ABUMBOLA ADELAKUN FROM PUNCH
The ethnic irredentists who regularly punctuate the atmosphere with the dog whistle of Yorùbá ro’nú are not sincerely invested in the gains of contemplation. If they were, they would deploy the same gusto to call for a reflection on the Yorùbá condition within this contraption called Nigeria. We would be asked to ponder if this is all there is to our life or if we are being shortchanged by our self-serving leaders and their herd of brownnosers who remind us to use our power of reason only when it potentially benefits the political class. Deploying the force of our thought to further the ambitions of our leaders is not all there is to the expression of the life of the mind.
Yorùbá ro’nú should not be an errand we are asked to run each time an election is around the corner, and our leaders are worried their snouts would be removed from an accustomed feeding trough. Yorùbá ro’nú should be a regular exercise to take stock of our politics and determine how to better hold our leaders accountable to deliver the highest standards of governance.
As the governorship election approaches, Lagos—mostly due to its cosmopolitanism—is, again, the battleground for debates around belonging and nationalism. At this rate, the quarrel over who ought to dominate Lagos has become akin to a quadrennial festival. You wonder: is life in Nigeria so zombifying that people cannot even fight fresh battles? Will people ever get tired of this revenant, or are we perpetually condemned to the Sisyphean task of resurrecting it every election season? Given how much Nigerians suffered in the past eight years under the clueless All Progressives Congress government, one would imagine that this election cycle would feature frank deliberations on our fates. Rather than serious people discussing serious issues, the elections have largely boiled down to the standard fare of primordialism.
By now, it should be self-evident to the discerning that Yorùbá ro’nú is a tool they use to arouse primordial instincts, sort people into tribes, and motivate them to use the polls to wage a war that will ultimately benefit greedy overlords. An otherwise routine civic exercise becomes warfare and survivalism as people go to the polls thinking they are servicing a larger nationalist and moral cause. I have seen this movie repeatedly, and I know how it ends. What I would rather contemplate is what this perennial reduction of politics to ethnic/religious identity obscures. What other possibilities of living and being are we being shut out of when we buy into the sentiment of antagonising others just so that some reprobate politicians can get a free pass.
There have been enough of these Yorùbá ro’nú sessions for us to see that the whole hoopla they make about protecting Lagos from “invaders” has nothing to do with either Lagos indigenes or as an entity. This is—and has always been about—shielding the sordid finances of Lagos from public scrutiny. The APC has been in power for an unbroken 23 years, and they desperately need that streak extended for as long as possible. As long as they keep winning that state, there will never be proper accountability for what goes down in terms of the revenue and the pipelines through which it flows into private pockets. They are haunted by the fear of losing Lagos because they know that everything they have done in the dark will be brought into the noonday sunlight. The disgrace they will suffer if the books are opened, and the receipts of their activities printed will be far worse than the embarrassment the Peoples Democratic Party endured when the APC took over Aso Rock in.
After the recent presidential election, they have seen how much their hold on that state has considerably weakened and they are desperate. Shortly before last Saturday’s election, an analyst told me that the votes of Alimosho local government alone for the APC would blow the other parties out of the water. That never happened. Now, their fear of losing the governorship election is so palpable that they are trotting out virtually every one of their payrolls to the partisan war front: the career politicians, pseudo-intellectuals, pay-per-paragraph writers, bureaucrats, motor park louts, influence peddlers, bottom feeders, and even traditional rulers. That is why even a religious irredentist like that MURIC man would issue a statement begging Muslims to vote a Christian governor. The support is not about religious cooperation or liberalism, nor an appreciation of Governor Jide Sanwo-Olu. It is merely to protect the APC headquarters from demystification.
