By Kayode Emola
Loathe him or like him, there is no denying the fact that the first few days of President Tinubu at the helm have brought with it dramatic changes in the lives of many Nigerians. His presidency has proved to be different from that of his immediate predecessor Buhari who took more than 6-months to even arrange his cabinet and to think through his policies.
President Tinubu it would appear is a man who had done his homework before assuming power and has begun sweeping changes without any delay. Personally, I will want to commend the President for the direction in which he is driving his government and the country. However, may I use this opportunity to remind him that there is a difference between what he is doing for Nigeria and what the people who make up Nigeria want.
Such was the fact that Nigeria was put together without the consent of the indigenous people. This fact is clearly known to the president and he must in his policies find a way to give the indigenous people their voice back. For over a century, we have lived together as strange bedfellows oftentimes disagreeing on certain national issues due to the crisis of nationality.
If the people who are called Nigerians today will truly move forward, it is not about a good man who becomes president for 4 years or a maximum of 8 years and does wonderful things. It is the detangling of the various components that make up Nigeria. As much as Tinubu is doing what the people perceive as needful, those who have wrecked Nigeria and enjoying the rot will definitely fight back with all the resources they have stolen.
Therefore, the focus of President Tinubu and the Yoruba people should not be on how to make Nigeria great again as Nigeria was never a great nation. The glory that Nigeria claims today has mostly come from the Yoruba people’s benevolence. We must now as Yoruba begin to reclaim our lost glory and build for ourselves a lasting legacy of a great country outside Nigeria, for that is the only we can truly be great.
Nigeria has brought nothing but retrogression to us as Yoruba and it continues to suppress our greatness. This is a good reason why we must not allow the same for our children and the generation yet unborn. We must do everything within our power to ensure that we preserve the dignity of our Yoruba heritage, cultures, and traditions for future generations.
If we fail to put in the effort to preserve our heritage now, history will not forgive our present generation for failing in our duty to leave a lasting legacy for the future Yoruba generations. Yoruba should stop focusing on how the administration of President Tinubu is making Nigeria feel the country is going to function properly. Nigeria is irredeemable, the rot in the country will take more than just the window dressing of a regime’s administration to change.
We saw what happened at the beginning of this fourth republic of Nigeria when President Olusegun Obasanjo assumed office. Many public officials were afraid to steal money openly, however, the sheer looting going on within his administration and subsequent regimes was nothing to write home about. That should teach us a lesson that it doesn’t matter who holds the office of the president of Nigeria, no miracle can upturn its many years of decadence.
To truly build a nation that is enviable to the world, we do not need a few stints of good people manning the helm of affairs in all our governmental offices. We need a robust system in place that will have checks and balances to curtail people’s excesses. That is what Nigeria lacks and no amount of goodwill from President Tinubu or whoever occupies that position will bring this to Nigeria in its current form of decay.
When a country like Nigeria is decayed (just like former Yugoslavia and thus was broken down into 6 different countries) we don’t keep the existing structure thinking that something good will happen one day which we have become accustomed to in Nigeria. We need to know that the only way forward for Nigeria is the complete dissolution of the country so that each emerging nation can forge local and international friendships and grow at its own pace.
Yoruba people must not sleep with their 2 eyes closed thinking that one of our own is now at the helm of affairs in Nigeria. We must treat every day as if it was our last in Nigeria, therefore we must continue to prepare for our exodus from Nigeria.
Our greatness lies in the rebirth of our new Yoruba country for that is the promising future we must aspire to and not the current trend in Nigeria. We must not forget how Nigeria has dealt with us as a people and taken us to the gutters. We must not allow ourselves to be taken to that point of degradation anymore and so we must do everything within our power to get out of Nigeria as soon as practicably possible.
My message to President Tinubu and the Yoruba people is that remember that many have occupied the position of the president of Nigeria. Some took it as their inherited destiny, but today they are not to be reckoned with. One day in the future Tinubu will no longer be president, what will be the fate of the Yoruba people or dear I say what lasting legacy would Tinubu have bequeathed to his Yoruba kith and kin. Will it be that of gloom and doom or one where we can be proud to be citizens of a Yoruba country, only time will tell.
