a throwback to his eerie silence during the Lekki massacre. Ordinary people with their eloquent voices have been proclaiming the necessity of Yoruba nationhood and partition from a false federalism that had put Yoruba in perpetual disadvantage, slavery and political castration. Yet the Yoruba could not find support in their critical hour from Tinubu – a man who rode on the back of the Yoruba to his behemoth-like political stature!

First dice of cowardice. Governor Dapo Abiodun has made a fiery denunciation when it emerged that he invited Igboho Oosha to Ogun State to do the needful against the internal enemies called Fulani bandits. In his gallant and chivalrous manner, Igboho Oosha rode into Oja Odan. Fulani fled at the wailing and warring voice of Yoruba newest generalissimo who brooks no nonsense and fears no opponent. In a shameful capitulation, our fearful gink, Tinubu acolyte and Buhari apologist, Governor Dapo Abiodun, denied inviting Igboho Oosha.

Second dice of treachery. Many of the Yoruba Obas are not strident and clear in their support and loyalty to Igboho Oosha’s righteous cause. They speak with forked tongue because their heart is not on the collective resurgence of Yoruba dignity, pride and freedom but on selfish gains like dollars from the cipher at Aso Rock, new Japanese SUV, contracts and freedom from persecution. Mr. Seyi Makinde, the uncharismatic and turncoat governor of Oyo State is an unequivocal adversary of Yoruba freedom. His staccato voice on Igboho Oosha liberation war against the rampaging and cowardly Fulani has been one of betrayal. Makinde’s irony is huge. How could a man in PDP be behaving in a fawning manner towards Mohammadu Buhari to the point of subservience? Is this billionaire governor afraid of the midnight knock from EFCC? Is he on the verge of decamping over to Fulani party called APC?

Third dice of complicity. Fayemi, Oyetola and Sanwo-Olu the chief demagogue of them all, are all silent and could be accused of complicity in the decimation of Yoruba by the Fulani herdsmen and bandits.

Even the erratic jester and megaphone Femi Fani-Kayode who seized Igboho Oosha’s moment for personal advantage is now begging APC for a spot in the party. They are all selling their birthright for a plate of porridge from a Fulani die hard called Mohammadu Buhari who has never hidden his first allegiance to his people and his Islamic religion.

If blood loyalty and holding the fort for your people in their greatest hour of struggle is treasonable felony, pray, who has been more traitorous than a sitting Nigerian leader who squander Nigerian money to develop the Republic of Niger? Who has been more traitorous than the daylight action of Sheikh Ahmad Gumi who met over 700 bandits in Zamfara State? Who should be dealt with and made to face the full force of the law than Governor Bello Matawale of Zamfara State who allowed Gumi to consort and roll out a red carpet reception for fully-armed and combat ready leaders of bandits under our watch? Does the North care for our opinion in the South? Hell no!!!

This writer subscribes to the Biblical truth of Matthew 11:12. The kingdom of Yoruba has been suffering violence, rape, killings and despoliation and the violent must take it by force. With Igboho Oosha, I stand on this very reality!!! The Fulani have a bloody, evil and genocidal agenda against the Yoruba nation. A renegade and outlaw Fulani called Iskili Wakili once controlled Yoruba land of Gbangbangere, Kajola, Magbeje, Konko and Dagbere in the Ibarapa land of Oyo State. Now he is on the run! Is this not a sacrilege, abomination and direct insult to the Yoruba people? Makinde, the matador in Oyo State, has been rendered powerless. When would the Chief Security Officer of Oyo State lead the Fulani police to flush out the outlaws who control a sizeable area of Ibarapa?  

The silence of all Yoruba office holders in the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari has translated into putting millions of Yoruba people in the full grip of slavery and bondage. The roll call of dishonor include Prof. Yemi Osibajo, Yoruba governors, Femi Gbajabiamila, all Yoruba senators and house of rep members, Ministers and special advisers. The appellation of traitors is understatement. They have all helped in spreading the contagion of cowardice commonly associated with the Yoruba race.

Yoruba are in the throes of emotional ethnicism. Buhari’s regime has been championing this orthodoxy. Buhari sees cows and Fulani as a totem of adoration and awe. He is ready to commit genocide to save these two entities. Throughout the life of his presidency he has been making a gleeful exhibition of his Fulani tribalism. So it is nothing new.

