Every government in a federation, it must be emphasized, is equal in status to and independent in its sphere of its activities from the other governments in the federation including the federal government. Each government is responsible for the peace, order and good governance of its area. It is a flagrant derogation from that function and advice devoid of sense or worthy of precedent to have a regional or state government without the physical organ essential and indispensable to the discharge of its primary functions”.
The above was Awo’s presidential address at the 4th Annual Congress of Action Group at Calabar, April 28-May 2, 1958. Fifty-seven years after that historic clarification, we continue to live in denial, running a unitary system in the name of federal arrangement. Insecurity, pervasive corruption, infrastructural decay, collapse of the health and educational sectors are some of the baleful legacies of a ‘path to Nigerian freedom’ our leaders traded for today’s anarchy. A section of the political elite in the north, obsessed with power, and a section of the political elite from the east, driven by greed back in 1962, jointly rejected the Path to Nigeria Freedom. Dumping Awo and his “Path to Nigeria Freedom’, a seminal work he published in 1947, where he had advocated a federal arrangement for a heterogeneous and multi-cultural society like ours in Calabar prison, they swore if he ever came out alive, he would be too old to question how they governed Nigeria. Until the emergence of Buhari few months back, those forces have jointly ruled or ruined the nation since independence either as NPC/NCNC, NPN/ NPP or as PDP wheelers and dealers and in between along the line by ‘an army of anything is possible’.
Today, we are all victims of a rejected Path to Nigeria Freedom, the armed Fulani herdsmen who lay waste the middle-belt regions, the defenseless subsistence impoverished crop farmers who are left to their fate by their states as targets of mindless killings , the illiterate and uninformed Igbo street traders forced out by hostile environment where no history of kingdom ever existed but hilariously crown themselves kings in their host communities where they are left as canon fodders during violent upheavals, and the rest of us witnesses and chroniclers of the tragedies brought on a people by self-serving leaders who know the Path to Freedom but chose path to servitude.
Two weeks ago, 77-year old Olu Falae, a former Finance Minister and a former Secretary to Government was abducted from his farm near Akure, made to trek several kilometres barefooted through bush paths and swampy areas and set free only after the payment of N5m ransom by his family.
Many have condemned the treatment meted out to Chief Falae by criminals as Fulani herdsmen. Yinka Odumakin, the Afenifere spokesperson has warned if the federal government failed to stop the herdsmen from attacking the Yoruba people, the people of the South-west might have to defend themselves. He didn’t say with what or if he and our revered Afenifere elders are counting on the support of ex-President Jonathan, their buddy and his newly empowered and heavily armed Niger Delta militants. Femi Fani-Kayode, ex-President Jonathan’s campaign manager has also described the Fulani cattle herders as the ‘new pests of the nation’, accusing them of terror, intimidation, theft, murder, rape, abduction, mutilation etc.
A week after Chief Falae’s humiliation, some ill-educated Igbo traders in Akure, openly challenged the authority of the paramount ruler of Akure, their host community.
Chief Falae reacting to his own ordeal after regaining his freedom says – “I have not gone to farm in any other person’s territory. I have every right to farm here and live in peace here.” He therefore appealed to Commissioner of Police and the IG for protection. But the trouble with such appeal is that even from his own account of his ordeal, the chief ought to know by now that the only people guaranteed of protection by the state seem to be powerful criminals as senators, governors or their fronts in the private sector who after a stint in prison or EFCC detention, move around with police convoys while law-abiding Nigerians work out their own security arrangements privately or through residents associations, village vigilante groups or armed ethnic militias.
The humiliation of Falae and the challenge to the authority of the Deji of Akure were not isolated cases. Violent clashes have occurred between Fulani herdsmen and their host communities in Benue, Plateau, Nassarawa, Kaduna and other parts of the north since independence. Violence only assumed new dimensions in the last five years when heavily armed Fulani herdsmen laid waste the whole of middle-belt regions killing scores of innocent farmers. Similarly, long before last week’s Akure confrontation between Igbo traders and the Deji of Akure, we have had the Oba of Lagos, whose great grandfather, Chief Esugbayi, the then Eleko, had his recognition and salary withdrawn in 1913 for championing the appeal against the colonial state’s forceful acquisition of Chief Oluwa’s Apapa land up to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council which ruled in Chief Oluwa’s favour on the ground that even “treaty of cession had not annulled communal rights to land”, told by some Igbo traders that ‘Lagos is no man’s land’.
I think the current development in the South-west once again underscores the need to return to Awo’s ‘Path to Nigeria Freedom’ which was abandoned because of selfishness of some Fulani power seekers, Igbo greedy elite and their Western House NCNC Yoruba sympathizers led by the late Remi Fani-Kayode who after decamping from AG, led the crusade for an illegal and immoral declaration of State Of Emergency in the West on May 29 1962.
Since war is not an option despite the righteous indignation of Odumakin and Femi Fani-Kayode in the circumstances where it appears only Fulani herdsmen move around wielding AK47 assault rifles unchallenged by security forces, and Igbo palm-oil, gari, yam flour, pepper, okra and vegetable sellers routinely closing their shops to punish Yoruba at the slightest provocation, a more creative response is needed as answer to the threat posed by the invasion of Yoruba nation by violent herdsmen and Igbo petty traders who want to be kings in strangers’ land which by Igbo culture is expected to be ‘abandoned and left for the owners of the land who know how to appease their own gods’ in case of any calamity.
What Yoruba who ask only of good governance from Nigeria need for the survival of its people and culture and ultimately encourage enemies of “path to freedom” to see its virtues is regional integration. Within a federal set-up even with its imperfections, it is only the Yoruba people that can defend their culture. The current Yoruba political leaders must therefore find a way of bringing in Ayo Fayose minus his infantile fantasies and Olusegun Mimiko who has for the greater part of his stay in politics worked against the collective interest of the Yoruba people either as ex-President Jonathan ‘stomach infrastructure’ ambassador for the South-west or as the rallying point for errant Yoruba politicians already sent on forced retirement by their more creative sons.
As a first step, an integrated South-west can set up ranches as commercial ventures to fill the vacuum created by northern state governments who are unable to appreciate that such ventures can open up a path to the freedom for their poor cattle herdsmen who enjoy no government support in a competitive, globalised world where a pastoral farmer in the West gets a government subsidy of $2 for a head of cow.
The success of the South-west experiment has the potential of becoming a pathfinder for regional integration of the ‘yam belt’, cotton belt, grain belt and tomato belt’, all in the north where government support is needed to lift the poor Fulani herdsmen and crop farmers out of poverty.
NATION
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