The publicity secretary of Afenifere, the apex socio-cultural organisation of the Yorubas, Mr. Yinka Odumakin has said that the leadership of the ethnic region was not for the highest bidder. He said that the history of the region has shown that every Yoruba leader always emerged naturally and must be acceptable to all.
Odumakin cautioned that it would be self destructive for anyone to nurse the ambition of leading the Yoruba people.

What is your view on the seeming void in the Yoruba leadership?
There is no doubt that there is a kind of void in the leadership of the Yoruba nation today. The illness and age of our leader, Senator Ahraham Adesanya, has made it impossible for him to perform the duties required of his position. The situation has left a kind of a vacuum in the leadership of the Yoruba people.

The void, unfortunately, has opened a flood gate of all kinds of opportunism. Some people have taken the opportunity of the situation to assume that the leadership of the Yoruba nation is for grabs and for the highest bidder. Check our history and you will find out that every person who has led the Yoruba nation has never put himself forward that he wanted to lead. I want to tell you today, that the easiest way to personal destruction is to set out to become the leader of the Yoruba.

Anybody who nurses that ambition will end up destroying himself. The leader that the Yoruba nation needs today must be seen as one that is acceptable to all. What it means is that his pedigree would be known to all. The quality of the person must be about vision, character and integrity. These are the core values of the Yoruba, which everyone that wants to lead them, must have as a pre-condition for being accepted by the people.

It is not about the amount of money you have or the people you know because every Yoruba person is important in deciding who will lead the ethnic region. If the leadership of the Yoruba nation was for sale, Adesanya would not have emerged.

I remember in 1997 or so, we had a meeting and I recall one of my friends in the struggle who was from the south-east came out from Adesanya’s office, shook his head and said you Yoruba people are funny, you mean this is the office of your leader. This man cannot lead anybody in my own part of the country. It means that the Yoruba nation is not for the richest or wealthiest but for one considered as acceptable to all.

The people must be sure that their leader has their interest at heart, they must be sure that you have done this and that for them. It must be a leader who will not abandon the people mid-stream but will always stick to the core values of the people. However, I know that with time and it will not be long before such a leader would emerge. Again, I know that whoever will emerge this time would have age on his side and not in his 70s or 80.. He must be contemporary and one who will be conversant with developments in the modern world. But he must have the values of old including character, discipline, integrity, hard work and vision. He must have the commitment to the common cause. He must have the spirit of self denial for the good of the people.
All these are some of the qualities that whoever will lead the Yoruba must have.

But is it not taking too long for the Yoruba leader to emerge considering the fact that nature abhors a vacuum?
You are correct but it is not something you ask Prof. Maurice Iwu to put together as an election. Pa Awo did not become a Yoruba leader because he campaigned for it. He emerged naturally after leading a battle against ignorance and he introduced free-education, he built Cocoa House in Ibadan, First Television House in Africa, you cannot count his achievements. Some of them are still very visible till today. Do you know what the free-education policy did to the Yoruba? It is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the benefits of that policy.

By the time Awolowo was doing all those things, he was not doing it with the mindset that he wanted to lead his people. He was not putting bill boards showing what he had done. Go and read all the books about him. I read them and I wept. All Awolowo needed to do to avoid persecution was just to compromise but he refused. He would have just said I accept the arrangement in Nigeria but he suffered all manner of persecution, for refusing to surrender. He suffered a lot for the people but part of his struggles is what the Yoruba people are enjoying today. He was detained from Calabar to Lagos and to everywhere. He was harassed and tortured for the sake of the people. So, the Yoruba’s need a leader they can trust and not one they can trust on the pages of the newspapers.
It is not the kind of leader we had from 1999 to 2007, a leader who has finished Nigeria, a leader who has appropriated all that belong to the people for himself, children and associates. Every child and concubine of his has a land in Abuja.

Pa Ajasin emerged after the demise of Awolowo and nobody pronounced him the Yoruba leader. He emerged when the Yoruba nation was under siege and you remember his encounter with Onyearugbulem in Owo. Then he showed the firmness of a leader. He showed a deep passion for the struggle of the people.
Ajasin as a governor of Ondo state did not touch a kobo of the security vote in the state. He went into government with two personal cars and he came out with one. His house in Owo, it was when Shagari was to visit the state that he repainted it. He did not allow the government but used his personal resource to do it. That showed leadership. His wife was recently buried and the church where the service was conducted could not contain the people. That is Yoruba nation for you.

Adesanya emerged after Ajasin and it was during NADECO, they shot at him and he survived by the sheer grace of God as the bullet missed him by the whiskers. But with all that, he did not compromise and fought on to show leadership. At the pan Yoruba congress in Ibadan, somebody got up and said that the Yoruba nation needed a leader, he said the Yoruba needed a voice, the voice of Oodua and he moved a motion that Pa Adesanya should be the leader. That was it and it was not a matter of campaigning or things like that. He did not bribe anybody to be a Yoruba leader and he did not have the money anyway.
But Obasanjo has corrupted the system and people are now coming up with attitudes, we, as a people are not used to. People now emerge as governors without the mandate of the people and some people now think that it can happen to the Yoruba leadership. It is not possible.

