Bulletin 30: Open Letter To Afenifere Leader, Pa Reuben Fasoranti
On-going contention within Afenifere necessitates this intervention by the Yoruba Referendum Committee (ILU-SO-PE). Since Afenifere is the Yoruba language rendering of the Action Group’s philosophy of “freedom for all, life more abundant”, any Yoruba organization, whose ideological/philosophical direction is anchored on one form of social welfarism or the other, is “Afenifere”-- at least in spirit.
The Yoruba Referendum Committee has proposed the “Yoruba Referendum” as the pathway towards Re-Federalizing Nigeria. Re-Federalization will enable a reversal of Yoruba underdevelopment, which has been rising in leaps and bounds since the abolition of the Federal System which ushered in the “Golden Era” of the Western Region. Social welfarism/social democracy and maximum use of our God-given human and material resources for the uplift of our people from the underdevelopment occasioned by colonial and post-colonial, especially Unitary rule was (and is still) the driving force.
Therefore, the Yoruba Referendum Committee is well positioned to intervene in the rediscovery of Afenifere as a philosophy of action.
We, therefore, state as follows:
(i) We begin by placing Afenifere within our historical context. Its formal presentation and representation began with the formation of Egbe Omo Oduduwa, whose Constitution contained the following, among others: “to study fully its (Yoruba) political problems, combat disintegrating forces of tribalism, stamp out discrimination within the group and against minorities and generally infuse the idea of a single Nationality throughout the Region” and “the propagation of the ideal of a modern Yoruba State and Federal State of Nigeria through the agency of reliable persons who share our ideals”.
(ii) It must be noted that “True Federalism/Restructuring” is a political question that is achievable through various political means, to wit: electoralism, that is, contestation for political power through electoral means, mass mobilization, direct and indirect engagement with electoral forces on ground, etc.
(iii) The exception is military rule which can decree a “Restructuring” of the country into existence and which we have experienced with the creation of states, anchored on certain political factors which brought such states into being. Yet state creation, while it “restructured” the Regions into states, ended up not only atomizing the various peoples of Nigeria but also turned the states into appendages of the central administration, thereby negating the central thrust of Restructuring, to wit: the manifestation of the expectations and aspirations of the peoples in their existential realities.
(iv) Earlier Presidencies also took political actions towards “Restructuring” through the instrumentality of various Conferences, all of which were carried out by way of “Zonal Consultations” but whose conclusions were ignored by every Presidency. These “Zonal Consultations” had no roadmap/pathway for Legitimizing their conclusions to which the central Government would be bound, which further enabled the central Governments to ignore them. Therefore, the political context for achieving True Federalism must rest within the historical and contemporary context of such engagements.
(v) Despite the Egbe’s existence, the necessity for a political party platform to contest the 1951 Parliamentary Elections led to the formation of the Action Group, whose welfarist philosophy, “Freedom for all, life more abundant”was translated into the Yoruba language as “Afenifere”. The Action Group dismissed the attempt at making the Egbe serve the partisan political purpose, by maintaining a noticeably clear identity from the Egbe, despite the initial and temporary overlapping roles of top members of the Egbe in the Action Group.
(vi) The victory of the Action Group in 1951 made it the dominant political party in the West, and it became the vehicle for Yoruba political activities in the run-up to Independence, even as the party was not a “Yoruba party”, despite its Center of Gravity being in Yorubaland. This enabled the party to lay the foundation for social democracy in Yorubaland. This was the case with the UPN, with its Center of Gravity in Yorubaland, and the dominant partisan Party in Yorubaland.
(vii) An aberration occurred during the “June 12” struggles, with the emergence of NADECO, with a new organization known as AFENIFERE, playing a significant role in it.
(viii) This organizational Afenifere leadership comprised most of those formerly in the Action Group and the UPN. Unlike the temporary overlapping between the Egbe and AG, the new “Afenifere” mixed up its organizational existence with the philosophical/ideological social welfarism (Afenifere) of the AG and claimed proprietary rights to both the philosophy as well as the organization.
(ix) The consummation of “June 12” struggles also required the formation of political parties, which led to the formation of the AD, whose Center of Gravity was also in Yorubaland but within a more centralized political atmosphere. Despite this limitation, it became the dominant partisan political party in Yorubaland and followed the informally established paradigm.
