1. Welcome
Distinguished leaders of the Yoruba Nation, Your Excellencies – current and past Governors of Yoruba States, traditional rulers and fathers of the Yoruba people and their representatives, Yoruba officers of various civic and professional organizations and agencies, Yoruba people at home and in Diaspora, friends, guests, ladies and gentlemen.
It is a great honour for me to welcome everyone for answering the call to this Assembly. This is a confirmation that whenever the Yoruba people need to stand up for their nation, they are never found wanting. I also use this medium to humbly appreciate and congratulate the people who worked with me to organize this summit.
As the Convener of this Assembly, I am acutely conscious of the decision of the venue for this event, to hold it in this historic edifice rather than any other space. This is deliberate and carefully considered. This building occupies historic significance in Yoruba political movements and development, a place where important deliberations and consensuses were reached in the golden age of Western Regional Government.
2. Purpose of the event
Reports from across our lands and our people at home and in the Diaspora, confirmed the huge enthusiasm and expectations from this gathering. Therefore, we have good reasons to hope that those of us who are able to gather here today will make this a successful summit – one that will positively impact the future and prospects of the Yoruba people and Nation within Nigeria.
Hence, our main aim today is to arrive at a common narrative of demands that speak to our developmental aspirations as a people. We must leave here with established and coherent narratives of our demands within an emerging Nigeria and provide our people, the Yoruba people, a purpose-driven and dynamic development agenda that ensures our well-being and self-actualization.
3. Our challenges in the current dispensation
As a people, the Yoruba of yesterday was glorious, why can’t our present and future be?
The current governance sphere and structure in Nigeria is not favourable, has impeded and become a threat to Yoruba people and our developmental aspirations. In general and strategic terms, Yoruba people have been a victim of ‘arrested development’. Our existence as a people in the Nigerian space have been particularly devastating, especially when one compares this to the significant progress made by the AG government of 1954-1966 towards building a socio-democratic platform for transformation . We have witnessed transformation of next to nothing.
When the issue of educational system in the Southwest region is raised in present day, the first sets of thoughts that come to the mind are: decline in standard, deterioration of facilities, and churning out of unemployable graduates and youths. The quality of healthcare institutions in our Region and the country as a whole is generally considered poor. Lack of access to quality healthcare coupled with the prevalence of quack hospitals and doctors, fake drugs and substandard products, seemingly put staggering financial and health burdens on individuals and their folks. This trend will continue unless every federating unit is opportune to achieve its highest potentials within the Nigerian Nation without hindrance.
Our living environment ultimately describes our personalities. Sadly, our Region is now more vulnerable to drought, pollution, spread of evasive species, receding and shifting coastal lines, deforestation and de-vegetation, biological diversity depletion, erosion, land resources degradation and urban decay. Our space lacks environmental governance and we appear to be getting to a stage where we may no longer have a sustainable environment to fall back on or call our own. This trend will continue unless every federating unit is opportune to achieve its highest potentials within the Nigerian Nation without hindrance.
The Southwest Region has vast endowments and potentials to rival some stand-alone countries like South Africa, Canada, Ghana and even United Kingdom, especially with its increasing over 40 million people – approximately twice the population of Ghana and almost same as that of South Africa. As a people, we are boastful of a large market in Nigeria and home to possibly the highest numbers of middle class in the country. Despite these, the Region still lags behind on quite a number of developmental indices. The vast agricultural and industrial potential of the Region remains untapped, and most States in the Region still rely largely on funds from the center to balance their budget. Internally Generated Revenue [IGR] in States in the Region at its best is still un-optimized, leaving us with the burdensome question of how States in the Southwest Region would survive with the current realities of fluctuating crude oil prices or even the possibility of dry-up. This trend will continue unless every federating unit is opportune to achieve its highest potentials within the Nigerian Nation without hindrance.
Infrastructural deficit is large. Cities in the Region are not adequately connected. Growth sectors are not enhanced and optimized. Transport infrastructure is inefficient and rail network, which expectedly will help to facilitate intra-regional trade is moribund. Growth of cities and what appears to be development is majorly concentrated to the corridor of Lagos, Ibadan and Abeokuta, with limited emphasis on the growth of other cities within the Region. On top of these, there are few concerted efforts towards addressing the critical challenges of entrepreneurship. This trend will continue unless every federating unit is opportune to achieve its highest potentials within the Nigerian Nation without hindrance.
As a people, we have been assaulted, buffeted by the vagaries of strange cultures and traditions. Our penchant to accommodate strangers with open arms has led to the bastardization and in some instances a total replacement of our culture, norms and values. Today things we never thought could happen in the Yoruba Nation are now the things we glorify. We have turned our core values on its head. We now have able bodied Yoruba men and women begging on the streets or becoming ready tools for politicians to exploit as thugs. In our land today we no longer have a consensus on what is right or wrong as long as it paddles our canoe. The ugly Lagos example of Wednesday 16 March 2015 appeared an open threat to our space, a society that is naturally and cultural embracing whose receptive nature is now being abused. It was a further demonstration of a sponsored and organized violence with the intent and potentials to attack and pollute our people, values and democratic existence. This trend will continue unless every federating unit is opportune to achieve its highest potentials within the Nigerian Nation without hindrance.
