BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR YORUBALAND! Uche Amos: Its like you need to be beaten twice before you finally learn your lesson. If you are looking for Yoruba blood to shed, its defenders will march and thread on your entrails before you can perceive its colour. It is this kind of thinking and mindset that got the Igbo into the trouble they entered in the first republic. This arrogant, disrespectful and scorched earths tendency of your people led to their ruin that first time around. It is always good to go back to history, because we have a lot to learn from it. When you or one of your apologists wrote earlier that what took the Igbo 6 years (to realise that the Nigerian experiment will not work) has taken the Yoruba 50 years. The problems that later snowballed into a military coup détat, the revenge counter coup, the pogroms against the Igbo in the North (Note the word, North not Yorubaland) and finally the Nigerian Civil War, had its origins in the Western Region and the refusal of the region to work with a cantankerous, leprous Nigerian nation that was bent on working against its interests. So my dear brother, it was not the Eastern region that was smart enough to discover that Nigeria could not work, it was the West, under Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo. And I will not stop here to open your eyes. I will go deeper into history to make this crystal clear. Olayinka Herbert Samuel Heelas Badmus Macaulay (November 14, 1864 – May 7, 1946), a Yorubaman from Lagos is considered the father of Nigerian nationalism. He founded the first Nigerian political party, The Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) in 1923. In 1944, this metamorphosed into the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), later the National Council of Nigeria Citizens which was a massive party that ruled the political waters of Nigeria in the forties. Herbert Macaulay was the president, while Nnamdi Azikiwe was the secretary. When Herbert Macaulay died in 1946, Azikiwe became president, and in the usual Igbo clannish style, turned a hitherto pan-Nigeria party into an Igbo party. It was this old party with new colours that sought to now dominate the politics of Lagos and the Western Region. In response to this, in 1945, the Egbe Omo Oduduwa was formed by Chief Obafemi Awolowo and a host of other Yoruba patriots. The political arm, the Action Group (formed March 1951) contested against the more established NCNC and defeated it on all fronts to form the self-government of the Western Region and Lagos from 1951 to 1959. This irrepressible, energetic band of young adventurers and visionaries blazed the trail of development that still sees the west far ahead of all the other regions of Nigeria, sixty years after. The intense envy and jealousy of the achievements of the Western Region under Obafemi Awolowo, and the unique, advantageous geographical location of this region and its fertile soil and cocoa plantations quickly set the region apart as a region of desire to its enemies, to control politically or to destroy if the ploys failed. So the Igbo under Azikiwe sought to control the West politically, but failed woefully. We should not forget that, a century before, the ancestors of Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto and the premier of the North in this selfsame period, had sought to conquer the sea, through Yorubaland, in their quest to bury the Quoran in the Atlantic Ocean and control a vast empire from the desert to e sea. They had been decisively stopped by the Yoruba at Inisa, near Osogbo in 1935 and driven back to Ilorin before the white man intervened. Hence Ahmadu Bello, their descendant, again sought to achieve, on the political turf, what his forbears could not accomplish on the battlefield. He targeted the Western Region through Samuel Ladoke Akintola, Awolowos successor, by engineering a massive rift in-between them. They cooked up a coup, trumped up charges of treasonable felony against Awolowo and jailed him. The Yoruba masses saw through the machinations of the Northern cabal and reacted violently through the Operation Wetie that consumed all the political and economic activities of the Western Region, and by implication, the entire country, for the better part of four years. The main battle cry of the masses in this revolt was that Yoruba would prefer to be on their own. Ilo ya. Bole dogun, ko dogun... This was the origin of the Nigerian crises. Presumably to salvage the situation, some young officers in the military, under Nzeogwu, attempted a coup that failed. Only politicians and military officers of Northern and Western origin were killed. No Igbo politician or military officer lost his life...Error Number 1; Aguiyi Ironsi, who was the Nigerian head of the Army took over and formed a unitary government...Error Number 2; Igbo people and businessmen in the North started gloating on radio, in the newspapers and on almanacs, that they were the strongest in Nigeria and the masters of the North. One particular poster that was quite graphic had the picture of Nzeogwu standing akimbo with his leg placed on the bloodied, severed head of Ahmadu Bello, the assassinated premier of the North. (Uche Amos, please note)...Error Number 3; Six months later later, Northern officers planned a counter coup and nearly annihilated all Igbo officers in the army in one bloody night of the long knives. (Uche Amos, please note)... Error Number 4; The northern rabid mobs, who were already frenetic, spilled into the streets, the villages, the intercity roads, and started murdering Igbos mainly, and other southerners. The frenzy of the massacre was macabre, to say the least. (Uche Amos, please note o, you that want to shed the blood of Yorubas because we want to leave the unworkable Nigerian federation, that we had been protesting since 1962)...Error Number 5; Out of fear for its life and the sanctity of its people, Ndigbo ran for cover to the Eastern Region, and foolishly declared that it was seceding from the republic without tactically carrying along the Yoruba and other ethnic groups who had hitherto never showed any violent antagonism towards it. According to Ojukwu, No army in Black Africa can stop us. Is this how to start a war?...Error Number 6; You need to learn a lot of lessons. The Aburi accord that you are trumpeting came about as a final gambit to save the Nigeria Federation, which was being severely tested as a result of all the above events which had its roots in the Western Nigeria crisis. Beware what you wish for Omo Oodua! It might come back to haunt you!! The Aburi accord, which was a good document, was not the handiwork of only the Igbo delegation. It had inputs from all over. So, please, know your history. The Yorubas never wanted to be part of Nigeria. In fact, they were the only ones, among the four major ethnic groups, that were never conquered militarily by the British. We signed treaties with them. At the appropriate time, these treaties would be exhumed when it is morning yet on creation day. But that is the story of another day. -George Akinola
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 20:34:29 +0000
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