(x) However, “June 12” and its aftermath presented a dilemma, to wit: the comingling of the philosophy with the organizational structure, hence the issue as to whether AD is Afenifere or not. This was compounded by the drafting of the then Afenifere Leader, Pa Abraham Adesanya as the “Spokesperson” for the Yoruba, which was eventually converted to Leader of the Yoruba. This conversion formally brought the comingling of the philosophical with the organizational and brought the conflict between AD and Afenifere to a head.
(xi) Ordinarily, the issue would have been easily resolvable, in the sense that it had already been resolved by the AG. That is, the AG was the political party that fought the necessary battles with “Afenifere” as its ideological/philosophical weapon of choice; therefore, the AD could not have dissolved itself into the “new” Afenifere nor become subservient to it.
(xii) The conflict resulted in the extinction of the AD as a political party, which transmuted into various political formations, with a major faction becoming what is now known as the South-West All Progressives Congress (SWAPC).
(xiii) On the other hand, Afenifere, because it combined the philosophy with its organizational structure, foreclosed other groups from appropriating the same philosophy. Yet all these groups define their ideological/philosophical bent in one form of social welfarism or the other, in other words, as carriers of the ��Afenifere” vision for the polity, thereby informally making all other groups philosophically Afenifere but organizationally distinct and have no input or stake in “Afenifere’s” organizational structure.
(xiv) Hence, the “Afenifere Question” cannot be divorced from the philosophical, organizational, and politically partisan vehicle of its expression. This mandates an examination of current organizational and political choices to arrive at a resolution.
(xv) We start by recognizing that Nigeria’s political contestation for power at the center since Independence has never been a function of “democracy”, justice, equity, or fairness, but on the balance of forces/power between the contending parties, mainly between Unitarist and Federalist forces, and which the Yoruba Referendum Committee believes has come to a head with the 2023 elections.
(xvi) The contestation was manifested in every instance of political power contest at the Center, reflecting the balance of forces between the political parties as well as the Nationalities, as these examples show: the Alliance between the NPC and NCNC to sustain their Parliamentary majority and rejecting creation of more Regions for a balanced Federation; the success of the January 15/16 Military coups largely dependent on the dominance of Igbo Officers in the Nigerian Army and whose outcome was the abolition of Nigeria’s Federalism; the “revenge coup” of July 1966 largely due to the command and influence of Officers and rank and file of mainly northern origin; the NPN/NPP Alliance of the second republic reflecting the earlier NPC/NCNC Alliance; the military interregnum largely dominated by officers of northern origin; the declaration of Biafra without taking cognizance of the wishes, expectations and aspirations of the minorities in the Eastern Region; the 1999 Transition anchored on sustaining Unitarist Nigeria by deflecting the “June 12” struggle via selecting a Yoruba candidate of their choice, and subsequent elections since then, anchored on different types of alignments and realignments of various political forces in order to take power.
(xvii) From all these, justice, equity, and fairness are directly tied to the question of Federalism and the forces for or against it.
(xviii) The PDP, for now, has become the party whose goal is permanent Hausa-Fulani Hegemony in Nigeria’s political firmament by failing to even honor its own unwritten agreement to field a southerner. This is despite its presidential candidate’s foray into the realm of “devolution”. The Labor Party, through its Presidential candidate, has stated that there is nothing wrong with the 1999 Constitution, has no known affinity with social democracy, is anti-Federalist, judging by the positions it has taken on Federalism and has consistently been made available as a Special Purpose Vehicle for all sorts of political opportunists--all of which are a negation of Yoruba existential, historical, and contemporary pursuits. The APC, though not a Yoruba Party, nevertheless has a SW Leadership as a continuum of the AG through the AD. The pursuit of True Federalism as stated in its founding Manifesto makes it amenable to direct and indirect political engagement by the Yoruba.
(xix) Afenifere, as an organization, will therefore be able to manifest its philosophy, that is, “freedom for all, life more abundant” by the practical engagement of the dominant political party in Yorubaland through the instrumentality of a pathway towards Re-Federalization. With this, Afenifere would have filled the gap between the dominant political party whose Center of Gravity is not in Yorubaland, and the necessity for achieving True Federalism.
Thank you for your attention, sir.
Editorial Board,
ILU-SO-PE (Yoruba Referendum Committee)