Nobody Bewitched the Yoruba

DIALOGUE WITH NIGERIA BY AKIN OSUNTOKUN

From the contemplative to the theatrical, criticism of the Yoruba benign indifference towards President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has grown throughout this electoral cycle. On social media, where political disagreement readily becomes an accusation of moral failure, one question has been asked with unwarranted vitriol: “Who bewitched the Yoruba?”

Nobody did.

The question assumes that Yoruba people have abandoned a settled political tradition and therefore owe the country an explanation. There is some merit in asking why a community long associated with opposition politics appears reluctant to confront a president from its own ranks. But that question deserves more than a charge of collective hypocrisy. It calls for an examination of history, political interest, the alternatives on offer and the nature of the Nigerian federation itself.

Experience has taught me to make haste slowly whenever I encounter an especially fierce denunciation of a political position. Before accepting its terms, I try to distinguish genuine disappointment from criticism driven by ulterior agenda. Some who lament the Yoruba response to Tinubu are sincere. They believe the Yoruba should be among the first to hold what they deem an errant government to account. Others seem less interested in the principle of accountability than in securing Yoruba opposition to a particular president.

The Yoruba reputation for opposition did not emerge in a vacuum. The role expectation is closely bound to the political career of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. In the First and Second Republics, he led the opposition with discipline, conviction and formidable competence. A charismatic leader, his primary constituency, the Yoruba, stood with him through decades of struggle, up to his death in 1987. So closely was the Yoruba political imagination identified with his project that opposition came to be seen, almost mistakenly, as an inherited ethnic duty.

Yet, in certain respects, Awolowo’s circumstances were particular to him. His repeated pursuit of the presidency raised a question I have long considered: was there a basis for him to believe that all sections of the country would embrace the modernisation standards he set in the Western Region? It is on record that core to the colonial agreement between Lord Frederick Lugard and the Sokoto caliphate was the objection to the secular educational development model of Southern Nigeria that Awolowo spearheaded. As Ruth First observed, “In land policy, in a dozen different fields of colonial government, the administration reinforced not the unity of the colony, but the differences between North and South.”

Even if Awolowo had reached the presidency, he would have needed alliances strong enough to govern. Without them, the pressure to bend to the prevailing order might have been so great that he would scarcely have recognised his own mission. His difficulty in finding a northern running mate in 1979 illustrated the scale of the challenge. Admiration for his achievements should not prevent us from acknowledging the political conditions under which he operated.

Nor should nostalgia for an age of fearless opposition become a demand that every prominent Yoruba figure perform dissent on command. Consider Professor Wole Soyinka, a veteran of dissent whose public interventions have helped define Nigeria’s intellectual life. At 92, he has earned the right to decide when and how he speaks. Yet some of his critics treat any perceived reduction in his public commentary as evidence that he has compromised his principles.

That is an unfair burden to place on a person, however distinguished. Soyinka’s long career of criticism has created expectations no individual could satisfy indefinitely. What some are experiencing may be less a failure on his part than a kind of Soyinka withdrawal syndrome on theirs. If his voice is no longer as constantly present as they wish, the more useful question is who is prepared to carry forward the demanding tradition he represents.

Soyinka himself has objected to the suggestion that he has fallen silent. In an open letter to an unnamed friend, he wrote:

“You urge me to say something, anything at all to silence the recent caterwauling – my own deliberate choice of words — by our familiar custodians and adjudicators of the public weal. I repeat – I have already spoken, and clearly, only I remain inaudible, which is hardly surprising. At this age, one tends to speak more and more to oneself, that being the most dependable, and rationally responsive listener one can hope for in a rapidly changing – some would even claim – disintegrating world.”

The complaint is revealing. It suggests that speaking is not always enough; one must also say what an expectant audience wants to hear. That is hardly a sound measure of independence.

In the spirit of the season, Soyinka has himself in the unlikely company of former President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Critics point to his daughter Iyabo’s stated interest in seeking the Ogun State governorship on the platform of the All Progressives Congress. They also point to Obasanjo’s appearance among those who welcomed Tinubu at the commissioning of the Gateway Airport, dressed in an aso ebi bearing the president’s image. From these public details, some have concluded that Obasanjo has aligned himself with Tinubu.

It is simply not true. A family member’s political choice does not necessarily establish the position of a former president, any more than attendance at a state event proves an electoral pact. Nigerian politics invites speculation, but speculation should not be mistaken for knowledge.

I was especially taken aback when an Arise News anchor suggested to me that Obasanjo was backing a Peter Obi–Rabiu Kwankwaso ticket to weaken Atiku Abubakar and clear a path for Tinubu’s victory. Having been privy to Obasanjo’s role in efforts to bring Obi and Kwankwaso together, I categorically state there was no such ulterior motive.

My understanding was that he had no interest whatsoever in advancing the fortunes of either Tinubu or Atiku.

There is, of course, another reason people are reading meaning into Obasanjo’s conduct. Since leaving office in 2007, he has cultivated the practice of issuing open letters assessing presidents and presidential contenders. These interventions have often carried weight in public debate. His failure, so far, to make a comparable intervention in this cycle has therefore been interpreted by some as a deliberate favour to Tinubu.

