The Voice Of One Crying In The Wilderness: Message To Tinubu (8)

By FEMI ODEDEYI

SPECIAL NOTE
This is the 8th Message.
The first, published on February 2, 2018; republished on September 29, 2019, March 8, 2020; April 19, 2020; May 24, 2020; July 19,2020; December 13, 2020; each with its own variation within the same central theme.

In case Bola Ahmed Tinubu is NOT reading this, and has NOT read ANY previously published, ANYONE who has access to him must give him this Message.

The first version is reproduced after this SPECIAL NOTE.

It is written:
When I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life, that same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at your hand. Yet, if you warn the wicked, and he does not turn from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but you have delivered your soul. “Again, when a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits iniquity, and I lay a stumbling block before him, he shall die; because you did not give him warning, he shall die in his sin, and his righteousness which he has done shall not be remembered; but his blood I will require at your hand. Nevertheless, if you warn the righteous man that the righteous should not sin, and he does not sin, he shall surely live because he took warning; also you will have delivered your soul.”

(Ezekiel 3:18-21)
Our bodily activity or existence, even if reproduced as or in history, is relevant only to the extent of human knowledge and experiences, which may be celebrated or derided.

But this is NOT what determines the reach of the soul, the MORAL AGENCY for the body by which humanity has come to experience good or evil, sin and repentance, by which the “soul lives or dies” and which is also SUBJECT to the HOLY SPIRIT, which gives LIFE.

Therefore, a human may glory in the morality and achievements of the bodily form, but at the END of it all, the HOLY SPIRT will ask the soul to “account” for what is done through the body, hence the “delivery of the soul”: submission to the evil spirit OR the HOLY SPIRIT which gives LIFE.

To seek which we MUST aspire or hope to be in HIS PRESENCE.

The Context:
In response to M.K. O’s attempt at Nigeria’s presidency, Awo was quoted as saying “iji n ja, o gbe okuta, awon irawe nko”?

We all know where and how each was consumed by the stormy flood.

Now enter Bola Ahmed Tinubu, regardless of whether you are aiming for the Presidency or not.

You sent a message on Democracy.
There is NO Democracy when the Nigerian Post-Colonial State serially denies the existence of the Peoples of Nigeria as a Component/Federating Unit.

You did not name those who fought for Democracy, vis-à-vis “June 12”, most of whom were Yoruba, only recognizing the “spirit” behind their efforts.

Reinforcing the negation of their existence.
Denying the historical roles played by the Yoruba in pursuit of DEMOCRACY, since the anti-colonial era.

That Buhari will come to Lagos to make the type of statements he made only point to the fact that another front on the “war” against Yorubaland has been opened. Buhari’s statement appeared as if directed at you, or even the Governors, but they were NOT!

They were directed at the Yoruba jugular, hoping that your demonization will be sufficient to deflect attention from the defenestration of Yoruba political leadership in the ongoing political equation.

Two quotes will suffice (i) that two SW Governors came to me to say cattle rearers are destroying farms in their states……I don't like it when people campaign to become Governors and people trusted them with their votes and after winning, they can't perform, they're trying to push responsibilities to others. ........we have three tiers of Government, Federal, State and Local. We have killed the Local Government totally. We will send N300m as allocation to a Local Government, one Governor will ask the LG Chairman to sign that he collected N300m but he will give him N100m and the Chairman will keep quiet....is that how we will continue???"…..; we KNOW that at least ONE of them was Rotimi Akeredolu, who has been in the forefront of providing a Yoruba Regional Response as the Chairman of SW Governors’ Forum (ii) that one cannot sit in Lagos and dictate zoning for their party— we can substitute Lagos with either Ado Ekiti (where Fayemi is also rumored to be interested) OR Abeokuta, (where Buhari’s bosom friend, former Governor Amosun is also rumored to be interested).

Both statements pointing to the reality of Yoruba falling prey to easy picking; for, the first is to delegitimize the governors while the second is directed at you.

This means all of you will be pitted against each other, leaving Yorubaland prostrate.

As you are arguably the person in the “eye of the storm”; to avoid being carried away by the stormy flood, you MUST now pick the gauntlet by EMBRACING the YORUBA REFERENDUM as the DEMOCRATIC, LEGITIMATE, and valid YORUBA REGIONAL RESPONSE to the crises of the Nigerian Post-Colonial State.

