A frontline pro-democracy activist and spokesperson of Save Nigeria Group (SNG), Yinka Odumakin, speaks with DAPO FALADE on issues affecting the development of the South-West, among other issues. Excerpts:
Yinka Odumakin
Well, nothing has changed. I have remained consistent on the progressive side. It may just be that your definition of progressivism may not be totally in sync with what progressivism is. A lot of people called progressives have been going through all kinds of transformation.
First of all, I think there are three key issues involved in the election coming up in Ondo State. I don’t think it is just about electing a governor who will rule the state for the next four years. The election is going to settle many issues in Yoruba politics and Nigeria generally.
The first issue is that the time has come for the Yoruba nation to make a choice on what makes you a progressive: is it performance, label or party card that you carry?
The Yoruba nation also has to decide whether we want to operate on the template Chief Obafemi Awolowo gave to us – where governance is about the people taking decisions and leaders stepping forward to lead them in the desired direction – or a caliphate politics, where the Caliph sits down and appoints ajeles all over the place who are only answerable to him.
The last issue about this election, and which concerns Governor Olusegun Mimiko, is that I have gone round the state and seen what the man has done in the last three and a half years. I believe that if somebody has done those kinds of things and put himself forward for re-election and he is not re-elected, then there is no incentive for anybody to go to public office and perform again. Everybody can then say, ‘let me just go there and steal’ and when they steal enough, they can throw enough money at the people and the people would follow them.
Why are you so passionate about the issues you raised?
These are the cardinal issues that are involved in the Ondo governorship election. And I am passionate about the caliphate politics which Yoruba people must stop in its track. I am passionate about returning the Yoruba nation to the path of development, which is what Mimiko is doing in Ondo State. Look at the Abiye concept which, today, has become a benchmark for WHO (World Health Organisation). Not only that; UCH (University College Hospital), which was established several years back, now understudies what goes on in Abiye.
I have known Mimiko since 1999 when he represented Ondo State in the Afenifere political committee and I recalled that in 2003, when he said he wanted to be governor on the ticket of the Alliance for Democracy (AD), he gave me a pamphlet on the night of his fund-raising in Lagos.
In that document, he said that his paradigm of governance is not top-bottom, but bottom-up. Three and a half years in the saddle, he has proved that he is a governor who works for the people. The Ondo people follow him because he has worked for them. This shows that people appreciate those who work for them.
The governor of Lagos State between 1979 and 1983, Alhaji Lateef Jakande, touched the lives of the people the way no other government ever did. The effect is still felt even 29 years after he left office. He did not name anything after himself, but there is no community in Lagos today where you would not feel his touch. That shows that people appreciate those who work for them, the way they appreciate Awolowo, who transformed Yoruba nation into a pacesetter for the whole of Africa.
After Oduduwa, the most venerated individual in Yorubaland today is Awolowo. Oduduwa is the founder of the Yoruba, but Awolowo is the progenitor of modern Yoruba nation. That is what Lagos people are doing to Jakande, 29 years after he left power and that is what Ondo people are doing to Mimiko.
And that is why today, in spite of all odds, I am sticking out my neck for Mimiko.
But you were part of the system that produced the so-called caliph in the build-up to the 1999 elections. At what point did you part ways?
I know that in 1999, when my political leaders and I decided to move beyond advocacy to engaging in governance and politics, we declared for AD at Oworonsoki. There, we were received by Chief Ayo Adebanjo, the late Alhaji Ganiyu Dawodu and many leaders of Afenifere and AD. When the issue of who would be governor of Lagos State came up, I supported Senator Bola Tinubu without having met him then. The closest I knew him was in 1992 through a colleague of mine in the Daily Times who handled his media campaign when he wanted to run for the Senate.
But when he came back from exile, those of us who played prominent roles in democracy movement in the country at that time were told stories of Tinubu’s involvement in NADECO abroad and we felt that a man who stood up in such a time when most of our colleagues and leaders were running to the late General Sani Abacha should vie for public office. I can recall that the first television commercial that announced his governorship ambition was my concept.
When the governorship primaries were to be held, Afenifere had committees in each of the six South-West states to decide who was to be governor. I was part of the committee that went to Ondo. We were the ones that held the primaries that produced the late Chief Adebayo Adefarati as AD governorship candidate in the state. By the time we came back to Lagos, all that happened had happened. As we were coming back from Ondo, we felt that we should go to the house of our chairman in Lagos then, Alhaji Dawodu, as we bought some fruits for him as it was during the Ramadan period.
By the time we got to his house, we didn’t meet him. Then we decided to go to Ore Close where they normally held caucus meeting. On our way, we saw him in traffic at Masha area with his friend, the late Mr Ferera. We flashed and ran after him to give him the report from Ondo. But I noticed that Alhaji Dawodu was agitated. He just told us to move on. It was when we got to Ore Close that we learnt that there was a problem in Lagos; that Alhaji Dawodu had forwarded the name of the late Engineer Funso Williams to INEC and the leaders were waiting for him to reverse that decision, but he had made himself unavailable. It was then the leaders said that Chief Ayo Adebanjo should write to INEC to remove the name of Williams and replace it with that of Bola Tinubu.
