BY SOLA EBISENI

THE situation in our country is likened to the cock that perches on the rope. The Yorubas say that neither the bird nor the rope will know peace.

The rope is relatively constant, the cock is a bird of passage. As both tango, even if the rope snaps, the flying creature is still the ultimate loser in the absence of a perching place.

Don’t ask me the representatives of the cock and the rope in this Yoruba ancient philosophy. Just like Bob Marley, I can feel a natural mystic blowing through the air which I can’t keep down. But I can tell you, this is neither the first nor the last trumpet. My fear, like the reggae maestro postulated, is that many more will have to suffer, many more will have to die, except the cock, like biblical Pharaoh, allows the rope to fulfil its destiny.

As I write this Sunday night, 22 persons, among travellers from Bauchi to Ondo State were reported murdered in cold blood and 14 injured in Plateau State. Scores were killed same day and several reported disappeared in the nation’s killing field in Southern Kaduna. Ayo Alabi was tortured to death by kidnappers along Oke Onigbin-Omu-Aran road in Kwara even after the payment of N4.5 million ransom. These are only a tip of such dastardly acts in a mystic blowing across the country, leaving many to suffer and die ad infinitum. As usual, the leadership only condemns and hypocritically seek the assailants.

Coincidentally, the Taliban announced the intention to declare the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan as the president fled; the Taliban having virtually ensnared the capital of Kabul. The mystic in the air of our clime may seem long from consummation, it is given impetus by occurrences of this nature on which it cruises steadily.

On this page last week, we stated that the nepotistic disposition of the Buhari administration and body language that seem to support Fulani terrorists, was the eye-opener for non-Fulani Northern tribes and particularly the majority Hausa that the philosophy of one-North and the non-existent Hausa/Fulani nomenclature, is a deceitful mechanism in perpetuation of the Fodio Jihad, in the face of the attacks of the Fulani herders and their ethnic terrorists army on the indigenous tribes all over Nigeria.

Quite prophetically, over 400 of these Northern ethnic or tribal groups rose during the week in defence of their territory and vowed to repossess their ancestral land which have been taken over by herdsmen and their terrorists kinsmen. Don’t ask me the names of the tribes or whether they could possibly be up to 400. It is part of the mystic blowing in the air.

Ambassador Aminu Walli, immediate past Minister of Foreign Affairs, in his interview with the Sun on Saturday, agreed that appointments under the Buhari administration are skewed in favour of his Fulani people which he opined is contrary to the governance module of our diverse country. He decried the state of insecurity in the country and recognised that the refusal of the President to engage different shades of opinion was partly responsible for the different self-determination agitations. He advised the president to consider the reports of the 2014 National Conference.

Speaking at the 10th edition of Chief Emeka Anyaoku Lecture Series on Good Governance last Thursday, Emeka Anyaoku, former Secretary General of the Commonwealth, said that the only solution to Nigeria probably tripping over the precipice is restructuring along true federalism which gave the regions the edge in their various and respective areas of comparative advantage as the panacea against secessionist agitations in the country. Of course, the irrepressible Ayo Adebanjo, Acting Leader of the Afenifere, reiterated his position on the state of the nation, noting that it was out of sheer respect that the people of Western Nigeria still tolerate his sermon on restructuring as the vast majority have sold in on the self- determination agenda.  

The National President of the Ijaw National Congress, my brother Professor Benjamin Okaba, told me he couldn’t celebrate his remarkable ascent into the age of senior citizens at 60, which he clocked on Sunday because of this unnatural mystic blowing in the air. Instead he issued a statement on behalf of the Ijaw reiterating the demands of the Ijaw for the restructuring of the federation for the maximisation of their people’s potentials. He insisted on a minimum of 10 percent for host communities before the president’s assent to the Petroleum Industry Bill. To him, “we should not capitulate as a region at making rightful demands within the polity”.

Those who believe in iron hand governance and felt ignorantly that the incarceration of Nnamdi Kanu was the solution to insecurity in the South East must have now seen how erroneous they were. After the illegal abduction of Kanu and his detention, the situation has not changed. Rather the people of the ‘dot nation’ have nilly-willy continued to abide by  the order of the IPOB to stay indoors every Monday in protest against the continued detention of Kanu. Counter instructions by the police and some of South East governors have been ignored and may only be called off at Kanu’s authorised statement.

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In the same manner, the continued strive by the Federal Government for the return of Sunday Igboho to Nigeria from neighbouring Republic of Benin has continued to be seen as a declaration of war on the Yoruba people. All Yoruba in Nigeria and the diaspora consider Igboho as our hero and carrier of our collective cross in redemption from the killings by Fulani ethnic militias whose agenda to take over our land is seen as being surreptitiously backed by the Federal Government.

Igboho is cast in the image of the Yoruba 19th century warlords who realised their mistakes of leaving Afonja to his fatal folly at Ilorin with monumental consequences for Yoruba land till today. They decided to suspend their internecine battles to save Yorubaland from being overrun in the name of religion as the Fulani did to the Hausa and their indigenous rulers.

The war garments, laced with traditional spiritual ornaments, including the ones the Federal Government claimed to have seized in his house, serve as good publicity for Igboho as symbolic readiness to reinvent our history as unconquerable people. It is laughable that the Federal Government spokespersons, including Lai Muhammed, whose ancestors were part of the memorial Jalumi war which finally humbled the invaders, said they were looking for sponsors and financiers of Igboho.

They are only in search of the irunmole. As long as the Buhari administration refuses to listen to the Nigerian people who merely seek that government engages them in a dialogue to say “po”collectively on problems confronting the nation, so long shall it continue to say “po, po, po,” in several battlefields across the country, as another Yoruba adage says.

Intellectual capacity

In a trending video, a lady has asked Nigerians if the country is working for them. Even the president knows that the country is not working, the obvious evidence being its incapacity to protect life and property, including the vote of no confidence on our health care delivery system and the concomitant preference for overseas treatment. The repetition of same procedure in handling our affairs can only produce the same unwanted result. A country, like other natural and human endeavours, is inevitably susceptible to change. Heraclitus, one of the early Greek philosophers, recognised this phenomenon when he postulated that everything is in a constant state of flux and that only change is permanent in nature.

To accede to change is not an act of cowardice or weakness. It is a noble preoccupation by those who have the requisite intellectual capacity to appreciate the endemic and perpetual conflict between natural and imposed tendencies both of which engage in thesis and antithesis contest. The triumphant synthesis may not be a perfect resolution of the eternal contest, which may only be wrought to the momentary progressive advantage for society by leaders who have the intellectual capacity, strength of character and largeness of heart to make history for their people and humanity.

For those who find virtue in recalcitrance and fail to appreciate that neither life nor position is permanent they only need to realise that even most powerful empires have either faded away or merely now exercise ceremonial powers. Such humility of character is encapsulated in the following lyrics of a zionist song:

“To God, my prayer; that pride may not overcome me; that I may not from my peers be removed.

When the word they rejected, Suffering was their lots in the wilderness For which the land of Canaan they missed.”

Nigeria, we hail thee.

Vanguard News Nigeria