This much was stated in the FIRST MESSAGE.
You are to do this by mobilizing your political goodwill to get the Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ekiti and Ondo State Houses of Assembly to pass the Draft Referendum Bill already placed before them into LAW, following which the Governors MUST assent and the YORUBA REFERENDUM conducted.

This is DEMOCRACY, for, there is NO other DEMOCRACY than a REFERENDUM by the Yoruba, and indeed ALL other Peoples of Nigeria.

A “YES” vote will establish a YORUBA REGIONAL CONSTITUTIONAL COMMISSION which will (i) negotiate with the rest of Nigeria on ALL issues on behalf of and concerning Yorubaland (the issue of zoning thus becoming superfluous);(ii) be a TEMPLATE for other Nationalities in Nigeria to follow;(iii) become the FEDERALIST TEMPLATE for Nigeria anchored on “A Federal Nigeria, through a valid Federal Constitution, to be known as The Union of Nigerian Constituent Nationalities, with a Federal Presidential Council, whose members will be selected or elected from each of the Nationalities as Federating Units and from whom a Head of State will be selected or elected as the primus-inter-pares with an agreed term”, further providing an example for the rest of Africa undergoing similar crises of State.

It is written: When the enemy comes in like a flood, The Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against him.”—Isaiah 59:19.

The enemy has now come in like a flood.
The Spirit of the Lord has lifted up the YORUBA REFERENDUM as the STANDARD, the SOLID GROUND for you to tread through the stormy flood, the first steps being the approach to the Houses of Assembly.

This is reinforced by Buhari asking his Attorney-General to “dig up the gazette of the First Republic” in opposition to the southern Governors’ ban on open grazing.

The First Republic had been repudiated since 1966 and consummated by ALL Constitutions since 1979; efforts to “return” to it, despite its severe limitations, rebuffed.

Resorting to it for a solution to issues arising from the 1999 Constitution therefore MANDATES us, MORALLY and POLITICALLY, to SIMILARLY seek our solutions without being circumscribed by the 1999 Constitution.

Bola Ahmed Tinubu, “that which I have heard from the Lord of Hosts I have declared to you”.

Wale Odeku.
THE FIRST MESSAGE—February 2, 2018
The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness—Message to Bola Ahmed Tinubu

Bola Ahmed Tinubu, this is the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Hearken unto it and it shall be well with you and by implication, the Global Yoruba Nation.

You are arguably the most effective political leader of the Yoruba Nation today, regardless of any assumptions as a pan-Nigerian leader. You are engaged in a life and death struggle with the forces of darkness ravaging Nigeria. It must be restated that the fortunes of Yoruba Nation as a major factor in Global African Emancipation is not limited to Nigeria’s geo-political confines and therefore cannot be constrained by it.

You must know that historically, all efforts at mixing the fortunes of the Yoruba with that of the Nigerian colonial architecture had always ended up in a misfortune for the Yoruba. And it is not fortuitous that the only manifestation of our potentials was through the attainment of Autonomous Self-Government between 1951 and 1959.

This is not an advocacy for a Yoruba National Purity. Our history testifies to this, where it is on record that we are a welcoming and tolerant people, very liberal to non-Yoruba people and proved by our existentialism, where, traditionally, the Oba was (and is) the guarantor of the non-Yoruba rights and freedoms in his domain.

Despite these, all attempts to dissolve our particularities into Nigerian generalities have always ended disastrously.

The famous and popular Afonja story powerfully illuminates this. Afonja was not a Muslim; yet he provided Ilorin as a haven for Muslims from the northern part of what later became Nigeria, partly because of his own strategic impulse at the then power-play in Yorubaland.

These northern Muslims were intent on ramming their own brand of Islam through Yoruba throats although Islam predated their arrival in Yorubaland. The resistance to this brand of Islam led to their being regarded as violent interlopers in the land upon which Afonja formally declared Ilorin a place of respite for them. Despite this, they went ahead and destroyed Afonja and the Yoruba Nation lost Ilorin and environs to northern Muslim political control, which has continued till date.

