Yoruba elites: Where art thou?
Thank you to the over 1000 tweeter followers @baasegun1. Thank you to more than 2,800 people who have signed our UN petition on self-determination for the Yoruba people of Nigeria. Your continued support is necessary to actualise our dream of Oduduwa Republic.
The Fulani from 1945 onward have progressively colonised Nigeria. Their colonisation has brought no benefits at all to the Yoruba or to southern Nigerians in general. There has been no mass uprising because of the acquiescence of southern elites. Since it was tolerable to the elites, then the people have had to accept it. Fulani military coups came and went, and still the southern elites kept quiet. Fulani constitutions came and went, and still the southern elites lay supine. We are now at a stage where the elites have enabled the Fulani cancer to metastasise to all parts of southern Nigeria. Fulani are abusers. Abusers never stop unless confronted. Fulani are bandits. Bandits never stop until defeated. Appeasement is never enough. Treatment must be drastic to remove the Fulani cancer. Dissolution of Nigeria, peacefully or otherwise, is inevitable.
By attending rallies in their thousands, the Yoruba signal that they are fed up with Nigeria and wish to leave. By staying at home on the hero’s day, Biafra signalled that they are fed up with Nigeria and wish to leave. The voice of the people is clear and unequivocal: they are fed up with Nigeria and wish to leave. However, they do not know how to go about it, so naturally they rely on their elites to lead them out of the Nigeria quagmire.
Unfortunately, too many Yoruba elites (and southern elites in general) are ‘alaini kan se’; he-no-wan-do. They give interminable reasons for doing nothing. Always self-denigrating, self-blaming, navel-gazing, they suffer from a condition of ‘psychological paralysis of the elites’. Home incarcerated. Amenity starved. Travel high anxiety. Insomniac by fear. Lifeless or stuck in the airport lounge of life. No quality of life to speak of. Yet, and yet, the Yoruba elite resists his liberation by engaging in fuzzy logic.
The Yoruba elites (and southern elites in general) rail against war. Bad peace better than war, they say. They would, won’t they? Life for them may be low quality, but it is still tolerable. By contrast, life is most intolerable for the less fortunate Yoruba or Igbo. War may well be the only way to improve their lot. Not doing so now postpones the inevitable. Hear the Yoruba elites’ chant: No war! People will die! People will be refugees! Lame excuses all: many already dead or are dying; many already refugees or are fleeing. The Yoruba elites need to grow a spine. Take the leadership role for which society invested heavily in them! Otherwise, they are worthless.
All societies have elites. They do so for a reason: to provide leadership particularly in times of crisis. Some Yoruba elites hide their ethnic identity to avoid that leadership role. De-ethnicising is no upgrade. De-ethnicising is not strength. De-ethnicising is not even political correctness. It reveals instead, low self-esteem and dysfunctional psyche. A society’s considerable investment in its elites is wasted investment if the best the elites can do is to fold their arms and tell their people to ‘grin and bear it’, as Fulani herdsmen maim, murder, orphan, rape, destroy farms and livelihood, and the Nigeria army turkey shoot.
The war of Yoruba liberation from Nigeria has two fronts: physical combat and propaganda. The propaganda war is equally important as the combat war, and may even be more important. Pacifist Yoruba elites can fight the propaganda war by doing the following. 1. Educate their people that they have a right to independence from Nigeria, which is guaranteed in local and international law. 2. Educate the Fulani enemy that the Yoruba have this legal right to independence, which is guaranteed even by Nigeria’s laws. 3. Remind the world, particularly the world powers, what they signed up to when they (as the UN and the African Union) gave peoples, such as the Yoruba, the right to self-determination.
A legally guaranteed right, such as the right to self-determination, is a claim that is made secure by being recognised and delimited by law. The right holder is a beneficiary or intended beneficiary of a specific inalienable benefit. Indeed, his right imposes a duty on others not to interfere with it. The essence of a right is to have choice and control.
The Yoruba wish to exercise their right to self-determination. Help us secure our objective; support, sign, spread, share, retweet http://chng.it/QJp8yJ6hPs Target: 100,000 signatures by the end of 2021. Signatures cost nothing! And you don’t even have to be Yoruba to sign!