Afenifere, inappropriately described as the pan-Yoruba socio-cultural organisation, has reportedly endorsed President Goodluck Jonathan of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for a second term. Whether the organisation’s leaders like to admit it or not, the implication is that it is now official that Afenifere has endorsed the PDP, for Dr Jonathan cannot be divorced from the PDP anymore than the PDP can be extricated from Buruji Kashamu. They are all intertwined, soul and body, follies and foibles, and in manners and egregiousness. It is unlikely that Afenifere entertains any illusion about the full ramification of its endorsement, or that all along it has been a political and ambitious organisation. It gave the endorsement boldly and proudly, indifferent to whether it was wise or foolish. Last week in Akure, after a meeting at the residence of the organisation’s leader, Reuben Fasoranti, Afenifere offered its soul to Dr Jonathan in the presumptuous conviction that of the two main contestants to the Nigerian presidency, Dr Jonathan better approximates the Yoruba yearning and worldview.
There is nothing in their statements and actions to indicate that Afenifere still represents all Yoruba people. Indeed, over time, its moral force has weakened considerably, its political sagacity and logic waned, its judgement dulled, and its compass so twisted it is a wonder its leaders can still find their way home after every endorsement they give out to undeserving politicians. But they hold on to past glories, just as they won’t let go of past prejudices and bigotries. Notwithstanding the formation of the more ideological and principled Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), the rump Afenifere still believes it is the main deal among the Yoruba, that it can crack the whip and the gelding would respond, that the little rudder it imagines itself to be literally and figuratively can still imaginatively steer so large a ship and so complex and intransigent a people as the Yoruba.
The endorsement comes barely three weeks to the general elections, and was hatched in Akure under the tempestuous and conspiratorial noses of Governor Olusegun Mimiko, Chief Fasoranti and Gbenga Daniel, former Governor of Ogun State, among others. Dr Mimiko was once hailed as the rallying point for Yoruba renaissance by the same Afenifere enigmas who a little while back were famished for a hero, anyone, any type. Dr Mimiko wins elections, but he possesses little else by way of sagacity, spunk and character. He is the archetypal Machiavelian who thinks nothing of giving his word with quiet dignity, but desperately disavowing it at the first hint of a challenge or difficulty, and with all the contrived ruefulness his melancholic spirit will allow. Today, the Afenifere enigmas have moderated their expectations.
Chief Fasoranti may have inherited the stool dignified by the late Adekunle Ajasin and the late Abraham Adesanya, but there is little else to indicate that the contemplative quietude and regal aloofness with which the founding leaders presided over the Yoruba group are inherent in the current leader. In particular, Pa Adesanya not only exhibited an expansive view of history and culture , and was deep, reserved and magisterial, his judgement was also incomparably and intuitively sound, his style avuncular, and his view of leadership noble, rich, kaleidoscopic, selfless, metaphysical, almost infallible. Under Chief Fasoranti, Afenifere’s endorsement of Dr Jonathan illustrates the wide gulf between inheriting a throne in its physical ordinariness and inheriting a throne in all its dignity, nobility, and intangible etherealness. What Afenifere’s soul looked like under Pa Ajasin and Pa Adesanya was indisputably robust and magnetic; now who can tell what it looks like and what strange and indecipherable signals it emits?
Otunba Daniel was also reported to be present at the meeting where Afenifere’s endorsement was peddled for a trifle. Like Dr Mimiko, Chief Fasoranti and a few others, Otunba Daniel pretends to be imbued with the attribute of a Yoruba leader. But when he governed Ogun State, his mind wandered promiscuously between the esoteric mysticism of his past, complete with a fondness for cultural miniatures and gargoyles, not to say the dark arts of native alchemy, and the more open and conventional orthodoxy of his Christian upbringing. He perhaps excuses this fondness for the dark arts, this strange besottedness, on cultural grounds, but no one is fooled. It is not for nothing that the mind of this self-appointed Yoruba leader is seething with reactionary politics and discordant dialectics, as evidenced by his eight years in office.
All three, together with their personal and dedicated clearing house and cultural and political Ouija board, Yinka Odumakin, have engineered Afenifere’s questionable and reprehensible endorsement of Dr Jonathan and the PDP. Finally, after many years of rigmarole and epic struggle with their identity and conscience, Afenifere has now become a subset and subject of the PDP in a galling and anticlimactic way. It has shut its eyes to all the weaknesses, not to say the crass conservatism, of the ruling party. It convinces itself that neither the PDP nor the APC is progressive, and that if it comes to bureaucratic and leadership shenanigans, there is apparently no settling the precedence between the two leading parties. More, it believes without substantiation that the deceptive affability of Dr Jonathan, as it sees him, is preferable to the mercurial and brutally competitive nature of one or two APC leaders.
The Afenifere position on the presidential election is anchored on two leprous legs, both of which attempt to justify the endorsement. Hear the group: ‘’As far as Afenifere is concerned, the presidential election is to decide between two options, freedom or slavery. We have elected to choose freedom, freedom from bondage, internal enslavement and internal colonialism that hold most Nigerians down under the bastion of domination and we are convinced that the 2014 national conference report has laid the basis for the proper restructuring of the country…We want to warn the people of Yorubaland to be careful of those who promise change and do not believe in the restructuring of Nigeria and those who boycotted national conference and described it as diversion.’’
