Many Yoruba people voted for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar or the Labour Party candidate, Mr Peter Obi, during the 2023 general election. This despite knowing that the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu, is their kinsman. It is on record that Tinubu lost Lagos State to Obi and Osun State to Atiku. It is also on record that people from other ethnic groups voted for Tinubu. In fact, a few of his supporters outside the Southwest were almost violent in their endorsement of the man who is now our president. Former Niger Delta militant leader, Mujahid Asari-Dokubo is one of such people.
However, in a viral video last week, Asari-Dokubo claimed to have deployed his resources to campaign for Tinubu but feels ‘betrayed’ by the recent rechristening of the Ministry of Niger Delta. Rather than blame his (former) friend for that decision, it is the Yoruba people that should be held accountable. “I apologise to our fathers because they were not wrong in forming an alliance with the North, and as young men, we will now start that same alliance. From today, I will work and form an alliance with the North,” Asari-Dokubo said. “We will take this message across that only the Northerners can work with the Ijaw people. We can’t work with Yoruba people; they are a betrayer (sic) to us. We risked our lives by voting and doing everything, and this is what we get?”
Asari-Dokubo is not alone in pointing accusing fingers at Yoruba people on account of real or perceived transgressions by Tinubu. It is the latest game in town, although some are more subtle about it. There is a piece being circulated widely on WhatsApp titled ‘Is Tinubu settling scores?’ written by a Dr Ugoji Egbujo. “Tinubu has become an unabashed chauvinist. It’s a hard watch. It doesn’t bode well for national unity. Tinubu’s critical appointments have become the most lopsided in the history of this country,” the author wrote while reeling out the list of positions, especially in the security and economic sectors, now occupied by Yoruba people—despite Tinubu’s history in Afenifere, the socio-political group that used to be “the conscience of the Yoruba nation and Nigeria.”
While accusing the president, “an Afenifere apostle and NADECO evangelist” of “installing an ethnic hegemony” in the country, the author is at least fair minded enough not to place all the blame on Yoruba people. As Egbujo correctly surmised, most Yoruba people “are embarrassed by Tinubu’s antediluvian antics.” He went on to eulogise Yoruba people as not only most welcoming, empathetic, culturally and religiously tolerant but also “the loudest and sincerest champions of equity and meritocracy. So, this ethnic hegemony that Tinubu is weaving is patently not Yoruba. They didn’t send Tinubu on this errand.” The author then added: “President Tinubu knows that in a fractious multi-ethnic third world country, the concentration of the levers of the criminal justice system, economy and security in the hands of one ethnic group will feed the system with disenchantment and paranoia and corrode cohesion…”
There is a Yoruba adage that says if you want a deaf person to understand your message, relay it to his child. I counted the number of prominent people who forwarded the article to me last Saturday. They were 13. While they must be aware I am not working for this president, they were invariably telling me, “This is what your kinsman is doing.” I ignored them. Until the same post was forwarded to me by a respected scholar from the North on Sunday. I had my reason for responding to him: “The reality is that the president is appointing his loyalists (mostly from Lagos), including those whose grandfathers had their placenta buried in other Southwest states where nobody knows them. But I have also written about this issue.” The response was instant: “Your article escaped my attention. It has to be recirculated.”
Now, this eminent northern scholar supported Tinubu before and during the election. But he would not take responsibility for the choice he made at the polls. He is holding me accountable because I am Yoruba. For the record, let me cite three of the interventions I have made on this issue. Barely three weeks after his inauguration, on 20th June 2023 to be specific, I wrote ‘Tinubu and the Buhari Error’ where I rehashed a similar counsel his predecessor failed to heed. “Of the several columns I wrote on the lack of sensitivity in critical appointments by President Muhammadu Buhari, one stands out. I used a Yoruba word, ‘Amunibuni’, to situate my intervention,” I recalled in the piece, following the first set of appointments by Tinubu which I considered lopsided. I then excerpted from the March 2021 column: “That making strategic concessions is beyond Buhari administration is an embarrassment, even for many northerners. That is because they are also aware that the appointments being cornered by a tiny clique is not to promote any ‘Northern agenda’ (whatever that may mean) but rather in pursuit of the personal interest by those who nominate these individuals. This explains why they go for their in-laws, kinsmen, friends, and the like. Yet nepotism in critical appointments engenders collective insults in the manner of ‘Amunibuni’”.
I offered a disquisition on what the Yoruba term means and the message it embeds within the context of Nigeria’s political arrangement before I concluded with an admonition for Tinubu: “Even when he did nothing to improve the material condition of the average Fulani man, the damage President Buhari did to people of that ethnic stock in eight years was enormous. And as a Yoruba man, I wouldn’t want President Tinubu to do that to me…That is why presidential handlers need to be circumspect lest they attract insults to Yoruba people who have always advocated for a peaceful and secure Nigeria that works for all citizens and where there is equity and justice in the distribution of opportunities…In making critical appointments, I hope the president will be mindful of the ‘Amunibuni’ syndrome. His appointments must be inclusive and reflect all our diversities. I shall be watching!”
In another column last October (2023) titled, ‘Where is Abdulrasheed Maina?’ I wrote: “In case the president is not aware (a Villa disease, especially under his predecessor), most Yoruba people I know are becoming increasingly embarrassed by a number of his appointments. I have received many of those WhatsApp messages that list critical offices in the economic/financial sector and the ethnic affiliation of appointees. There is already a whispering campaign in Abuja of a budding ‘Republic of Oduduwa’, based on these appointments. I hope someone will bring the issue to the attention of the president.”