The advantage Buhari has over the Yoruba is the near homogeneity of collective support from his Fulani constituency. They see themselves as blood brothers with rigid allegiance to solidarity no matter the injustices of their actions and inactions on others. Buhari has rendered one Nigeria impotent through his obsession for identity politics of Fulani domination and hegemony.

Collective solidarity is where the fight for the liberation of Yoruba land from foreign Fulani invaders and their internal enablers must be fought and won. Unity should be our strength if we will have a homeland for our future generation. Yoruba land must be shut down through mass mobilization rather than fall into the hand of Fulani herders and their Yoruba collaborators. Never!

Fourth dice of political blindness. Yoruba politicians who are nursing political ambition in 2023, and by extension a Tinubu presidency should go ahead and re-examine their brain. They should re-read the ominous handwriting of mayhem, confusion, anarchy and possibly civil war on the wall. Yoruba are angry. Their elected and appointed leaders are boy-boy to Fulani and slaves to their own ferocious and rapacious greed that had rendered Yoruba as third class citizens in a Fulanised entity called Nigeria.

Igboho Oosha who appeared as a magnet to whom we all should cling is facing Yoruba Afonjas, jomi-jokes, jegudujeras, olote, the agbabodis and the seku-seyes within a space of a month in the trenches. Igboho Oosha is about to be demarked, delegitimized, overawed and maneuvered by Yoruba political elites who are yet to grasp what is coming at them from Fulani.

The voices of Yoruba politicians are divided on Igboho Oosha and the recent ethnic revolt in Ibarapa. For a fact, Yoruba tribal spirit and generational curse is disunity. It manifests itself through the ancestral spirit of Afonja, embedded in the betrayal of his own people. Those emblematic traits of betrayal, treachery and deceit are yet to be exorcised from the humanity of Yoruba people. It is the social and spiritual cancer eating up their possibility of greatness, power and nationhood.

Lastly, any kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. Igboho Oosha must watch and pray lest he falls into the hand of a state sponsored Judas or Jezebel. Fred Hampton was betrayed by William O’Neal and Jesus Christ by Judas Iscariot. Yoruba political traitors are about and they must fall down and die. Shandaraba!!!

Igboho Oosha has dared and has called for collective martyrdom in order to recapture Yoruba greatness, honour and dignity. Igboho needs our sacrifice of support and solidarity – now!!!

Absolutely Jabulous: Got my jab, Hoo Haa!!!

Taju Tijani

Vaccine disinformation, anti vaxxers genocidal hallucination, end time conspiracy theorists, demonization of Bill and Melinda Gates as agents of Satan commissioned to depopulate black people all over the world, family pressures and fear, have all conspired to consign me into a walking cynic. I have been a victim of Covid-19 pandemic and have been locked down close to a year. It has been depressing, despairing, limiting, sectioning and discouraging. Covid-19 bounced me off the London social circuit. Places of interests were shut down. Avenues for fun and relaxation became ghost towns. High streets with their colorful, exciting and limitless offerings to the rich and curious closed their shops and threw the keys into River Thames!

Children were shut away from their parents. Schools were shut down. Offices were shut and staff melt into their neck of the wood moaning day and night and praying for solution to end the pandemic. Then the race for vaccine caught the world by storm. A global race to discover vaccine ensued in western laboratories while the world waited with anxiety and expectation. Several sensational claims of vaccine discovery were made – from Africa to Zagreb. Hope was kindled and dashed. The world was on tenterhooks. Self-help became an instant hit. Patiently and methodically, scientists were burning midnight oil to save humanity from the ravages of a pandemic that had claimed millions of lives across all continents. 

Then a ray of hope beckons. AstraZeneca announced its vaccine discovery in Oxford, United Kingdom. In retaliation, Pfizer also gleefully joined the big player in vaccine production. Today, the world is sighing a huge relief and hoping that the abnormalities of Covid-19 pandemic will soon return the world to its normalcy. Countries brought out the gongs to celebrate an antibody that will keep humanity alive all over again. The legion of anti-vaxxers are thinning by the day. Old vaccine skeptics are queuing up across western clinics to get the jab.

On Monday 15^th February 2021 at 1.10pm I got jabbed by a petite, pretty Indian female doctor in Burnt Oak, North London.  I joined a snaky short line. In 20 minutes I was facing a life saver – Pfizer vaccine – that would shield me from a deadly and nomadic virus that respects nobody.

I confirmed my date of birth and pronto, I was ushered into an office where questions about allergies were asked. Protocol questions were answered. I shot out my left arm and in seconds I got a painless antibody baptism that will enable me live a virus-free life – at least for now.

