Akin Osuntokun
“It is interesting that close to the 20th anniversary of Ige’s death, Chief Bisi Akande, one of Ige’s closest collaborators released his robust autobiography, My Participations, to tell Ige’s side of the story, especially as it pertains to Afenifere. Anyone who has read Akande’s great book would know he has no kind words for those he perceived as opponents of Ige, principal of which were the duo of Adebanjo and his late friend, Sir Olanihun Ajayi. He was also heavy on Chief Olu Falae. Since Falae lost that election, the Awoist vanguard has been at war with itself.
Another chapter in that war is now opened by My Participations. Akande’s book is the third by Afenifere chieftains to tell their stories and wage war by other means. The first to publish was Chief Ayo Adebanjo whose autobiography, Telling It As It Is, spares no one in his gunsight. He had no kind words to one of the old comrades, Chief Bola Ige, who by 2018 when Adebanjo published his book, had been dead for 17 years. Ige is not going to write any new book and cannot defend himself against those who continue to make him the object of their bristling campaign of calumny”- Dare Babarinsa
“I just know that Akande is a very reckless person. He will just say anything without thought. Without thinking about the consequences, he will just say it like an irresponsible person. That is how he speaks. That was why I said I was not going to comment about Akande. I don’t want to lower myself to his level”- Chief Olu Falae
“The revolutionaries of today are the reactionaries of tomorrow”-Hannah Arendt
The most damaging aspect of the recently published memoirs of Chief Bisi Akande is not so much the contents of the book but the inauspicious timing of its introduction to the Nigerian public. To be sure, the contents are controversial enough but by themselves are less damaging taken in isolation of the contemporary Nigerian context. A few years ago the publication would not have been so corrosive to the reputation of the author, to the pet project of Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s presidential ambition and the corporate integrity of the Yoruba. One of the dominant themes is the subject matter of the heroic and charismatic Yoruba political icon, the late Chief Ajibola Ige.
The open secret at the time of his death was the supremacist struggle between him and his colleagues at the Afenifere political hierarchy. His death was the climax of what had become a bitter political struggle and it was not going to end well for the protagonists and the cause of Yoruba political cohesion. Next to their mentor and patriarch, Awolowo, Ige was the most formidable political mobilizer in Yorubaland and the most prominent face of Afenifere. He thereby perceived himself and had a sense of entitlement to the role of the political arrowhead of Afenifere- what he himself designated as arole Awolowo. He knew or perhaps should have known, that his colleagues would most probably resent any such assumption of political preferment.
If he was ever in doubt, his loss to Chief Olu Falae at the Afenifere shadow primaries confirmed the ill disposition. After his humiliating loss to Falae, the smart political strategy, from the perspective of group cohesion and unity, would be for his colleagues to see the need to rally to his side and help heal his political wound. Not to see and accept this need amounted to insensitivity bordering on hostility but Ige equally overreacted. And so the cold war intensified.
Whatever his shortcomings and the extraneous circumstances of his death, Ige’s premature death became an albatross not only on the neck of the government he served but also on that of his estranged Afenifere peers; and created an outstanding debt the survivors did not know how to liquidate. This tragic pall was reinforced by the resultant death of his highly regarded and broken widow Justice Atinuke Ige a year later.
Although muted, It is possible that the other camp read in the tragedy of his death a vindication of sorts and entertained no guilt conscience. The bad blood was compounded by the disinclination of his colleagues not to speak ill of the dead where Ige was concerned. To this extent, Akande was right to rise in defence of his mentor who was no longer around to take matters into his most capable hands. In picking up the gauntlet however, the former Osun state governor typically went overboard. Bar the reckless impunity and inauspicious timing, there was validity to Akande’s purpose in this regard. No occasion is good enough for the Yoruba to engage in intramural war of attrition and certainly not a prevailing situation in which Nigeria is, once again, challenging and provoking the comprising natonalities to the battle cry of to your tents o Israel- requiring all hands to be on deck.
