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Our Ref: YorExit/UK10
 
20 September 2022
 
 
House of Commons
Palace of Westminster
London
SW1A 0AA
 
Dear UK Parliamentarian
 
We at IlanaUK very much appreciate your participation at the session on ‘Deaths in Nigeria - Urgent Questions’ on 6 June 2022. We are immensely grateful to Conservative MP Fiona Bruce who tabled it on the killing of church worshippers in Ondo State, Nigeria. We at IlanaUK count you as our friends in the British parliament.
 
IlanaUK is a welfare organisation dedicated to achieving self-determination for the Yoruba people of Nigeria through lawful and non-violent means. Ondo State is in the Yoruba Homeland.
 
It is self-evident that only the dissolution of Nigeria could and would end the suffering. We respectfully ask you our friends in the British parliament to lobby His Majesty’s Government to broker self-determination for us Yoruba people of Nigeria. Whilst you are very much aware of the atrocities and genocides being daily perpetrated on us, you probably are not fully appreciative of the several benefits that likely would accrue from an independent Yoruba Homeland.
 
Britain gave life to Nigeria on 1 January 1914. Britain since then has been responsible for keeping Nigeria alive. Without Britain’s support, Nigeria would immediately cease to exist. Sadly, Britain continues to look the other way as Nigeria has sank into a failed state. Britain implicitly is responsible for the current parlous state of Nigeria.
 
Britain resists dissolution of Nigeria in part because that would represent the greatest failure of British colonialism in Africa. But keeping Nigeria together is both immoral and inhumane because it is at the expense of the wellbeing of the indigenous peoples of Nigeria. The coincidence of the beginning of the King Charles III reign and the Liz Truss government provides Britain with the unique opportunity of making a decisive break from the past and making amends for the Berlin 1885 Act.
 
We the Yoruba people of Nigeria wish to reclaim our sovereignty that Britain arbitrarily and forcibly took away from us in the Amalgamation of 1914. Britain took us into Nigeria. It is only fair, just, and reasonable that Britain should broker our exit from Nigeria. We wish to follow the example of Brexit and exert our inherent sovereignty by leaving Nigeria to form an independent Yoruba Homeland. Creation of the Yoruba Homeland will right the humiliation and wrong that we the Yoruba people have daily suffered and endured in Nigeria since 1914. Buckingham Palace and Number 10 owe an obligation to make the Yoruba Homeland a reality.
 
Nigeria’s peoples are doomed if Nigeria remains as one nation. The British created Nigeria without regard for diversity, history, customs, and traditions. Maintaining Nigeria as one nation has been a continuous cause of conflicts, a civil war and stunted development. Nigeria’s ethnic groups have no shared values and no common vision for the country. Ethnic and religious rivalry and tensions are intractable. Nearly every successful European country is built around a common language, culture, tradition, and system of beliefs. But when it came to Nigeria, the British ignored boundaries between nations, empires and ethnic groups and imposed on us an egregious structure, akin to the Tower of Babel.
 
We Yoruba people between 1954 and 1959 showed what we could do if we had our own independent Homeland. Development in Yorubaland in those halcyon days, when Obafemi Awolowo led us, was ahead of that of South Korea and Singapore. We had free primary education and free healthcare for children. We had a television service before most countries in Europe had television. We built the first skyscraper and the first Olympic stadium on the continent of Africa. Given the chance again, we have human and natural resources in abundance to enable us catch up with South Korea and Singapore.
 
As an independent Yoruba Homeland, we shall do things the Yoruba way. We have our own distinct Yoruba convention, culture, language, and tradition that we shall keep and rejuvenate. We have our own indigenous laws from ancient times that are as comprehensive as English laws. We have our own system of government; the ‘Constitutional Oba’, which is similar to the British ‘Constitutional Monarchy’.
 
As an independent Yoruba Homeland, we shall use our locally generated resources to develop the Homeland the way we want. Currently, 75% of Nigeria’s income comes from Yorubaland, from customs and excise, taxes, companies etc. Imagine what we could achieve if all that money was retained in Yorubaland. We have mineral resources yet untapped including bitumen, marble, gold, and oil. We have arable and fertile land in abundance, suitable for growing almost any crop – indeed, cocoa sales funded the 1954-59 development. We have the landscape to harness renewable energy from sun, water, and wind.
 
As an independent Yoruba Homeland, we shall educate and employ our youths the way we want. This was Awolowo’s vision all those years ago. Nigeria’s ‘Federal character’ policy, forced on the country by the Fulani ethnic group, has destroyed our education system and deprived our children of education fit for the 21stcentury. Nigeria kills our children’s talents particularly in science and technology. Many of our youths have fled to seek better life elsewhere. We shall bring them back home to help develop the Yoruba Homeland. We are confident that we would generate local opportunities that would prevent others from fleeing abroad.
 
As an independent Yoruba Homeland, we shall play a more visible, and constructive, role on the global stage. We shall contribute social and physical sciences perfected by the ancient Yoruba. The Ifa oracle is a probability system available to be scientifically exploited. The Gbere intradermal techniques could be used to deliver therapeutic agents; in 1776, Onesimus, a Yoruba slave introduced the technique of vaccination to America. Principles underpinning the ancient Yoruba medicine, which is more observational science than the conceptual medicine of India (Ayurveda) and China, would finally attract western scientific scrutiny.
 
As an independent Yoruba Homeland, we shall secure our external and internal borders. Just as our forefathers did in the 19th century, we shall prevent the expansion of Islamic terrorism to the Atlantic Ocean. The Yoruba Homeland has the longest coastline in West Africa; terrorist control of that coastline would be a catastrophic threat to the wellbeing of Europe and America.  The Nigerian government over the last decade has financed and imported jihadist terrorists through Nigeria’s northern borders. Indeed, the Nigerian government has provided finance to the Taliban terrorists of Afghanistan. We shall put an end to all that.
 
We are confident that dissolution of Nigeria into previously existing constituent nations will be neither detrimental nor injurious. Breakup of countries have led to stupendous leap in development and modernisation. Ours would be no different. Whether breakup is beneficial or not depends on how it is done. Experience from Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia shows that a negotiated breakup is beneficial not harmful. Dissolution was beneficial to the multi-ethnic nations of Europe, we are confident that dissolution of Nigeria would benefit the indigenous peoples and their ethnic nations.
 
We believe that His Majesty’s Government can successfully broker a negotiated settlement out of Nigeria for our Yoruba Homeland. We are hopeful that you our friends in the British parliament would as a matter of urgency lobby for this on our behalf.
 
Respectfully yours
 
 
 
 

Baasegun (Dr) Olusola Oni
Coordinator IlanaUK