The Oyo-Yoruba people, the group from which Chief Akintola hails, are now Oyo and Osun states and one wonders how Chief Akintola would have greeted this news. For in spite of all the efforts made by Alhaji Adegoke Adelabu to persuade the Oyo-Yoruba to demand the creation of this state in 1957, Chief Akintola seems to have been vehemently opposed to the idea of fragmentation of the Yoruba.
But by 1965 when he was already under the strain of violent opposition to his regime from Ijebu, Abeokuta and Ondo provinces, he started making insinuations about the traditional hostility of these groups to the Oyo-Yoruba. What has happened since the end of the Civil War, particularly the fact that the federal cabinet has within it representatives of every state and therefore of the major and minor ethnic groups, has confirmed Chief Akintola’s belief that there can be no peace until there is a feeling of belonging to a ‘Commonwealth’, in which every group has a share, even though his party, the NNDP, never managed to rise above its origins as an opportunistic amalgam of personalities and power blocs.
Akintola in a brutally frank way made it quite clear that Nigeria belonged to all of us and that a policy of exclusiveness and nepotism manifested by one group could not help but draw appropriate reaction from those who feel shut out of the normal run of things and the attendant ethnic or regional benefit accruing from shared revenue and shared risks and responsibilities of living together in a federation.
The constitution of the Second Republic which came into force on October 1, 1979, has further confirmed Akintola’s belief in team work by the fact that the constitution makes it obligatory for the President to see that cabinet members represent all the states and reflect the federal albeit ethnic structure of Nigeria. Nigerian leaders have learned from the lessons of the Action Group crisis and the Civil War. The present constitution and the built-in clauses emphasizing that the essence of the federation is cooperation and compromise attest this fact. It is clear to me that the issues raised by Akintola’s later years are to a large extent being resolved. No single party can dominate Nigeria, and Nigeria is unlike a good number of other African countries in the sense that control of the visible apparatus of state does not necessarily ensure that there will be peace or that the populace will acquiesce in what is patently wrong.
The Yoruba as a people suffered between 1961 and 1966 because of lack of unity. It is one of the ironies of modern Nigerian politics that the most culturally homogenous people lack any semblance of political unity. The fact that political unity has eluded the Yoruba for so long reminds me of General Charles de Gaulle’s statement that if you ask two Frenchmen to form a political party they will probably emerge with three! This characteristic of the French applies to the Yoruba. It is not clear whether this is a weakness or an element of strength in a federation. The ideal of course is that political parties should cut across ethnic or regional lines, but when, in a pluralist society such as Nigeria, only one group believes in this idea, the tendency is for that group to become a pawn in the hands of others.
Akintola’s championship of the cause of Yoruba unity was based on the above premise and analysis. It is only when Nigerians can rise above the primordial ties of ethnicity and language that Akintola’s idea of an “Ethnic Commonwealth” would lose credibility. But until that time, it would be foolish and unrealistic not to face the fact that Nigeria is a country of diverse peoples, each with clearly distinguishable strengths and weaknesses and that the only way to take in stride our diversity is not by forceful integration but by accommodation and cooperation through mutual respect of one another.
One thing that has emerged through the study of the life and times of Chief S. L. Akintola is that despite the fact that many Yorubas believed in what he stood for, particularly his idea that culturally Yoruba people have many things in common with the Hausa-Fulani, and that this should be translated into political cooperation, the Yoruba people have always drifted away from cooperation with the Hausa-Fulani. The reason for this has been historical. In the first place, the AG leadership, including Akintola himself, always saw Hausa-Fulani leaders as obscurantist oligarchs who had no idea of democracy and who were hands in glove with British imperialists during the colonial days. The second and perhaps most fundamental reason was the impact of the Usman dan Fodiyo’s Jihad of the 19th century which led to the forcible incorporation of Ilorin province into northern Nigeria. Until Ilorin is seen to be absolutely out of northern political control, the Yoruba are likely to continue to develop a revanchist tendency towards the Hausa-Fulani, which will make cooperation very difficult.
The Yoruba, even though they lack political unity, are an extremely historically aware people and the Ilorin seizure by Alimi from Afonja more than a century and a half ago is still a vivid part of Yoruba modern-day political awareness, an awareness which, to put it mildly, immediately leads to a lowering of the group’s ethnic self-esteem. This fact has admittedly been exploited by politicians for their own ends, but the sore point remains and in any policy of political accommodation between the Hausa-Fulani and the Yoruba, this is a fact that must be taken into account.
Finally, it is hoped that Nigerians will soon begin and continue to respect the feelings of one another, and in the words of Chief Akintola, Nigeria must strive to remain a “commonwealth, its resources must be accessible to all its citizens regardless of creed, clan or tribe …”. This will continue to be necessary until such time as Nigeria will have developed to such a level that the question of which ethnic group one comes from would only be of academic and not of political interest.
This goal is not to be confused with any long-range attempt to obliterate our distinctive cultures and ethnic characteristics with the idea of super-imposing a national culture. Nigeria’s ethnic groups, some of which are “nations”, need not be made to face obstacles on the way to normal “national” evolution and development. In fact a conscious effort must be made to build the idea of a unified nation in diversity by encouraging each group’s cultural development and identity while fostering the idea of Nigeria as one multi-national state, where each group can contribute in a meaningful way to enhance the strength of Nigeria. This indeed is and should be the basis of an enduring federalism. The idea has been a factor in the organic growth of countries such as the Canadian Federation, the Swiss Confederation, and recently the Belgian State.
These are three examples of countries wherein local, ethnic, or “national” specificities are being reconciled with the desire and need for an indivisible state in which particular groups can still realise their freedom and full cultural development. Akintola ab initio recognised that the most fundamental problem in Nigerian politics stems from the rivalry of the country’s great ethnic groups or nations. Lack of a resolution to the conflictual competition among the major ethnic groups and the breakdown of law and order in western Nigeria following massive rigging of elections in 1965 led to the coup of January 1966.
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