By Kayode Emola
Some Yoruba patriots will argue that Nigeria is a dead carcass waiting to be buried, and we, the Yoruba people are the ones still delaying the burial to our detriment. For many of the major ethnic nationality that make up Nigeria, they are only there to get whatever benefit they can using the name of the dead country.
Truth be told, we the Yoruba people have been the ones sustaining Nigeria since its creation and we continue to do so till date without the majority of our people realising it. Yet we have been the ethnic nation at the receiving end of many economic woes bedevilling the country.
In 1914 when the northern & southern Nigeria were amalgamated, the Yoruba south made over £4 million in revenue and the entire north made only £100,000 for the same period. We had a surplus of over £5 million in reserve and the majority of our people lived a good life. The British took our surplus money to build the Eastern railway network which helped them in transporting coal from Enugu to Port Harcourt harbour.
Our resources were also used to build the railway network in the north, education and other infrastructures that they enjoy today. All these should not have been a concern had Nigeria worked properly but the British people who built Nigeria never intended it as a country, it was just a trading post. This was advised to the Yoruba leaders when we sought independence around the 1950s that it would be better if we took our Yoruba nation out of Nigeria.
Your guess is as good as mine, they refused the advice and we are all paying the price of a failed Nigeria experiment. Nigeria has become a country where you only benefit from what it has to offer if you know someone in government. Poverty and deprivation run deep in the land and we Yoruba that use to be givers have now become beggars in our own land with many families not able to feed themselves like they use to before.
Despite all these numerous challenges facing the people of Nigeria, all the president of Nigeria and the national assembly can think of is how to revert to the old Nigerian National anthem from independence. This is such a shame that people who said we cannot revisit the sovereignty question of Nigeria from independence are comfortable to go back to the old Nigerian anthem. I wonder what benefit an anthem will do for the ordinary man on the street who doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from.
Afterall, there was no national anthem before the British came and our ancestors lived a far better life than we are in this 21st century. We the Yoruba people must decide whether we want to continue in this shamble called Nigeria or we bury this dead giant once and for all and move to a more prosperous venture. We can do far better for ourselves as an independent Yoruba nation than continue to wallow in poverty.
Many of our Yoruba people have now resorted in selling their valuable assets such as lands and other tangible items just to escape the nightmare that the Nigerian economy has become. This really doesn’t bother me as much; but what really gets to me is that majority of those who think they have escaped the poverty of Nigeria by relocating abroad quickly realises that the grass is not as green as they had hoped.
The ultimate beneficiary of these are the ethnic nations who are hell bent on taking over our ancestral land either by buying it for cheap or taking it by force. If we don’t do anything now to stem the tide of these calamity that has befallen us, research shows that by the year 2050, Yoruba people will become minority in our own land.
If we think this cannot happen, we should take a cue from the Nok people who once lived in the Middlebelt of Nigeria. I am sure many of us have not heard about them and may never hear about them. I pray and hope that history will not point to a Yoruba race that once occupied our land but are nowhere to be found.
We need to know that there is only one solution and that is a complete U-turn from the status quo. Get out of Nigeria as quickly as possible to build an independent Yoruba country where we can begin to enact policies that will preserve our culture and tradition. Implement policies that will enhance the personal economy of our people so that they do not see running away from their ancestral land as the only solution to their personal life ambition. If not, I hope and pray that the worst doesn’t happen to us as a race.
