THE NATION
The speed of light, with which Prof. Banji Akintoye and Sunday Igboho denied the Ibadan miscreants, claiming to be Yoruba “nesan” activists, was simply amusing!
Before you could call “Odua!”, both distanced themselves from the arch-folly of these romantics, who had wished to “capture” the Oyo State Government Secretariat, with the special thrill of hoisting their Yoruba Nation flag on the Ibadan Parliament building of the old glorious West, now serving as the Oyo State House of Assembly.
And after that, what?
Again, the haste with which the eminent and respected professor of history distanced himself from that comedy was something else. Yet, his discomfiture was fit rebuke for intellectualizing for stark guys, who could hardly relate.
Igboho himself was the first victim, serving as happy battling ram, to batter the “Fulani” president, plotting to enslave his beloved Yorubaland, with Fulani “terrorists”! Why, a charged Igboho once told himself and ilk, while on a raid of the Idiroko border with
Benin Republic, that he was defending “Yoruba border”!
But a hard stint in Benin Republic jail, complete with ugly skirmishes with DSS that preceded his fleeing to that country, seems to have reset his brain to cold reality.
Before then, however, he was even captured on video, bragging, to raucous applause, that he would “kill” a “senator” for Igboho’s “Yoruba nesan” cause. That “senator” is now president of the Federal Republic.
Igboho is wiser now — for neither that subversive roar, nor the good professor’s free-wheeling “Yoruba Nation” theorizing, helped Igboho in his Benin odyssey, though that lobby made a face-saving claim they helped to spring Igboho. Maybe they did.
But after Igboho, these brain-washed souls trying to seize the Oyo Government Secretariat, after another batch had earlier created a public nuisance at Ojota, that popular bus stop, on Ikorodu Road, in Lagos. When will this comedy stop?
By the way, under what mandate, popular or closet, is Yoruba Nation or Odua Republic, beyond the whims and caprices of its sponsors? How can a tiny minority impose their racket on the majority, that continues to look on with quaint bemusement?
Is it not clear to everyone now that Nigeria only has two tribes — the poor and the rich — and that the rich had better sort out the poor, lest the poor gobble up the rich in no time?
Let the Yoruba Nation theorists take a cue from the mess in the South East. Chinua Achebe, storied author and father of the African novel, nevertheless exited with historical bile in his final parting shot: There Was A Country.
That bile woke up the buried demons of Biafra, epitomized by a rash Nnamdi Kanu, who has since run himself into a ditch.
The message is clear: those on the departure lounge should not create needless future hazards for uncritical youths, at the start of their lives. A word is enough for the wise.