As I write, 15 million most vulnerable Brits have received the jab beating the government set target. In ecstatic exuberance, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has hailed,” a truly national effort.” He said, “Those vaccines have been delivered in our NHS hospitals, in GP surgeries, in high street pharmacies, in cathedrals,  churches, mosques, temples, in community centres, and in living rooms in cities, towns and villages.”

“They have been delivered by the most extraordinary army of vaccinators who jabbed like there is no tomorrow – doctors, nurses, retired health workers who returned to the fray – supported by volunteers, organisers, marshals guided by the leadership of the NHS and supported by the great strategic, logistical nous of the British Army.” He continued, “There will undoubtedly be bumps on the way but after all we have achieved, I know that we can go forward with great confidence. Of course, on their laurels. On his p-art, Prof. Tim Spector the initiator of the Zoe Covid Symptom Study that tracked 330,000 people said,” We are achieving 67% protection after three weeks and 46% after two weeks. There is a lot of reason to be optimistic that we will be in a much better place in two or four weeks and then we can start to ease some restrictions.”

In UK, 1 in 5 people have got the jab. The pandemic has claimed 118,195 British lives. Global death from Covid-19 pandemic stands at 2,411,745. In spite of the optimism of the vaccination and dip in UK death, the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab has rejected the temptation to set a date for the lifting of lockdown restrictions. Majority of Tory MPs would like life to return to normal by end of April but Mr. Raab has insisted that decision has to be based on data. Common sense decision you might say judging by the initial hesitation in March to lock Britain down. That delay action cost thousands of life.

Raab said, “We have made good progress. We don’t want to see that unravel because we go too far too quickly. We need to retain some flexibility to deal with the variants, which of course are part and parcel of dealing with the pandemic before we can alter the precise timeframe.”

The UK government has gone a step further in its effort to combat the spread of Covid-19 by mandating UK travelers returning from a red list of 33 countries to check into quarantine hotels at a cost of 1,750 pounds. Other nationals are required to pay 210 pounds for Covid-19 test on day two and eight of their ten days isolation period. As I write, deaths are down and immunity is up. However, there is widespread fear and cynicism among the black and Asian community which has led to a low take up of the vaccine among these ethnic minority people. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) has consistently been making apocalyptic prediction that blacks and Asians are two-and-half-times more likely to die from Covid-19 yet, they are digging deeper into skepticism and fear.

For my Nigerian readers, this is a picture of a civilized, normalized and well-ordered society. Vaccination program in the UK was treated as a national emergency. There was a brutal British efficiency in all areas of its delivery. There was absence of hierarchy, class or race in the whole vaccination drive. No VIP treatment. It was absolutely free. No gun wielding soldier, police or any uniformed personnel around the clinics with whips to brutalise us. No privilege arrangement. Once you received the message on your phone and book a date, you are good to go. No shortage or hoarding of vaccines for family members. No vaccine corruption. No vaccine millionaires. No vaccine impunity. No vaccine inhumanity against man. No vaccine discrimination on gender and your postcode. Here, a person in Peckham could even get it faster than a person in Knightsbridge!

But not in Nigeria. If Ebele Obiano, the First Lady of Anambra State could travel to US to receive the jab, God helps ordinary Nigerians when Nigeria starts the vaccination roll out. She may be a US citizen, it was a bad PR for the privilege Nigerians. Our wicked and insensitive elites will rather make the people suffer, miserable and die rather than give them the vaccine. That is who we are. Humanity is not in Nigerian governance. They govern for their self-interest. Period! Vaccine will not be given to Nigerians because government cares for them. Any government who could hoard perishable Covid-19 palliatives would more than likely hide away the vaccine. However, they may grudgingly deploy it because they could not help it – morally!

When the vaccine arrives Nigeria, it is hoped that the delivery will not be crude, barbaric and punishing. It is hoped that hierarchy, class, elitism, ethnicity and privilege would not play a part in its delivery.

It is hoped that controversy, primordial hoarding and impunity will not mar the humane process of giving Nigerians immunity from a pandemic that had killed humanity in millions. It is hoped that my family at Ibadan can jab the air and roar like this writer and say: absolutely jabulous! Hoo!! Haa!! We got the jab! We got the jab!

