“… the attempt to yorubalise the clash between the Vice President and Kemi Badenoch is bad politics for President Tinubu. Not only does it put the President and his Vice in an awkward position, it risks creating a political headache for the president in the north, a region that was critical to his 2023 electoral victory and that will be needed for a repeat performance in 2027.”
A popular Yoruba adage says when an elephant dies all kinds of knives come out of their sheaths for a piece of the action. In the same vein, a political crisis on social media such as the dust-off between Kemi Badenoch and the Vice President, Senator Kashim Shettima, or the titanic rumble in the jungle clash between Dele Farotimi and Afe Babalola represent a tantalizing opportunity for all kinds of groups to gain notoriety and to launder all kinds of agenda. After the initial broad-based condemnation of Kemi Badenoch for denigrating Nigeria, the ill-advised intrusion of Vice President Shettima into the controversy, has brought out the ugly side of Nigeria ethnic animus. No sooner had the VP asked the British leader of the UK’s opposition Tories Party, to drop her Yoruba name, if she was ashamed of our Nigerian ancestry, to which she responded with an equally ill-advised ethnic slur against the north, than many Yoruba groups ran to her defense.
This post in the SaharaReporter by the UK based Yoruba Union has taken the Yorubanization of the Kemi Badenoch controversy over the top. It is doubtful even if the Yoruba Union group is a registered entity in the UK as no such document could be retrieved in a search of Yoruba registered entities in the UK (see https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/search?q=Yoruba+Union&page=5). Its website is also very scanty in terms of its organizational structure and executive board. I might be wrong of course, but it looks like a fairly new entity.
Yet, this Union has put out a post that includes a potpourri admixture of issues from IG Egbetokun, to Kemi Badenoch versus Shettima, Dele Farotimi Versus Chief Afe Babalola, to police brutality during #Endbadgovernance and a host of inflammatory and denigrating statements about the north. Given its track record, the choice of Sowore’s SaharaReporter might raise some suspicious glance. This attempt to throw every and any spaghetti on the wall to see which one sticks smacks of gross opportunism by this group to get some media leverage from the various controversial issues on the Nigeria social media landscape.
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Beyond that, the attempt to yorubalise the clash between the Vice President and Kemi Badenoch is bad politics for President Tinubu. Not only does it put the President and his Vice in an awkward position, it risks creating a political headache for the president in the north, a region that was critical to his 2023 electoral victory and that will be needed for a repeat performance in 2027. Asiwaju Tinubu as governor of Lagos state and in his political alliance with General Buhari clearly played a post-ethnic, cosmopolitan, broad based nation-wide politics. Not only did he appoint non-Yoruba to his cabinet to the chagrin of many people, given the apparent ingratitude shown by the beneficiary ethnic group, but he built a broad based nationwide political empire on whose cor-tail he rode to Aso Rock.
Unlike Peter Obi who allegedly ran an Igbo-centric campaign spiced with his attempt to religionise his campaign toward the end with his Muslim-Muslim candidate campaign, Asiwaju Tinubu ran a broad-based, nation-wide campaign. He never ran as a Yoruba candidate. Yes his Emilokan speech talked about Yoruba having earned the ticket, but his campaign did not run on an ethnised agenda. Had he, he would have lost the election in a landslide. To start with, a huge chunk of his own Yoruba people campaigned vigorously against him candidacy. A majority of the major Yoruba mega-churches opposed his candidacy on the basis of the Muslim-Muslim candidate tag, the Yoruba media, a faction of the Afenifere, and a large chunk of the Yoruba intellectuals also went sour on him. Former President Obasanjo unleashed the vast political capital to defeat Asiwaju Tinubu. They all failed thanks to the strategic politics played by Tinubu and sheer fortune of a fractured opposition.
It bears reminding ourselves that Asiwaju lost in Lagos state (his political base), in Osun state and if my memory serves me right, he either lost or split Oyo state with the former Vice President, Alhaji Abubakar Atiku, the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). So it is not too far-fetched to say that Asiwaju Tinubu won his presidential election in spite of the less than maximum support from his own people. On the other hand Obi won in the east in a Tsunami with the Igbo. Asiwaju Tinubu owes his narrow victory largely to the support he garnered from the north despite the fact that Alhaji Atiku a northern candidate also ran in that election. Of course we all knew that Tinubu was crushed in the southeast.
It is therefore a great disservice to President Tinubu’s re-election prospects to tokenise and wrap him in the Yoruba candidate garment. It is doubly unhelpful to denigrate the north as uneducated terrorists. Playing the tribe card by insulting “the Vice President and asking him to stop harassing their daughter (whatever that means) and urging him to focus on his Almajiri people who are being used as terrorists” like the Yoruba Union of UK noted in its release is not only despicable, it smacks of ethnic stereotyping. More importantly, it is bad politics for Yoruba and for President Tinubu in 2027.
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So, as we transverse through this Kemi Badenoch drama, frankly more like an unnecessary tempest in the tea cup, it is important that we don’t lose perspective and not allow ourselves to be distracted from the prize, a focus on helping the president succeed in the big and consequential reform agenda he is pursing. If he succeeds, our country succeeds. We need to tone down on our hyper-ethnicised rhetoric and politics. Otherwise President Tinubu risks ending up a one term president without building bridges to other ethnicities especially the north. Antagonizing the north and denigrating them as uneducated Boko Haram is a dumb thing to say. It is putting President Tinubu’s reelection prospect in grave jeopardy.
Yes, ours is a country suffering from unbelievable identity crisis, from a debilitating trust deficit between, among and sometime, within the ethnic nationalities that make it up. A mixture of ethnic nationalities, many of which feel trapped in an unwanted union.
We must understand that as much as we might dislike each other and wished that we were not yoked together in a union that was put together without our consent, Nigeria is the only country we have. Nigeria is not the only nation that came into existence in that fashion. The entire continent was carved out by Europeans who were more interested in preserving their fiefdoms of exploitation than what was good for the continent. That phenomenon of nation states emerging as a result of conquest, colonialism and imperialism has been around since antiquity and it is not peculiar to our country nor the African continent. We have the choice to either work harmoniously to build a true nation state out of the geographical expression that the European created in 1914 or engage in highly destructive seccessionist agitation. Those who fail to learn from history are bound to repeat it. No matter the flowery optimistic language of secessionists who point out to their so called “peaceful” break-up of Yugoslavia (ask the survival of Serbian genocide in Kosovo and Srebrenica) and the Soviet Union, it is unlike that Yoruba nation will emerge via a peace treaty with other Nigerian ethnicities. Sending petition to 10 Downing Street when the UK has its own internal secessionist agitation, is dumb. The Biafran disaster should be instructive. Nigeria is our present reality and we must all do our part to make it work for us.
Adewale Alonge, PhD, is Founder & President, Africa Diaspora Partnership for Empowerment and Development. www.adped.org
