By Kayode Emola

Last week, we witnessed another kidnapping of one of our Yoruba son enroute Lagos to Abuja. This was not just another kidnapping as it was the youth leader of the revered Afenifere Yoruba Cultural group. Just to put it in context, Afenifere is the foremost Yoruba group that speaks on behalf of the Yoruba people since the days of Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

However, since the Alliance of Democracy led by Tinubu destroyed the Afenifere group, it has since lost it potency on the Yoruba matter. Today, it is a pity that the Afenifere cannot take a stand whether to unite and fight for an independent Yoruba nation, a restructured Nigeria, or a regional government.

Until such time that the Afenifere makes up their mind as to their direction of travel, we on the Yoruba self-determination struggle will continue to unequivocally ask for our independent Yoruba nation. We believe it is our moral duty to demand from the Nigerian government our inalienable rights to self-determination as enshrined in Article 1 of the United Nations Charter.

This is the only sure guarantee to lasting peace in our Yoruba land and our future prosperity. We cannot afford to continue in this state of anarchy in Nigeria and pretend as though the country is working for the benefit of all.

Video of the released Afenifere Youth leader was widely circulated in social media. However, the release was not without the parting of huge sums of money to the kidnappers. The monies paid to the kidnappers will then go on to purchase more sophisticated weapons to continue in their dastardly act of kidnapping where they await their next victim.

I do not know how much was eventually paid as ransom to the kidnappers before he was released but their initial demand was ₦100M equil $67,000 to be produced within 3 days. If we on the Yoruba struggle had called on the Yoruba people to raise $100,000 to support our local vigilante, it may take us forever to come up with one-tenth of such resources.

Whilst I am happy that my brother Ojajuni has been freed from the kidnappers den, I believe strongly that this is the time for us to act decisively. We each need to reflect of the current situation of insecurity in our environment and ask ourselves what can we do to stop kidnapping in Yorubaland.

We need to be better prepared to tackle this issue of insecurity in Yorubaland and ensure that this ugly incidence do not repeat itself. Every community in Yorubaland need to come together to form a community defence team to tackle this menace. They need to link their defence team with their neighbours to ensure that when one community is attacked, the next community is ready to rise up to the occasion in solidarity.

It is only when we come together in unity that we can achieve a meaningful result in terms of tackling the menace of insecurity. No one community can achieve success on their own without the support and solidary of the next.

We must all come to a place where an attack on one is seen as an attack to all and everyone must rise to the occasion. If we continue to think that the attack on our fellow Yoruba citizens does not concern us, then the day it will be our turn, there may be no one left to help us.

Above all, we must begin to earnestly work together for the greater good of our Yorubaland and the liberation of our people. Without the total liberation of Yorubaland from Nigeria, these sort of events will not be totally eradicated from our land. I am taking this opportunity to call on everyone who cares that this is the time for us to double our efforts in our self-determination struggle, God willing, we will come out victorious in the not too distant future.

By Kayode Emola

Earlier this week, I watched a video where President Tinubu was addressing a conference and promising an uninterrupted power supply by 2027. In his remarks, the President stated that he will deliver an uninterrupted power supply to Nigerians before the 2027 general elections by any means possible. If he fails to do this, he claims he should not be voted back in those elections.

My question is how many of President Tinubu’s promises in the past has he kept? Tinubu and his predecessor Buhari are the ones who promised to make $1 equal to ₦1 within four years of the former’s presidency in 2015. Today, $1 is over ₦1,500 and nowhere near coming down soon.

President Tinubu, during his campaign in 2023, stated that he would hire fifty thousand Nigerians into the Army to tackle insecurity. As of today, I don’t even think the Nigerian army has hired up to ten thousand people a few months into Tinubu’s second year in office.

We must not forget that our Yoruba farms and village settlements are being surrounded by terrorists hibernating in our forests waiting to unleash the worst mayhem mankind has ever witnessed on the Yoruba people. Yet we sit on our hands waiting for the day the government will come to our rescue.

Except President Tinubu is promising to give free fuel to every Nigerians to power their generators at home, he should not make promises he can not keep. There is no way the president can provide uninterrupted power supply to every nook and crannies in Nigeria without critical infrastructure.

The president, in his one-line political sloganeering of uninterrupted power supply, should not be his priority. Rather, he should focus on a sincere roadmap to delivering an uninterrupted power supply. This roadmap will serve his credibility very well rather than trying to win a popularity contest.

Without any concrete evidence of activities going on to improve the electrical installations and distribution networks, there should be no bold promise of uninterrupted power supply. As we speak, some communities in Southern Ondo Senatorial District have not seen electricity for over a decade. Most of these communities rely on generators, solar panels, and other heat sources to generate electricity.

The president’s bold promise of providing uninterrupted electricity in 2027 is offensive to people who know this is another election gimmick. The fact of the matter is that the president is only concerned about his political future in 2027.

He may direct the electricity board to maintain a façade during the election period by providing electricity in some areas, making the people think that he is fulfilling his promise. When it is just to win the votes of the people who will be neglected once he secures a second term.

As Yoruba, this is clear evidence that President Tinubu is not concerned about the plight of an average Yoruba person who bears the brunt of his harsh policies. Tinubu is more concerned about his own political future and would do anything necessary to keep him power.

Many of our elderly people may not survive this current hardship going on in Yorubaland. Therefore, it is high time we came together to unanimously demand our own Yoruba nation. It is our duty to do this for the coming generations as we may live or die to regret the loss of our ancestral home to strangers. It is time to be bold and to take a stand, and as for me and my household, we will stand with the Yoruba nation.

By Kayode Emola

For some time now, the Yoruba nation struggle has seemed to be experiencing ups and downs. Truthfully, this should not be a surprise, as surges and setbacks are not unusual in a struggle like ours. There is no perfect off-the-shelf template, which one can deploy in their struggle for freedom. We can only keep adapting our methods to the environment in which we find ourselves at that time, and endeavour to utilise it to our advantage.

The major ingredients for the success of any group are unity and togetherness. Sadly, we have lacked these a great deal in our Yoruba struggle. Many comrades in our ranks have been agents of disunity, sowing seeds of discord in an attempt to stall our inevitable destination.

However, the dynamic is changing rapidly, and our people are beginning to see the need to work together. Even the Holy Bible says that a house that is divided against itself cannot stand, and this is why the enemy is employing this tactic to derail our goal.

Now that the liberation struggle is back on track, the importance of taking the path of unity cannot be over-emphasised. It is the foundation on which all our work must be based, otherwise, we will find ourselves back where we started, all those years ago.

Therefore, as we march on to freedom, we must remind ourselves what freedom means. The freedom that we seek is one that ensures the government works for the benefit of all citizens, and not just the few.

We must build a nation where the rights and privileges of every person are enshrined in the constitution and protected by law. A nation where everyone can take care of themselves without needing to become reliant on bribes or the indignity of becoming involuntary beggars.

The new Yoruba nation must not be allowed to degenerate into the chaos that Nigeria has become today. We must be ready to preserve our freedom from those who desire to return us to the poverty rampant across the country. We should resist anyone, whether political groups or individuals, that would seek to take us back to a culture of government that serves only the elite and their cronies.

I encourage all our Yoruba people to remove the garments of Nigeria and embrace their true identity. We must ready ourselves to push for Yoruba sovereignty with every fiber of our being. We must strive with all desire to see our freedom from slavery come quickly. And then we need to strive all the more to sanctify and preserve that freedom for the next generations to come.