Unfortunately, the political illiteracy and mis-education plaguing majority of our citizenry coupled with the nonchalant attitude of most electorates have made it easy for elected public office holders to evade their responsibilities and fail in delivering the mandate given to them. The principle of election as a way of achieving democratic governance needs to be re-instated in us so that we as a people can demand credible governance from elected leaders in exchange for our votes.
The Omoluwabi ethos that we cherish as a people is now in the throes of a sadistic phase. We now live in a world where the belief is that money answers to all things; but money not applied properly as we see today, has devalued our traditional and cultural values, to the eternal shame of all Yoruba. This we must sanitise.
In moving forward as a people, we must become giants in thoughts and actions within the Nigerian space and not followers of visionless rafts. This we must do and situate on effective institutions alongside our values and culture.
4. What we must do as a people
The Yoruba People are rightly concerned about their nation within a Nigerian construct.
Power in Nigeria is too concentrated at the centre. We have a Federal Government that is too powerful, overbearing and with many resources at its disposal than it has the capacity to manage. All the powers and authorities at the centre are now being used to hold the rest of Nigerians as slaves in their own country. This makes devolution of power a very important national issue and this is central to what we Yoruba people demand.
This is because nations do not just happen, by historical accident; rather they are built by men and women with vision and resolve. Nation-building is therefore the product of conscious statecraft, not happenstance. The impact of poor governance architecture on the polity has been unmistakable in the increasing erosion of elements of federalism in Nigeria since 1966. While a proper political structure does not automatically amount to good leadership though, it is clear that appropriate structure can facilitate the job of an average leader who believes in the rule of law. In other words, an average leader working with benevolent structure is likely to have fewer challenges than a good leader working with a flawed political architecture, one would argue.
We the Yoruba people are too sophisticated to follow one leader or adopt one political belief. What is required is for us to share a common developmental aspiration and values much more than what obtains now in the present Nigeria .
This stance, therefore, strengthens us to focusing on a common narrative of demands that speak to our developmental aspirations as a people – which is why we are all here. We must leave here with established and coherent narratives of our demands and provide our people, the Yoruba people, a purpose-driven and dynamic development agenda that ensures our well-being and actualization.
Your Excellencies, Royal Fathers, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, our aspiration today is that we leave this venue with one voice – a Yoruba Charter of Demands – from the central government of Nigeria. This we must do, to ensure that we do not become a footnote in history. We must act now and table with clarity, our irreducible minimum from a Nigerian government. Our developmental realities are no more table-top exercises. The neglect of the last forty years has now come full circle and it is evident in everything we do and are becoming.
5. A picture of where we are going
Our Charter of Demands must include developmental principles and developmental thematic.
On developmental principles, we as a people, Yoruba people, demand;
a. A restructured federal government – that enables every federating unit the opportunity to achieve its highest potentials within the Nigerian Nation without hindrance
b. Fiscal federalism
c. Good governance
On developmental thematic, we as a people, Yoruba people, demand an enabling environment that will enable federating units to achieve;
d. Economic development and competitiveness
e. Education system that builds skills, capacities, learning and character
f. Energy and integrated infrastructural development
g. Secured environments and communities
h. Health systems with universal access
i. Agriculture and food security
j. Value reorientation
To arrive at these, part of our demands as a people is the erosion of poor leadership from the Nigerian political space. We cannot afford a leadership that is absent of developmental foresights, that lacks innovative thinking and is not capable of including the right responses and answers to the challenges of multi-ethnic and multicultural politics in the country. The absence of imaginative leadership in Nigeria in developing the right responses to the Boko Haram insurgency and its terrorist plan to decimate the nation is one we must collectively confront.
For leadership recruitment, Yoruba people will no more rely on accidents and the overwhelming eloquence of money. Our people would reach out to time-tested values and moral compass. Yoruba people are looking for leaders who are ready and willing to lead by example, who are humble enough to be part of a collective development agenda and work towards consensus. It is therefore incumbent on us to think deeply about the process of leadership recruitment and take all necessary action to save the Yoruba people from unscrupulous and decadent section of the elite and secure for our children, an equitable future in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Therefore, we need to make demands.
For us Yoruba people, a Nigerian leader must be ready to make the necessary impact and imbibe core value-laden attributes. The national leader that Yoruba people want and would support should subscribe to a body of beliefs based on our perennial and tested values of honour, dignity, integrity, industry and patriotism which are encoded in the concept of Omoluabi. The leadership Yoruba want should be those body of men and women who are believers and are ready to live according to those tenets of Omoluabi and work for its continuous propagation and effectiveness. It is this embodiment of values that should guide us in the process of who we vote for at the 2015 general election, not corrupted endorsements.
6. Conclusion
To achieve our demands, I call on all Yoruba people to ensure that we use our votes wisely during this 2105 general election by voting for those who make good their promises and vote out those who falter. We must take this once in four years opportunity and use our votes to successfully empower or reject individuals based on their performance, principles, values, developmental aspirations and good character.
Democratic governance requires an active civil society that is able to question the public authorities and suggest different methods of political participation not just the wholesale endorsement of a candidacy. Good governance has no ultimate model, but it is often based on active involvement of citizens, either grouped together in associations or individually – as today’s inclusive and representative summit demonstrates. Hence, getting involved in the Nigerian governance sphere is not an option, it is mandatory for us as Yoruba people, if we want a secured future for ourselves and for generations to come. This is the only way to have a governance sphere in the nation that is responsive to the present and future needs of Yoruba people.
Thank you for listening. God bless
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