M.K.O Abiola spent a large part of his financial fortunes in pursuit of Islamic development in the North, again, within a strategic political objective. Northern Muslims voted massively for him but when the time came to take up a stand against the then looming military shenanigans, they balked, largely because another “northern” Muslim would take over.

They famously refused to be part of the pan-Nigerian coalition against the annulment of a fellow Muslim’s election thereby leaving the opposition to only the Yoruba, Muslims, and non-Muslims alike.

In both instances, Nationality prerogatives trumped religious solidarity; therefore, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, while you do not play up your religious affiliations, you must recognize the role of Nationality in any quest for political power in Nigeria.

While this is true for all the major political organizations in the country, for the South, especially the Yoruba, it has been relegated to the background as a factor in Self-Determination, which is why Yoruba National Imperatives become confused with a pan-Nigerian agenda, all in the name of developing Nigeria into a modern geo-political entity.

Yet, for the North, it is its raison d’etre; that is, controlling the center is its own end.

50 years after political Independence in Africa, the colonial architecture cannot engender any form of development for her various Peoples. Rather, the continent becomes merely a playground for International economic forces with a capability to reproduce its own internal elites for continuation of its economic hegemony while her hapless Peoples continue to wallow in deep material poverty as well as of consciousness.

Sustaining this economic playground requires a political façade, often procured through periodic cycle of elections usually dubbed as democracy, where victors in all African countries seem to have only one prescription for Africa’s development, which is always foreign investment, foreign investment and foreign investment supposedly aimed at creating jobs for the youths coupled with intricately woven words on economic development.

Yet, none of these African countries have been able to translate any of these into reality.

This is so, because the political agenda is yet to be fulfilled; such agenda being the imposition of one Ethno-Nationality over the others to bring about the homogenization of the cultures into one under the suzerainty of the other. This is the cause of inter-Nationality conflicts on the continent where one colonially-favored Nationality will seek to impose its status on the rest and the cycle of violence goes on while the post-colonial state continues its economic parasitism unmolested.

Obafemi Awolowo attempted to reverse this phenomenon by combining the best of capitalist development and its social imperatives with a decidedly YORUBA world view. He also attempted to introduce this paradigm into the rest of Nigeria, with each Nationality/Culture as its own paradigm and the story of what happened to him is very well known.

However, among the Yoruba, there is the continuous debate as to whether he should have “gone to the center or not” with differing answers. The bottom line is that Yoruba Nation became a victim of Nigeria’s post-colonial State architecture thus posing the problematic differently.

It is not about going to the center or not, but the anti-colonial imperative of coming into being of the Yoruba Nation as a Nation for, and in itself. This was the rationale behind the agitation for True Federalism anchored on Ethno-Lingual Categories.

Nigeria’s forces of darkness will avoid going for your jugular, that is, your physical annihilation lest you become another icon in the mold of Awo and MKO. But they will attempt to decapitate you with a debilitating strike, physically and politically, regardless of any number of your private” meetings with the effective leader of APC and its presumed 2019 presidential candidate.

This has started in earnest, and it is not subtle, it is a “ROFOROFO” fight. To your credit, you will not give up easily as doing so is not your habit; you will fight with all your strength, but you need to change the narrative. You need to change the name of the game. Your strength, that is, political savviness, strategic impulses, historical astuteness will not lead to victory, and by implication, victory for the Yoruba Nation.

Bola Ahmed Tinubu, you must identify the golden bullet for victory. It is already available, waiting to be picked up.

The victory does not lie in aiming for Nigeria’s presidency, so this is not a matter of a new coalition for power and certainly does not lie in retaining Nigeria’s current political and economic formations.

Self-Determination/Autonomy for all the Peoples of Nigeria is the key.

Any form of Southern/Middle Belt solidarity, any handshake across Eastern or Northern Niger, MUST be anchored on Self-Determination/Autonomy for ALL, lest it becomes a route to your political decapitation mentioned above. Perchance others may foot-drag, the Yoruba Nation must not be carried along that route.

The Yoruba Nation does not need to wait on them before pushing ahead.

And that is the golden bullet.
That which I have heard from the Lord of hosts, I have declared to you.”

Wale Odeku