Perhaps it is simply silence. We should be careful about assigning a single political purpose to every action—or omission—of a public figure. The same caution applies to the position of Afenifere. That the foremost Yoruba sociopolitical organisation, diminished though it may be from its former stature, publicly supports Tinubu is politically significant. It does not mean that every Yoruba person agrees with the president’s record, nor that criticism within the region has ceased.

Still, the broad observation cannot be dismissed: by pulling its punches where Tinubu is concerned, a substantial section of Yoruba opinion is offering him support. In the context of Nigerian politics, this should surprise no one. Regional loyalty has always shaped how Nigerians judge those in power and those seeking it.

A Yoruba saying speaks to the sentiment: Omo eni kò sèdí bebere, ká fi ìleke sí ìdí omo elòmíràn. However ill-fitting the waist beads may be on your own child, you do not give them to another person’s child. It is an expression of attachment, not a claim that the child has no faults.

Attachment, however, is only part of the explanation. Many Yoruba voters also judge Tinubu against the available alternatives. Atiku Abubakar’s candidacy, for instance, faces an objection rooted in the principle of North–South power rotation. For those who believe power should have returned to the South after a northern presidency, another northern candidacy was unacceptable from the outset.

My own view of rotation is even more specific. Before becoming Director-General of Peter Obi’s presidential campaign in 2022, I had argued repeatedly that the South East deserved the opportunity to produce Nigeria’s president. If North–South rotation makes sense as a means of sustaining a diverse federation, then rotation among the South’s three geopolitical zones deserves the same consideration.

I did not conceal that conviction. In 2022, I went to see Tinubu and told him that I would support a candidate from the South East. I also told him I would state that position in my column the next day. It was a decision I made openly, despite pushback from family and friends whose political outlook had been shaped by the long history of Yoruba–Igbo antipathy.

The 2023 elections exposed how fragile efforts to move beyond that antipathy remained. Obi won the presidential vote in Lagos. In the two weeks before the governorship election, tensions between Yoruba and Igbo communities intensified. Some level-headed friends who had voted for Obi changed their minds, saying they feared a resurgent Igbo chauvinism. Such fears should have been met with reason and restraint. Instead, ethnic identity became an increasingly prominent weapon in the campaign.

What I saw at my neighbourhood polling station was disturbing. Voters were being segregated according to their ethnic identities. People identified as coming from the South East were roughed up and prevented from voting unless they were prepared to support the APC candidate, Babajide Sanwo-Olu. Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, the Labour Party candidate, was branded an “Igbo candidate”, partly because his mother is Igbo. When I attempted to intervene, community leaders threatened me with physical assault.

That experience must not be softened into an abstract account of political rivalry. Intimidating voters on ethnic grounds is wrong, regardless of which party benefits. It also shows why appeals to regional grievance can so quickly become dangerous. The tentative steps taken by Yoruba elites away from interregional hostility faltered in the heat of that contest.

Tinubu’s eventual ascent also produced a measure of Yoruba triumphalism. At gatherings of friends, my arrival was sometimes greeted with the teasing remark, kì í se ara wa—“he is not one of us.” The joke had an edge. It reflected the ease with which a political choice can be recast as a test of communal belonging.

None of this places Tinubu beyond criticism. His first year in office was marked by the shock of his inauguration-day declaration that “subsidy is gone”. Removing the fuel subsidy was, in my judgment, a courageous and necessary step. But a measure with such immediate consequences for household costs should have arrived alongside a credible package of protections. The government needed to demonstrate, at the moment it imposed hardship, that it understood who would bear the heaviest burden.

Many Nigerians are unhappy with Tinubu, and they have good reason to demand better from his administration. Yet many are also exhausted by the condition of Nigeria itself. Their dissatisfaction is older than this presidency and older than the administrations that preceded it. The historian Anthony Kirk-Greene observed that the seeds of the 1967 civil war were sown not merely in the coups of 1966 but, depending on one’s reading, in the 1950s, in 1914 or even earlier. The point remains relevant: Nigeria’s recurring crises cannot be explained solely by the choices of the person occupying the presidency.

This is why I return to the constitutional question. The distribution of power, the incentives governing competition among regions and the persistent fear that one group’s victory must mean another’s defeat all shape the decisions societies make. A new president may make better choices than an old one, and voters are entitled to seek that change. But a change of personnel will not, by itself, resolve the structural weaknesses of the federation.

The Yoruba do not have to pretend that Tinubu has governed flawlessly. Nor should they be expected to oppose him simply to satisfy an image of themselves as Nigeria’s permanent opposition. Their response may be informed by regional loyalty, disappointment with alternative candidates, memories of recent ethnic conflict and a conviction that the country’s deeper problem lies beyond any one administration.

Those judgments can—and should—be debated. But the debate will be more honest if it begins with the political realities people face, rather than the suggestion that an entire people have somehow been bewitched.