Osinbajo: Stop Selling Yoruba into Unity of Slavery

By Taju Tijani

The Vice President of Nigeria, Professor Yemi Osinbajo has made a bombshell gaffe in his Ikenne constituency. On Tuesday, 9^th February 2021, the VP, in a monumental recapitulation of APC agenda on restructuring Nigeria, pushed a grovelling theme of unity. He appealed to “Nigerians to resist any attempt to destroy the unity that the citizens had lived and worked together for”. Further, “government would continue to attend to the cries of communities for justice, equity and fairness adding that the nation was stronger together than apart.” This pretentious drivel was delivered during an illegal revalidation of his membership of All Progressives Congress (APC) at ward 1, Unit 3, Egunrege, Ikenne, in Ikenne Local Government Area of Ogun State.

The VP must be a blind and obdurate politician who lives in a bubble of stupidity, delusion and denial. He has desecrated Ikenne, the land of the great sage, visionary and statesman called, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Awolowo in his days fought for the progress of Yoruba land. His premiership was skewed to developing the South West and today the blind could see the enduring footprints of his sterling legacies. In spite of the many political restrictions on his genius as a thoroughbred politician, he excelled and scaled all obstacles placed before him by the Fulani.

If Obafemi Awolowo were to be alive today, he would be recoiling with horror and a sense of forlorn despondency with the way the Northern Fulani have destroyed the aspiration of a potentially great nation. That is why all sensible Yoruba are looking wistfully to a reincarnation of that era of regionalism when all the indices of progressive politics – education, health care, security, infrastructure and job creation – were in abundance! That is why we have a new resurgence of clamorous Yoruba people who desire to see a rebirth of ‘Awolowo moment’ again in Yoruba land. This is the way to go!

But watching Osinbajo in Ikenne, I wept. We have to be indelicate with our clowns we called politicians. At Ikenne, he alluded to Great Awo as a pillar of progressivism in Nigerian politics. However, Osinbajo’s trivialization of progressive politics has been causing disquiet among true progressives. The motley crew of hungry APC crowd were abundantly amused when Osinbajo’s made a big fool of himself when he burst into disingenuous song. He fooled his handpicked audience with tons of APC lies upon lies all over again.

Today, Nigeria has entered into a redpilling phase of Fulani awakening ably enabled by none other personality than President Muhammadu Buhari. His government is a giant workshop for Fulani toxic experimentation of how to reduce Nigeria to an Islamic state with an illiterate Fulani caliphate cipher at the head. Therefore, to declare at Ikenne for a new affirmation of unity among disparage and competing ethnicities at a time when our faultlines have become more expansive is a total betrayal of Yoruba momentum that is daily unfolding. We must measure our unity with the current Nigerian realities.

The Miyatti Allah, that has Buhari as a patron, has provided him a strong loyalists base with a transcendent omnipotence, vanguard against dissent and ethnic support that is making our unity suspect, or at best, impossible. The capture of the Nigerian space by its internal colonisers has lasted 61 years if we go by the year of our independence. Since then we have been wrestling and debating how could we continue to watch as corrupt people prosper while the governed wallow in abject misery, pain, poverty and the death of compassion. By every human reckoning, 61 years of bondage, lack, captivity and rent extraction is a long time. For 61 years, we are trapped in a pattern of repeated failure. Here, I can say loud and clear that the Central Bank of Nigeria is too poor to compensate for the loss of a great and promising nation.

Even the return to democratic experiment since 1999 has not proven beneficial to Nigerians. It has been a long line of trajectories of failure upon failures. Genuine and concerned progressives have advanced reasons for our failures. Rather than look inward and embrace genuine change and the retooling of our democracy, each group is hell bent on keeping the other down in a Hobbesian fight for supremacy. This is our recurring travail.

Now let us purify this provocative discourse. Our unity has been abused, disfigured and bastardised by the Fulani Northerners. Fulani conceit, the belief in Othman Dan Fodio’s hallucination, treasonable control and hijack of the armed forces and Buhari’s on-your-face loyalty to his blood brothers in the North and Niger Republic, have all combined to make our unity unworkable. We have been patching things up but unfortunately the cracks are tearing us apart. But trust Osinbajo, a man who had once been sidelined, humiliated and treated shabbily by his Fulani principals, will rather continue to fool Nigerians that the way to go is to keep lining behind Fulani as we sing with a banner of One Indivisible Nigeria!