While it is clear the reasons Afenifere endorsed Dr Jonathan, it is not quite clear why and how they became heedlessly trapped in the ethnic divisions and prejudices of the past. Using hysterical language, the Yoruba group talks sweepingly and anachronistically of the choices they claim are before the country: of freedom and of slavery . It is hard to explain why they are stuck with this nonsense. The revelation of the 2011 elections is that no one, no region, no ethnic group can singlehandedly win a presidential election, let alone dominate and enslave others.
More profoundly, it is also crystal clear that the North has to work with the South to win, and the South must ally with the North to sweep the polls. East-West alliance never worked, and never will. Northeast-Northwest alliance is even more preposterous. It is dead on arrival. The 2011 elections put paid to the military aberration that distorted and undermined the polity for decades. Whether we like it or not, for peace and stability to reign, cooperation between North and South is unavoidable, and is in fact the crying need of the moment. Instigating ethnic loathing, such as Afenifere is doing, and fanning sectarian distrust, such as Dr Jonathan is himself doing, should be viewed warily and denounced.
It is likely Afenifere spoke of slavery in respect of the quest by the North, in this instance, through Muhammadu Buhari, to win the presidency. In the Second Republic, the ordinary south-westerner was harried by the ghost of northern hordes swooping on the South and forcefully Islamising them. Many southerners outgrew this childish apparition and have yielded themselves to the prospects and possibilities of inter- and intra-regional relationships. But not the regular Rip Van Winkles of the Afenifere who canonise this outdated and indefensible argument with the quizzical zealotry of kid soldiers introduced to killing for the first time. And except Afenifere leaders who self-righteously reduce the presidential poll to a choice between one thing or the other, every other person, including foreigners and an assortment of half-wits, knows the issues that are uppermost in the minds of Nigerians. Foisting a discredited and silly agendum on Nigerians is unworkable.
Second, and more revealingly, the Yoruba group went beyond endorsing Dr Jonathan to warning the Yoruba to avoid the All Progressives Congress (APC) whose mantra is change. Since a few leaders of the opposition party advocated a boycott of the national conference, it was enough for Afenifere to appoint themselves as leaders and prefects of the Yoruba and issue what amounts to a political fatwa on the APC. Given how they worded their warning, and the effrontery with which they issued it, it is abundantly clear that the leadership of the group is consumed by malice, bitterness and unadulterated hatred for one or two of the APC national leadership. It is such personal grievances and petty animosities that Afenifere has shockingly elevated into group and regional policies. In previous statements, leaders of Afenifere even insinuated that the APC was polliticising the Chibok abductions, without explaining how, and had sold the Southwest to the Hausa-Fulani, without suggesting how anyone can win the election by alienating a whole region.
Without doubt, the presidential poll is all about the economic downturn, with unemployment rate close to a quarter of the workforce; insecurity in large swathes of the country, a fact dangerously underestimated and misread by the Jonathan government; cancerous corruption; the nine-month-old abduction of 219 Chibok schoolgirls that has outraged the whole world; the personal ineptitude of Dr Jonathan; his obtruding wife; the president’s well-known ethnic prejudice and provincialism evident in his indulgent handling of the provocations of Ijaw militants;, and his obvious demonstration of inability to comprehend the demands of his office.
The poll is certainly not about Afenifere’s so-called choice between freedom and slavery, two gaseous and malignant words signifying nothing. The world is appalled by events in Nigeria; the African continent is ashamed of Dr Jonathan and bewildered by our connivance; Nigeria no longer commands respect of any sort in Africa; and Nigerians themselves are so dismayed and frustrated that they are lost for words to describe the sorry pass to which their country has tragically come. It is a shame that the Yoruba, famed for their education, political activism and progressivism, can host a socio-cultural organisation that blindly ignores the reality of the moment, embraces a chimera, and instigates ethnic and in some ways sectarian hatred with violent words.
Rather than have Nigeria face two choices, it is Afenifere itself that is staring down the barrel of two disconcerting choices. By endorsing Dr Jonathan and throwing in their lot with the PDP, thereby abjuring their apolitical nature, they have indicated their preparedness to swim or sink with their new masters. If inconceivably he wins, Dr Jonathan can still not rise above his modest talents to offer Nigeria quality and inspiring leadership, and may in fact come to grief sooner rather than later. Afenifere will thus be exposed for backing the wrong horse. But if he loses, as he seems fated to do, Afenifere will lose everything dramatically. What were they promised for them to make this mad and desperate gambit? In short, Afenifere is damned whether Dr Jonathan wins or loses. For a Yoruba organisation that galloped resplendently into the people’s view and consciousness on a revolutionising and liberating ideology, they have found themselves in a peculiar and uncomfortable position indeed. It is sad that barely three leaders since the Sani Abacha years, the Afenifere knights errant are impaled on their own swords in one massive, tectonic unravelling.
The post Afenifere crosses the endorsement Rubicon appeared first on The Nation.