The Afenifere used to be a rallying point for the Yoruba. What is happening to the organisation now?
The reasons are not far-fetched. Don’t forget the Yoruba are usually united when there is a common siege and cause to fight for. The Yoruba come together when there is external aggression. But it does not necessarily mean that everybody has to agree 100 percent all the time. If you look at the Yoruba nation, even before the emergence of the Awolowos, it was a history of strife and crisis. The Egbas and the Ijebus and the Egbas and the Ibadan and so on were engaged in a kind of war. So the truth is that the Yoruba always see themselves as one when there is a collective siege. But when the crisis is over, everybody now goes his own way .There is a Yoruba proverb that we cannot all sleep and put our heads in one direction.
And it has always been so that even when Awolowo introduced the free education policy that some people kicked against it. That was a policy that turned out thousands and millions of Yoruba as educated people but some people fought him and some campaigned against him. In fact, the Action Group lost many seats in the next election because of that policy. Some people even wanted the NPN to take over the Yoruba land in 1983. They tried it in Ondo and the people rose against it. They tried it in Oyo state, the same thing. To come to an agreement in Yoruba land is a long process but once they agree it is final.

Take the case of Abiola, the support he had during his election was not as strong as the one he had after the election. After the election, many people felt they were persecuting him and they said we must fight it back. So, it takes a lot of effort to make the Yoruba to agree but once they do, woe betides whoever steps out of line. So, at every point in time in Yoruba land, you can always get people who can show leadership. There are many of them who will not shout that they are Awo reincarnate. Many of such people may never have been to Ikene to go and see mama HID Awolowo.
The bottom line of my explanation is that the Yoruba leadership cannot be bought by the highest bidder. Everybody must go through a process of scrutiny by the people. So, at this stage, it is premature bandying names around. We have gone beyond that as a people.

Do you agree with those who argue that with democracy, it will be difficult for the Yoruba nation to speak with one voice again?
But I said the Yoruba come together the way you are talking about when they are under siege. You only see that when they are under external aggression. But remember that the Yoruba are the most liberal and so it is not surprising that under a democracy, people may say they are not speaking with one voice. I know a friend who used to say that his father is a Moslem, his mother a Christian whereas he is neither of the two and they are living in the same house. That is the Yoruba nation for you.
So, in times of democracy, you find the Yoruba in all the parties where they can express their fundamental human rights; but one thing is that there is always a dominant voice in Yoruba land and that is the voice of progress.

That was the voice which Obasanjo tried to muffle in his eight years in power. He did not want the voice of progress to be dominant in Yoruba land. He wanted and entrenched retrogression in the Yoruba nation. Obasanjo does not speak the language of the Yoruba people and he cannot communicate with the Yoruba people. He cannot speak the language the Yoruba people understand. So, there had never been a time in history where all Yoruba were under one roof in terms of opinion but the majority were always one when it comes to the progress of the Yoruba people. That was what Obasanjo stood against for eight years. He did not want the sound of progress to be the dominant voice in Yoruba land.

So, would you like to assess Obasanjo’s eight years in office?
The Yoruba were more than justified in not supporting him in 1999. Remember that in 1999, Obasanjo did not win his ward. In 2007, the PDP lost his polling unit where Obasanjo voted in that election. That was why they cancelled the result of that ward. In 1999, the Yoruba told Nigerians, we know all our children, we know the one that is a prostitute, a thief, the one that is brilliant and has character, the one that can represent us well and give leadership to Nigeria. If you ask us to pick 10,000 of our children, Obasanjo will not be on our list. That was what the Yoruba said in 1999 when Nigerians elected Obasanjo.
He failed in the south-west but the south-east, south-south, north-east, north west and all other zones apart from the Yoruba said no, we know your children more than you. They all said Obasanjo is our man. It is what Yoruba would say that you cannot know oso’s mother more than oso. But Nigerians told us that they know oso’s mother more than oso. But we have all seen who was more correct ,eight years after.

The fact is that the tragedy he has perpetrated on the nation is so monumental and more than the effect the atomic bomb had on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The impact in human capital and wasted opportunities is highly monumental. The impact in the destruction of the destiny of a nation is unquantifiable. All we can do is to lament that had Nigerians listened to the Yoruba, all these would not have happened.
So, that is their Obasanjo, he is not our Obasanjo and it is said that he had the opportunity but ended up messing Nigeria up for eight years.

So, there is nothing positive you can take from his administration?
Well, there are positive things I can pick from his eight years administration. The positive thing I can pick is that he spent $16 billion to give us darkness in Nigeria. He ran the NNPC like his Ota farm. Every contract awarded was an opportunity to take bribes and siphon the people’s money.
Look at the land allocation in Abuja and the rest. If you look at all these, then Obasanjo has tried for Nigeria.

Advice to Nigerians and the Yoruba nation
To the Yoruba nation in particular, I think we must be part of the effort to ensure that Obasanjo goes back for a second time in jail. They should support every attempt to probe the Obasanjo administration so that he can go back to jail because in Yoruba land, any child that steals is not accepted in the house.
But to Nigerians in general, we have to put the present government on its toes. Already, one year is gone and before you know it, four years have gone and we must not allow that to happen again. Let us as a people, make sure that the present government becomes accountable to Nigerians.

There is so much money in Nigeria. We just signed the budget of N2.8 trillion and you will be surprised that they may waste that money without impacting on the peoples lives. At the end of the day, they will be having unspent funds that they will be sharing in the ministries. How, for instance, can the health ministry have unspent funds in a country like Nigeria where people are dying of Malaria, Typhoid, Guinea worm? How can that happen in a country that has about the worst mortality rate in the world? How can that happen here, where the maternal mortality rate is on the increase?

President Yar’Adua himself has now gone out of the country for medical treatment. There is no hospital in Nigeria that he can be treated in. In Nigerian hospitals, you can’t even get good X-ray machines. There are medical doctors who leave schools today and they cannot even diagnose a patient. There are some of them who have been on the job for several years and they do not have the instruments and equipment to work... Some people even go to Ghana for medical treatment. The late Fela really foresaw what Nigeria would be.
In the 70’s, he sang how a Lagos commissioner traveled to London to learn how to carry dustbin. He said they were perambulators who were just toying with our lives. We must in Nigeria rise up and say enough is enough.