Provocation number one. Buhari is a dangerous president. His binary allegiance to the Republic of Nigeria and Niger is a treasonable offence. He has little allegiance to Nigeria. He is Fulani first. A Nigerien second. Then, Nigerian third. In his 6 years at the saddle as a cipher in Abuja, most of his administration infrastructural strides have been skewed to the North. He has a plan to build refineries in Katsina that will link up with Republic of Niger. The Kashi refinery in Katsina will be completed this year (2021) and will produce 150,000 barrel per day.

President Buhari on Tuesday 9^TH February, 2021 also flagged off an ambitious project to construct a 284 km rail project that will connect Kano-Dutse-Jubia (Katsina State) – to Maradi in Niger Republic. The loan of $1.96 billion was secured from the Chinese and the project was approved by the Federal Executive Council in September 2020. The project, wait for it, will boost socio-economic activities along the corridors of Kano, Katsina and Jigawa in Nigeria and the people of Maradi in Niger Republic. Also, Mr. Buhari in June 2020 signed the construction of 614km gas pipeline from Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano all the way to Morocco through Niger Republic worth an estimated $2.8billion.

The timeline of President Muhammadu Buhari’s romance with the Niger Republic began in 2015. After his victory in the 2015 presidential election, Buhari went straight to meet Mamadou Issoufou in Niamey, Niger Republic. There, in a shame of transnational Fulani solidarity, a Nigerian president was given a white horse and a sword – both potent symbols of Fulani conquest! This action was a foretaste of where his allegiance will be during his presidency. He has never forgotten his root. But he could forget and regard the pains and killings of Ibarapa people in Nigeria as irritation. Unity my foot!

Another provocation. How could a sitting president who sworn an allegiance to the protection of Nigerians ever allowed a misbegotten Islamic negotiator consorts with bandits? Why would Sheikh Gumi roll out red carpert to terrorists called bandits and go on to appease them, pamper them and ask them to be pardoned and reintegrated back to society? Fulani bandits are blood-sucking terrorists who have been maiming, sodomising, raping and butchering Nigerians with the full knowledge and sometimes encouragement from our armed forces. There had been numerous cases of looking the other way by our Police when Fulani bandits masquerading as herders were caught.

It has been documented that our military gave Fulani herdsmen a first class escort in Ogun State and the residents who mistreated them were given the beatings of their lives. Professor Wole Soyinka was nearly killed yesterday by armed Fulani herdsmen who ambushed him in his own home in Ogun State. Would a president from the south got away with all these ethnic aberrations? Unity my foot!

Another provocation. He desecrated the Nigerian constitution and extended the tenure of a retired Inspector General of Police, Mr. Abubakar Adamu. Would he have extended the tenure of a Southerner? No way. He ran most southerners who served him out of town, some, under humiliating circumstances. Ask most of his ex-southern ministers.

When Osinbajo was being humiliated by the Fulani mafia led by the late Abba Kyari, did Buhari step in to redeem the integrity of Osinbajo’s humanity?  What was in play was the usual game of throne where Fulani issued edicts, warnings, threats to Southerners and pretended that all was fine with our unity. Osinbajo like all other blind and ambitious politicians who are slaves and hostage to Tinubu’s aborted presidential dream of ruling Nigeria should be told in clear and unambiguous language that Yoruba should seize this moment and call for restructuring based on regionalism or at best, separate nationalities.

Unity is no longer our strength in today’s Nigeria’s convoluted socio-economic-political space, but a conduit and convenient mantra to subject southerners to rapacious resource cleansing, brutality, domination, cheating and perpetual slavery. Osinbajo, please allow the soul of the sage, Obafemi Awolowo, rest in peace and fight for the emancipation of Yoruba from further humiliation in a fallen contraption called Nigeria. Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s dream of a united Nigeria was heavily predicated on shared arrangement of equality and separate development. Not a dominant Fulani North barking orders and demobilizing our aspiration through primordial and bankrupt Caliphate Islam-driven backward progress. 

Fulani-inspired 1999 constitution has erased that noble dream of regional autonomy couched in the progressive heartbeat of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Worse, Muhammadu Buhari, a proud Fulani and Republic of Niger sympathizer has accelerated our urgent need to dissolve this nation for the sake of equity, justice and balanced partnership. Every right thinking Yoruba should be tired of selling an outdated orthodoxy of unity to Yoruba nation.

Our unity has passed its sell by date. Osinbajo’s fulminating and disgraceful Ikenne declaration is a mockery of the memory of Awolowo, Yoruba greatest leader.

tajutijani@hotamil.com