FOR US YORUBA, ITS A TIME OF DESPERATE URGENCY (SERIES) Every nation in Nigeria is in trouble. Every nation in Nigeria is experiencing extreme hardship. Altogether, we the people and nationalities of Nigeria are heading for something unimaginably massive and cataclysmic. I started in my message of last week to spell out the Yoruba share of this swelling tide of disaster. I mentioned our virtually impotent state governments incapable of doing much for the welfare and prosperity of their people; the masses of our highly educated youths roaming our streets unemployed and depending on their poor parents for sustenance; our nation living today in a depth of poverty that we as a nation have never before experienced in our whole history; and the growing danger that our people may suddenly erupt in a massive and uncontrollable insurrection. We Yoruba traditionally loved to brag that no Yoruba person could become a beggar in the streets. Any beggars in our streets were usually persons from other lands. But in post-independence Nigeria, it has become more and more common to see Yoruba beggars in our streets. Today, the huge number of Yoruba beggars in our towns has become a Yoruba national shame, and the number continues to balloon. The famous German professor, Ulli Beier, worked in Yorubaland for years in the middle of the last century – in the 1950s and 1960s when the fabric of Yoruba society and life was intact and strong. A long time later, in his old age in another country, he wrote: “Between 1950 and 1966, during my first stay in Nigeria, I never locked the door of my house. In a closely knit society, theft was almost impossible. - - - During this entire period, I never saw a hungry Yoruba; nor was anybody abandoned by the community”. But before Ulli Beier left Nigeria in 1966, the situation in Nigeria had already started to corrupt Yoruba society. By the late 1970s, the impact of Nigeria on the Yoruba nation had become remarkable. Many capable Yoruba citizens were giving up productive enterprises and hustling for some sort of share in Nigeria’s petroleum money. Under the impact of federal Nigeria’s seizure and control of the country’s produce exports, the unfortunate falls in export produce prices in the world market, and the grossly inept federal management of the situation, Yoruba cocoa farmers were quickly ruined. According to Ulli Beier, “the farmers could no longer afford to pay the labourers to harvest the cocoa pods. The cocoa began to rot on the ground - - . The large cocoa sheds (in Yoruba towns) stood empty”. Poverty tightened its grip on Yoruba life – as on the life of all other Nigerian nationalities, for a combination of similar reasons. Excessive and intensifying federal control on all aspects of the affairs of Nigeria, and the consequent loss of morale and initiative in our states, made sure that the poverty would grow stronger and stronger. Obviously, the right thing to do at this point was to relax the federal death-hold, reduce the powers of the Federal Government, and empower the states to revive their economies and re-energize their people. Rather than do that, the controllers of Nigeria continued to tighten the federal hold. By the late 1980s, the disaster had become almost complete. Ulli Beier wrote that when he visited Nigeria again in the mid-1980s, he could not believe how totally the fabric of Yoruba life and society had crumbled. Even in the supposedly rich neighbourhoods of Ikoyi in Lagos, he saw Yoruba people begging. “Yoruba society had fallen apart”, he wrote sadly. The crumbling is now at an absolute peak. While the masses of Yoruba university graduates are roaming the streets and suffering the shame of depending on their economically battered parents, even the types of Yoruba citizens who have traditionally managed to provide for their families and to help their kinsmen and neighbours have been robbed of most of their strength by the poverty in Nigeria. All over Yorubaland, some of such notable citizens now must look up to their politicians to help them sustain a semblance of economic self-respect. In the circumstance, it is no longer sufficient for the elected public official to perform his duties well (to build roads, renovate the school buildings, improve the quality of teaching in the schools, build water supply systems, etc); he is also expected by some of the notables among his people to give them more or less regular hand-outs. If a governor does not keep up with these expectations, he might risk a political storm rising against him in his state. In the circumstances of today, authentic Yoruba political parties or political leaders have become a rarity; and most of the so-called politicians and parties of these days are just crowds of self-seeking jobbers perpetually regrouping – like mindlessly shifting sands on a sea shore. All these developments represent a vile and unacceptable destruction of Yoruba character,Yoruba political mores, and Yoruba governance ethics, and they embarrass most Yoruba people. They make it impossible to create and sustain the kind of constructive, accountable and dignified political leadership and governance that the Yoruba people are used to, profoundly negate the ways that Yoruba people want to live and be governed, and alienate the masses of Yoruba people. Obviously, the Yoruba nation must find some way out of this quagmire – and do so in a hurry, before the treasures of their culture are totally destroyed, or before their highly educated masses rise like a hurricane. For the Yoruba nation in Nigeria, therefore, these are times of desperate urgency. The sad truth is that there is no real hope that the necessary change for the better can ever materialize in Nigeria. If Nigeria’s history to-date teaches anything, it is that Nigerians do not, and cannot, have a unity of purpose – a unity of purpose to reorder the direction of Nigeria’s affairs, to restructure the lopsided Nigerian federation, and to deal effectively with public corruption. The National Conference called by President Jonathan holds out some promise and some hope,and we Yoruba people will cooperate with it to the very best of our strength. And it had better produce the kind of results that we the nationalities of Nigeria can live much more comfortably with. However,to expect such a major qualitative change in Nigeria’s barbarously tortuous political life is another thing altogether. When has Nigeria ever carried a major exercise like this to meaningful fruition? In the final analysis, it is each nation struggling through the Nigerian darkness and disaster that knows where, how, and how intensely the shoe pinches; and as one proverb of ours says, “Alatise lo nmoatiseara re” (it is the person whose foot is hurting terribly that knows what to do).And as for any of us who is inclined to doubt and dither, or to continue to hug and glamourize the unsupportable, when it is really time to poop the anus will open.-APATA
Posted on: Sun, 01 Dec 2013 04:38:59 +0000
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