The major dysfunction of Akande’s book is his handling of the subject matter of the presidential aspiration of Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu- in the pursuit of which he pulled no breaks and was prepared to thrash and besmirch all. Without prejudice to Tinubu’s ambition, I have earlier reiterated my misgivings which has nothing to do with the personal merits or otherwise of the political titan. So let me restate them once again. First is the question, what best serves the cause of national integration and political stability of Nigeria at this critical juncture? Is there a better option than the purposive gesture of healing the festering civil war wound and the attendant political marginalisation of the Igbo by the contrivance of an Igbo acceding to the Nigerian presidency in 2023? In my reckoning, any option to the contrary amounts to the elevation of abusive power politics over the ideal of national unity and integration. I have taken the position that eight years of President Olusegun Obasanjo and eight years of Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo (in 24 years, in which the Igbo had never featured in either position), morally disqualifies the South-west from contending for the presidency with the Igbo in the forthcoming 2023 election.
Second is religious balance. The suggestion that the Northern caucus of the All Progressives Congress, APC has preempted the outcome of the party presidential primaries with an insistence on a particular religious identity (that whoever emerges as the presidential or vice presidential candidate from the North must be a Muslim) is insensitive, discriminatory and divisive. It has, ab initio, prejudice and problematise the candidacy of any Nigerian Muslim from the South. The rationalisation that religion is not an issue in Yoruba politics begs the question of whether Nigeria comprises Yoruba alone and why Nigeria should tinker with any notion that will subject a country already fraying with divisive politics to any religious sensitivity test. You may also ask, what about the precedence of the Moshood Abiola/Babagana Kingibe’s Muslim/Muslim presidential ticket? Well, Abiola did not start his presidential election run with the presumption of being under duress to pick a Muslim as his running mate.
The ticket evolved from a process in which the choice of Kingibe was compelled by the imperative of unifying the party. Kingibe had been a popular party chairman (especially among the governors elected on the Social Democratic Party, SDP platform who were united in rooting for him as running mate) and he came a close second to Abiola in the presidential primaries.There was equally the extenuating explicit adoption of Abiola as presidential candidate by the South West political block specifically for fulfilling the prioritisation of power shift to the South- in contrast to the option of the National Republican Convention, NRC, ticket of Bashir Tofa (may his soul rest in peace) and Sylvester Ugoh.
Third is Akande’s dysfunctional strategy of pulling down the house so that tower Tinubu may rise. Factoring the indispensability of President Mohammadu Buhari to this aspiration he would go on to canonize the President beyond the recognition of anyone familiar with the Nigerian leader as “ascetic and profoundly patriotic”. How patriotic is a leader who vowed and faithfully executed the vow of discriminating against those who did not vote for him? Narrating his detention ordeal at the behest of the Buhari military dictatorship in 1984/85 Akande himself levelled the allegation that “the theme, all over, was that there were double standards in the arrests and humiliation of politicians from the South and the North, between Christians and Muslims with the southerners, and Christians suffering the worse treatment.” Yet this is the same Nigerian leader Akande eulogised as “ascetic and profoundly patriotic”. Of course, cringing as before a demi god, he could not bring himself to name the leader who presided over such characteristic display of profoundly unpatriotic governance. In the course of an unremitting servile ingratiation Akande made the unkindest cut of all by collectively degrading Nigerians as undeserving frauds and cheaters. “We (Nigerians) know you love the country, We abuse you for everything that is wrong in the country. We know we are fraudulent, cheaters and for all the wrongs we still blame you for it” he crowed
Trumping all else was his subversive take down of any anticipation of Yoruba regional autonomy or self-determination. This was his cynical exploitation of the 19th century Yoruba disunity history to savage the notion of Yoruba nationalism and sell his people short. While he was prepared to extol that the 19th Fulani is qualitatively different from the contemporary Fulani and capable of historical rectitude, he saw his own people (the Yoruba) as fixated in the disarray of the 19th century and incapable of historical progress. Hear him “Who has not seen any change in the Hausa Fulani society of the nineteenth century compared to the Hausa Fulani of 1999 who surrendered the presidency to the Yoruba to right the wrong done to Yoruba by annulling Abiola’s presidential mandate”. In contrast and spiteful allusion to the 19th century Yoruba countrywide implosion, Akande taunted “Those agitating for a Yoruba nation should have a rethink. This country must remain united to save it from war..Yoruba will be in war for another 100 years if Nigeria is allowed to break.” Akande has set the propaganda tone for Tinubu’s presidential campaign in a manner that may come back to haunt the latter as the most significant turning point of his campaign-for the worse.
