THE NATI

The need for a paradigm shift in the South West    20/4/2008

Of course one understands where Chief Akande was coming from. It was in the heat of Papa Ayo Adebanjo’s vitriol against everybody except himself; a pattern that has become rather legendary. Chief Adebanjo was not particularly fair in his comments on a set of Yoruba leaders, individuals who  in the very recent past  were elected by the people into positions of great responsibility over their affairs; nor has he  exactly been  a paragon of subtlety in Afenifere matters which his age and experience would readily suggest. Regardless of that, Chief Akande should still have found a way of dealing directly with Adebanjo, without inflicting any collateral damage on the efforts of a group that means well for the Yoruba nation. The altercations were worsened when Chief Segun Osoba came on the heels of Akande to say there would be no more reconciliation in Afenifere.  I am, personally, not unduly perturbed by that position given that I would be the first person to confess to no pedigree or relationship with the Afenifere other than that which any progressive- minded Yoruba man or woman could claim. In essence, this means I am not a devotee of any of the parts and therefore owe allegiance to nobody or group but only to the truth. But suffice it to say that I was privileged to have been a member of the group that organized that Retreat. I therefore know, as a matter of fact, that one of the main aims of the organizers was to reconcile the  warring elders  within Afenifere.

Unlike General Akinrinade, none of the leaders of Afenifere who attended the Retreat can claim ignorance of this. The Retreat was not conceived as a mere photo opportunity or some ‘long-time- no-see’ event for long lost friends .Nor did the group stop at that. Directly after the Retreat, it broke into smaller groups which were given the task of further interrogating the issues in dispute as a way of narrowing the areas of conflict. It is instructive that Pa Adebanjo remains, till date, the most difficult, even intransigent, among these leaders, insisting that he needed an opportunity to square up to the others before matters could be resolved. Unfortunately, he appears infinitely capable of stoking some new crisis with or without  prompting. I am not sure he actually desires  a rapprochement at all. Indeed, at a point, he took exception to an article in this column, his misreading of which led me to do an entirely new article to further explain my position. He seems to me unwilling to forgive little infractions to his person nor does he forget one either. As the ‘star’ of what Hon. Olawale Oshun calls the ‘Controlling Leadership of Afenifere’ in his book, THE KISS OF DEATH, Papa Adebanjo engaged in a mutually antagonistic ‘war’ with the late Chief Bola Ige; a war which the latter’s death would seem to have left unmitigated as everybody who ever lined behind Chief Ige remains fair game to him. The only exception was, probably, the ill-informed recognition of Senator Moji Akinfenwa as  Chairman of the AD by Afenifere even when Pa Adebanjo knew only too well that Akinfenwa was a ‘plant’ having himself been, unsuccessfully, toasted for that position by  Abdulkadir, the double-faced former chairman of the party. I am not naïve enough to attribute a mono-causal factor to these problems, but something tells me that if Pa Adebanjo genuinely wants peace, Afenifere  could again attain its glorious past.

The Afenifere crisis, as at today has become rather intractable; its politics sterile- what TATALO calls ‘degenerate partisan politics’, that I think it is time for the Yoruba nation to either re-invent it or move on without it whilst, however, internalizing the fact that it is nothing more than a social contract between the  people and a  political leadership that is trusted to perform to their satisfaction.

It was just as I was ruminating over these things that I had a 90- minute chat with Dapo Adelegan, a highly resourceful, very quiet but big player in the Nigerian economy. The 46 year old  Chief Executive  with interests  in Communications, Media, Project Management, Oil and Gas etc, told me how very much he enjoys reading this column; the clarity of thought  et cetera; but asked me pointedly ‘Uncle, why do the Nigerian Media devote 80 percent or more  of its  time to politics? Politics, he said, is a very tiny, though important, aspect of our life, and according to him, most Americans live their life without a thought as to who the occupier of the White House is. According  to him, the wealth of modern nations is fast emerging as their real value and this is where we all have a collective role; whether as individuals, group, the Media or Corporate  Nigeria, to persuade, translate, inform, inspire and transform our people. Politics, or at least the black man’s variant of it, he says, is more kleptomaniac than productive, and can therefore not take us anywhere. Our emphasis, he says, should be the economy. Nigeria he says is a good and blessed country with billions of dollars hovering in the air looking for where to berth to translate to industrial and infrastructural development, to jobs and to life more abundant for our people, far more than politics can ever do. According to him, the more foreign investors read about our thieving politicians who all the same remain our role models, dominating newspaper pages as well as prime time on our television, the faster Foreign Direct Investments disappear.

This encounter, though with a younger brother, set me thinking. And it reminded me that much more than politics, the Ibadan Retreat, considered issues relating to the economy of the South-West as were brought forth by the brilliant papers presented.

Now, in retrospect, I can only regret that my two articles flowing directly from the Retreat concentrated on politics to the detriment of the economic issues discussed at the event. For instance, experts demonstrated to us clearly that for over a decade now, the South West has been stagnating economically; they showed, for example, how we have all taken the location of banks, newspapers and  Electronic Media  in Lagos  to be synonymous with ownership by indigenes of  the South West. These were all areas where we had a head start but have now been consigned to the second or even third place. It was revealed that the involvement of Yoruba at the directorate and management levels of banks has plummeted beyond description within the same period.

 Professor Bolaji Aluko who flew in from the United States solely for the Retreat, in a joint paper with Professor Ropo Sekoni, went to great lengths in discussing how we can leverage our massive Diaspora Yoruba component in North America and Europe to jump start our economy. In deed for the next two weeks I intend to go back to those Retreat papers to highlight the  various panacea suggested as ways out of our economic stagnation given that nothing in the Nigerian constitution prevents a people from liberating their peoples economically. I shall also try to  identify a few of our young men and women who are quietly making waves in various sectors of the Nigerian economy; persons who, given the right environment, not this suffocating and needless political  intransigencies, can give the South West the opportunity of another era of massive economic development.

So in the name of OODUA, our Afenifere leaders should please save us another recourse to unnecessary unease in Yoruba land. Their politics of attrition has not succeeded in putting food on our table nor has it provided jobs for our teeming young graduates many of who now take to crime. In deed, quite unlike the Yoruba, you now find on the streets of Lagos , elderly Yoruba women begging; people whose children, had they jobs, would have happily taken care of.

The time to subsume politics and embrace a blue print for the economic development of the Yoruba race, IS NOW..