That was one year ago. Yet, in another piece I wrote in the early weeks of the administration, ‘Shall We Tell the President?’, I recalled welcoming a friend from Lagos to my office with a joke, ‘Eyinlokan’ (meaning it’s your turn). “Uncle Segun, you are in the old; the slogan now is ‘awalawanbe’”, (meaning, ‘we are now fully in charge’ or to put it in pidgin, ‘we full ground remain’). “My concern is that under the current dispensation ‘Awalawanbe’ can connote either service for the public good or hubris,” I wrote before sending another warning on this same vexatious issue. And in a recent column, ‘Tinubu: No Place to Hide’, I wrote about how the president and his handlers continue to display a behaviour the Yoruba would describe as “tani o mu mi” (impunity that carries a certain sense of hubris).
It is evident that nobody in the Villa paid attention to these interventions. But how does it make sense to allocate three junior ministers out of five to the Southeast while you allocate nine ministers to the Southwest, eight of them with senior portfolios? Let’s not even go to critical appointments in the security sector and revenue-generating agencies that have been ‘cornered’ by people from one ethnic group. Meanwhile, what the president ignores is that when a leader creates a poisonous atmosphere and suspicions around emotional issues like appointments, it is difficult to build a national consensus for crucial policies as we are already seeing with the pushback from the North over the Tax Reforms Bill.
Ordinarily, with hunger and starvation biting hard in the country, there are far more pressing issues that should engage our attention. For instance, on 8th July 2024, the federal government announced a 150-day duty-free import window for food items which include maize (the ‘agbado’ we were told was enough to satiate our hunger during the presidential campaign), husked brown rice, wheat, and cowpeas. Four months after, this has turned out to be another of those audio promises for which this administration is fast becoming notorious. Figures from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on food inflation are not only scary, but some locally grown items like beans have also experienced close to 300% inflation within one year!
However, while hunger has become the real staple for Nigerians, regardless of which language they speak, one should also not pretend that equity in appointments and distribution of opportunities is not important or that a leader can succeed without taking such into account. Beyond giving emotional satisfaction and sense of belonging, equity is good for social capital, national cohesion and development. While some may have ignored the fact that the economy has been handed over to the Lagos crowd on the pretext they have the expertise, the evidence of the last 18 months undercuts that concession. Maybe Nigerians would not have minded if these Lagosians (many of whom throw themselves around in Abuja with incredible arrogance) were performing. Unfortunately, most don’t even appear to know what they are doing. And the president himself seems detached from reality.
Meanwhile, for those sending me ‘coded messages’ because I am a Yoruba man, I also have a question for them: When former President Olusegun Obasanjo was being acclaimed as an “apostle of meritocracy and a detribalized Nigerian” for most of his critical appointments which went to people outside the Southwest, did they extend the credit to me as a Yoruba man? Why should anybody now guilt-trip me because Tinubu is appointing his Lagos loyalists in a manner that is embarrassingly sectional? The interesting thing is that the Abdullahi Gandujes, the Godswill Akpabios, the Benjamin Kalus and others (who are ‘eating’) will most likely defend this same president despite their ethnic affinity. But that is the cross Yoruba people will have to carry for as long as Tinubu is president. That is the way we roll in Nigeria.
There is a paragraph in my 2021 admonition to Buhari which I rehashed for Tinubu last October. It is still most relevant: “…Yoruba loses its flavour when you translate into English, but ‘Amunibuni’ is better explained in the complete idiom: ‘Amunibuni ewure ibiye. Ibiye f’oju otun, ewure re fo t’osi’. Crudely interpreted, it means if a goat is blind on the left eye and its owner is blind on the right eye, any discussion about the goat would always bring into focus the condition of the owner. As one scholar expanded on the idiom, the real message is in the ambiguity that could come from describing the goat as ‘ẹran olójú kan’ which could be interpreted either as a ‘one-eyed goat’ or ‘the goat of a one-eyed person’. Both definitions are correct, but the latter brings the owner into the conversation. Today, any discussion about killings by ‘herdsmen’ brings attention to the inequity in the distribution of opportunities in Abuja by President Buhari. The result is that when you encounter cows on the highway, you look at the poor herder just trying to eke out a living and you blame him for all the problems of Nigeria!”
I wish there was someone who can whisper to President Tinubu that this reporter keeps raising this issue because he wants him to succeed—in the manner of the proverbial child of the deaf. No matter the attraction, surrounding himself only with Lagos loyalists at the expense of fairness to other Nigerians will not help his cause. I have said my own!
The Shopping Cart Theory
In an article published in 2017, Krystal D’Costa, an American anthropologist who works in digital media, posed the question, ‘Why Don’t People Return Their Shopping Carts?’ This question has continued to provoke attention as people ruminate on why, either at the airport or in shopping malls, returning trolleys to their original places, is not always an easy thing to do. One response to the question has been dubbed ‘The Shopping Cart Theory’. It is as inspiring as it is profound. Said to have been first posted online in 2020 (with no proper attribution), the message was amplified on Monday by @elonmusk on his X platform with a crisp post of his own: ‘Trust those who return the shopping cart’.
And here goes the message: “The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing. To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore, the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you, or kill you for not returning the shopping cart. You gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct. The Shopping Cart Theory, therefore, is a great litmus test on whether a person is a good or bad member of society.”
There’s a lesson in there for all of us.
