Voice of Emancipation: Yoruba, Rise Up to Defend Your Land

By Kayode Emola

Many of our Yoruba people do not understand the concept of a nation and that is why we are having this senseless killing going on in our lands unabated. For want of a better word, the Yoruba word Orile-ede (land and language) better captures the definition of a nation. Therefore, it will be stupidity as Yoruba to think that Nigeria will be for us is a nation.

Prior to Christianity and Islam, our language and culture has been the guiding principle of nationhood. Even the Israelites in their unadulterated form spoke one language which is the Hebrew language. What we see this replicated in many European countries today as they follow that alignment of language and culture in forming their own nations whereas the reverse is the case in Africa.

In today’s Africa, we are not aligned as nations but as perpetual slaves of the European countries who merged us together thus adopting their language as our lingua franca. That is why our indigenous language and culture no longer matters to us, thinking of ourselves as lesser humans to the European colonisers. Gradually, we are losing our identity and gladly doing so to the detriment of our own survival.

Some of our people now see religion as the basis for the formation of a nation and can die for a god they have never seen or touch all in the name of religion. After much said than done, they themselves become victims of their own folly as they fail to learn and unlearn.

We have slept as Yoruba and allow our fortunes and rich traditions, and culture go into ruins by adopting a foreign ideology and language that is alien to us to be our guiding principle. Save for Russia and Germany that has populations of around 143 million and 84 million people respectively, Yoruba as a nation is more populated than all the other European nations.

With our population of over 70 million people in our Homeland, we Yoruba are supposed to be a superpower directing and shaping the affairs of world, however, we ourselves are now servants to a Fulani minority in Nigeria. We quibble among ourselves for issues that are not supposed to see the light of the day, giving our enemies the opportunity to do to us whatever they see fit.

Our politicians, Obas, traditional rulers and even the entire population looks on as our people get slaughtered everyday in Nigeria with no one lifting a finger. We are quick to pay ransom for our miserable lives just to save our skin only to enrich our enemies who have sworn to destroy us by any means necessary.

If we don’t put our act together and get out of this mess called Nigeria, then the future of the coming generation is bleak let alone those that will come after them. Many of our people are now running overseas and to neighbouring African countries all in the name of ‘Japa’. With some not even knowing what they are going to face when they get to that foreign land.

After much sojourning, we hope to return to a wonderful country where everything is working perfectly after our sojourn abroad as though the country we left behind will build itself. We live in fools’ paradise thinking that if we stay silent, then one day God in heaven will remember us and send a saviour to heal Nigeria.

It is high time we woke up to reality in Yorubaland that the destiny of this nation God has given to us rest in our hands. No messiah is coming down to save this nation from the Fulani marauders who are hellbent in seizing the land from us. They lie in wait daily in our farmlands, bushes, highways and even on our streets, yet we sit down to complain as though a solution can be found by doing nothing.

Let us rise now in unity to defend our land so that our children will not curse us in our graves when we’re long gone. Let us band ourselves together in unity to save the heritage that we inherited from our ancestors so that we in turn can leave something for the coming generation.

If we think that by building Nigeria, we will leave a legacy for the children unborn, then we need to examine ourselves and ask what Nigeria has done for us in the last 60 odd years. The only true legacy we can leave behind that will stand the test of time is the Yoruba nation, therefore we need to double our efforts in securing its sovereignty for the good of our people.