Ethnonationalist Rumblings

If the twenty-nine odd members of the Yoruba Nation self-determination group who stormed the Oyo State secretariat, Ibadan, within the early hours of Saturday April 13 go down in historical past, it’ll most actually not be for his or her strategic genius. For a gaggle with the obvious intention of taking on the secretariat because the opening gambit of a bigger try to determine a breakaway Yoruba state, they might have accomplished higher than the skeletal masks which hardly did the job of disguising their identities and the 5 English Pump Motion weapons and three domestically made barrel weapons of their possession. Failing that, they might no less than have put up a battle in opposition to the handful of safety personnel that the Oyo State authorities rapidly rustled as much as neutralize them. All this, along with the truth that no single shot was fired whereas the “assault” on the secretariat lasted, factors to the conclusion that the agitators could have been pushed extra by a need to ship a message than an precise resolve to “overthrow the Nigerian authorities.”

Understandably maybe, this isn’t the way in which the authorities have seen it. Whereas the Oyo State authorities rapidly, if inexplicably, moved to demolish the building the place it believed the agitators had made their plans, the State Police Command arraigned the arrested agitators earlier than a neighborhood Justice of the Peace courtroom on prices of “treasonable felony, illegal society, unlawful possession of firearms, and conduct more likely to trigger a breach of the peace.” For his half, President Bola Tinubu used the event of the arrest to remind Nigerians of his “irrevocable dedication to the unity of Nigeria and constitutional democracy,” whereas warning “Those that assume they’ll threaten the sovereignty of Nigeria” that they “can have themselves accountable. They’ve a worth to pay. And we aren’t going to relent.”

Whether or not genuinely ham-fisted or expressly designed to ship a message to the authorities, the Oyo State secretariat incident is a well timed reminder of perennial political tensions simmering underneath the floor of Nigeria’s wrestle to consolidate liberal democracy. If the hope on the inception of the Fourth Republic in Might 1999 was that hand-to-hand political fight (the metaphorical form) would blunt the serrated edges of ethnic identitarianism, that expectation has been massively upset. If something, the manifest shortcomings of civil rule, chief amongst that are festering corruption and the failure to broaden financial alternative, notably amongst younger individuals, have (1) strengthened cynicism about liberal democracy, (2) inspired the sensation that the highway to political salvation lies outdoors an irreparably faulty Nigerian structure, and (3) empowered the leaders of ethnic-driven actions and associations. In different phrases: respectable impatience with a misfiring Nigerian democracy seems to have reminded numerous teams throughout the Nigerian federation the explanations for his or her disgruntlement with Nigerian federalism ab initio.

If the waters of ethnic disaffection run so deep, how will we clarify the cack-handedness of the Yoruba Nation agitators? One possible clarification is that the agitators have been constrained by the paradox of mobilizing for a breakaway Yoruba republic at a time when a Yoruba co-ethnic, Bola Tinubu, is the incumbent Nigerian President, a transfer that makes them weak to accusations of being ethnic traitors. As members of the predecessor O’odua People’s Congress (OPC) have been to find in the course of the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency (1999- 2007), nothing is harder than mobilizing for secession when one’s co-ethnic occurs to be the primary citizen.       

A second possible clarification is that the rag tag character of the Yoruba Nation group is a mirrored image of the state of latest Yoruba political dissidence, witnessed by (1) the evolution of the OPC from a gaggle that when insisted on violent separation from the Nigerian state into one at present on the payroll of the identical state as, amongst different issues, a protector of oil pipelines; and (2) the regular bourgeoisification of its one-time fire-spitting chief, Gani Adams, from political outsider to cultural guarantor and card-carrying “Massive Man.” An excellent new study by anthropologist Wale Adebanwi ably paperwork this institutional and private transformation.

We should always observe in parenthesis that the ostensible leveraging of self-determination for private aggrandizement and energy is neither distinctive to Gani Adams nor the Yoruba area. If something, it’s indicative of a sample seen in numerous components of the nation whereby numerous entrepreneurs have mobilized the specter of violence—or usually the actual factor—to build up large private wealth and, consequently, amass appreciable political affect. Within the Niger Delta area, the examples of Authorities Eweizide Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo, Ateke Tom, and Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, previously Melford Dokubo Goodhead, Jr., instantly soar to thoughts. Most telling maybe is the instance of incumbent Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, who, no less than whereas he was in political exile, proudly flew the flag of Yoruba secessionism and once told a reporter that “I don’t consider in a single Nigeria.”   

In any occasion, in Yorubaland, the impact of the transformation of OPC into mainly a safety arm of the institution is to open a possibility to its left, ideologically talking. That is the all-important sociological context of the emergence of the Yoruba Nation agitators—decidedly extra radical than OPC, clearly much less resourced (intellectually and materially), but on no account any much less respectable.

The scenario within the Japanese area appears extra risky, partly on account of the continued detention of the chief of the Indigenous Individuals of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu, and partly on account of a elementary distinction between the Igbo and Yoruba instances for self-determination as follows: if the Yoruba appear tactically hamstrung by having “one in all their very own” within the nation’s highest workplace, the Igbo, rightly, proceed to be embittered by by no means having been in that scenario. Large help throughout the Igbo heartland for the candidacy of Peter Obi over the past presidential election was partly pushed by an comprehensible need to see that scenario rectified as soon as and for all. To the extent that the Igbo elite seems to have deserted IPOB, as an illustration conspicuously refusing to take up a believable case for Kanu’s launch with President Tinubu, it’s due to its—the Igbo elite’s—continued reservations about IPOB’s political technique, particularly the group’s perceived indiscriminate use of violence, together with in opposition to fellow Igbo.          

If the Igbo elite has kind of deserted IPOB as a result of the group is “unhealthy for enterprise,” Fulani self-determination supplies a wonderful illustration of the optimistic intertwining of financial livelihood and ethnic id. With Yoruba and Igbo self-determination targeted to completely different levels on negotiating an exit from the Nigerian state, Fulani self-determination, primarily a response to their perceived mischaracterization because the black sheep of the Nigerian federation, has consisted in excavating and narrativizing Fulani heritage with a view to establishing an illustrious pedigree that’s believed to transcend the slim confines of Nigeria. As a part of this course of, a extra culturally delicate Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore has been carved out of the present Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN), the previous expressly created to “defend the curiosity of the Fulani herders, to battle for his or her rights, dignity, and in opposition to all types of stigmatization of the Fulani nomad pastoralist (sic); and to protect the Fulfulde language and Fulbe tradition.”

Taken collectively, these contending nationalisms—all energetic within the cyber world, all loaded to the hilt with the accoutrements and paraphernalia of an impartial state—level to the tenacity and boisterousness of the custom of pondering past Nigeria. One purpose they’re unlikely to vanish anytime quickly is the starkness of the underlying grievances. Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s recent call to the Nigerian management to “decentralize growth as massively as attainable” speaks to the forex of the sentiment.

The Nigerian structure insists (and the Nigerian elite agrees) that Nigeria is non-negotiable. Nigerians themselves, no less than these completely locked out of the interlocking orbits of energy and affect, will not be so certain. It’s a basic instance of the irresistible assembly the immovable.

One thing should give.

Reina Patel contributed to the analysis for this text.