What happened in Lagos; the guideline that was given to us said that anywhere there is fracas, the electoral panel reserves the right not to accept the result from such area. Now, there were crises in some local government areas where Funso Williams was the strongest and based on that, the electoral panel that came from Oyo State said that it was going to cancel the result of those areas. If we had accepted the result, the late Williams won the Lagos primaries; but if you cancel them, Bola Tinubu won.
That was why the leaders said, ‘well, we are the ones that gave the guideline, if the people we appointed said they have rejected these local government areas, we are upholding their verdict’ and this made Tinubu the winner. It was years after that it was suggested that some people were fast enough to create those crises in Funso Williams’ strongholds to fulfill that guideline which was a technical thing, but I think the leaders acted in good faith in accordance with the guideline and the decision of the panel.
Again, in 2003, when we were meeting in Ijebu-Igbo over the 60:40 thing; that the Tinubu group should take 60 and Dawodu group should take 40 and that was not going to work. Alhaji Dawodu indicated his intention to form another party and I remember Alhaji Lam Adesina said that it was unfortunate that we have found ourselves in a situation where a Ganiyu Dawodu who had won elections for us in the past is now somebody that is looking for a party to run for an election. What I am saying in essence is that if Dawodu had insisted that he wanted to contest governorship election, nothing would have stopped him.
So, when Tinubu became the governor of Lagos State because of his participation in the struggle, it was a natural thing to continue to support him. But within a year, by 2000, when the AD was split in two and he was on Chief Bola Ige’s side and we had only Adefarati and Chief Segun Osoba on the side of Papa Senator Abraham Adesanya. For some of us, in spite of our closeness to Tinubu, we supported the leaders and we were trying to promote efforts to ensure that the house of Afenifere was not divided. We used our friendship with some members of the Tinubu group to continue to try to build bridges.
In the course of time, we got to know that the Tinubu agenda was personal. The first thing I noticed was that, around 2005/06 when Yoruba were asked to leave Warri and I made a statement on behalf of Afenifere that no force on earth can displace the Itsekiri from their homeland, the following day, Tinubu came out to dismiss Afenifere, using some words to the effect that we are scaremongers. Then, I had to come out to say that Afenifere was disappointed in him to have made such a comment when it was in the open that our people have been given seven days to leave their homeland.
My second worry was when former President Olusegun Obasanjo set up the Confab in 2005 and I was part of the committee to declare the Yoruba agenda. We drafted an agenda which was a constellation of all the positions that Yoruba people have, built up since 1994- parliamentary system of government, fiscal federalism, regionalism etc- and we had thought that the only progressive governor that we have who can champion that agenda was Tinubu. But all of a sudden, he turned against the Yoruba agenda and not only that, he went to prepare what he called Lagos agenda and his points men started saying that Lagos is not part of Yorubaland; that it signed a different treaty with the colonialists. It was said that some of them were from the Tapa region. It was shocking and we made all kinds of entreaties but our own man rejected our agenda. Where we said we want parliamentary system, he said he wanted presidential; everything Yoruba agreed on, the Tinubu agenda rejected.
It came to a point where Gbenga Daniel (former governor of Ogun State), whom we had already casted away that he had joined the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), was now the one that was carrying the Yoruba agenda on his head. That was when we realised that there was a gap.
On the issue of third term agenda, all kinds of things happened, which I will not talk about now, but which also showed that there was a gap between what he told the public and what he planned to do.
The final straw, for me, was in December 2006. I was part of the Action Congress (AC) when it started; I went round the South-West to mobilise for the party and based on that, I also participated in its national summit. Chief Bisi Akande, Honourable Wale Osun and I drafted most of what became the constitution, the guideline for elections, how the delegates and candidates would emerge and the rest. Then, it was time for primaries within the AD and Governor Tinubu from Lagos shredded everything we had done and imposed his own. It was at that point that I said ‘it is enough.’
So, you are now saying that there is nothing democratic in the structure and operations of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) led by Senator Tinubu…
The party, today, is one of the undemocratic parties in the country, as far as its leadership is concerned. I don’t have any problem with members of the party, but the leadership is corrosive to our politics. Don’t forget, the leadership came to Yorubaland under the PRIMROSE Group under the leadership of the late General Shehu Yar’Adua in 1992 in the Social Democratic Party (SDP). They were the ones that came and introduced money politics to Lagos where they ensured that Jakande was defeated in Lagos by Yar’Adua with illicit money. That was when politics was destroyed in Yorubaland; before then what we had was politics of service, development and ideas; members would go to meetings to contribute to building the party and the party was run democratically.
Money was introduced by the PRIMROSE Group which metamorphosed into the Dapo Sarumi Group and came back in 1999 to enter Afenifere and then took over the platform, sidelining the patriarchs of the movement. It now started to wear the Afenifere agbada, whereas underneath is the PDP or the conservative politics it represents.
Today, there is a lot of deception going on in the South-West. The people identified that party and its leadership as progressives, but they are not. They pretend to be Awoists, but they are not. Until the leadership of that party is checkmated, there cannot be true politics of service and development in Yorubaland. It is politics of pockets and nepotism. Go to the National Assembly and the state Houses of Assembly and you will see the kind of characters that are there.
Liberty Report
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