Organisers of the June 12 protest, Take It Back Movement, have released a list of venues across the country where Nigerians will converge for a scheduled protest.

The exercise was to protest against worsening economic hardship, insecurity, and what the organisers described as the shrinking civic space under President Bola Tinubu’s administration.

Speaking in an interview with newsmen on Monday, the National Coordinator of the movement, Juwon Sanyaolu, said the protest would take place in at least 20 locations nationwide.

“In Abuja, we will converge at Eagle Square by 8.00 am. In Lagos, we have four locations: Badagry, Maryland, Agbara, and Toll Gate, all starting by 7 am.

“In Akure, Ondo State, we will gather at Cathedral Junction by 8 am, and in Benin City, Edo State, at the Museum Ground by 9 am. In Niger State, the venue is Gida Matasa at 8 am.

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“In Yobe, we will meet at the Maiduguri Bypass Roundabout in Damaturu by 7:30 am, while in Oyo State, it is Mokola Roundabout in Ibadan by 8 am.

“In Bauchi, the protest will be held opposite the Bauchi School of ACR, Yelewam Makaranta, by 8 am. In Osun State, it will be at Olaiya Junction in Osogbo,” Sanyaolu said.

He listed five locations for Delta State as Amukpe Roundabout in Sapele; Summit Junction and Koka Junction in Asaba; Otovwodo Junction in Ughelli Effurun Roundabout, PTI Junction, and DSC Roundabout in Warri; and Police Station Junction in Abraka.

“In Adamawa, we will meet at Juppu Jam Road, Yola, by 8 am. In Borno State, the venue is Kasuwan Gamboru Flyover by 8 am,” he added.

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He stated that the protest, fixed to coincide with Nigeria’s Democracy Day, was meant to demand accountability and reaffirm Nigerians’ constitutional rights.

“Our demands have not changed. We are using June 12 as a day to exercise our democratic rights as Nigerians to demand accountability and democratic governance.

“The Constitution clearly states that the primary responsibility of the government is the security and welfare of the people. All these have completely failed under the government of Tinubu,” Sanyaolu said.

He cited the report by Amnesty International that over 10,000 Nigerians had lost their lives to insecurity since Tinubu assumed office.

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“Over 133 million Nigerians are multidimensionally poor. Thousands have been displaced from their homes due to forced evictions and insecurity.

“For instance, in Benue State alone, over 40,000 people are displaced, while in Plateau, the figure is about 68,000. This is the state of welfare and security in the country,” he said.

The activist also accused the government of stifling dissent and cracking down on opposition voices.

“Under this administration, the civic space is under attack. Freedom of speech is under threat as government critics and opposition voices are being hounded.

“These are the issues we want to bring to public attention by expressing our democratic rights,” he added.

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Sanyaolu warned security agencies against any form of repression during the demonstrations, noting that the right to protest was guaranteed under the Nigerian Constitution and had been upheld by the Supreme Court.

“To the security agencies, we want to state categorically that they must protect protesters, not repress them.

“It is a constitutional mandate and a lawful one. Nigerians have the right to protest, and during such actions, the police must ensure protesters are safe and that their voices are heard, “ he said.

He listed some of the confirmed protest venues and convergence times across various states:

Sanyaolu urged Nigerians to come out en masse to “reclaim the soul of the country” and hold those in power accountable.

By Lasisi Olagunju

“When lions battle, jackals flee.” Isaac Newton wrote that to his bitter rival, Gottfried Leibniz. It was a barbed remark on their feud over who between them invented calculus. The more you read of the mutual respect those two had for each other, the more you wonder why they ended their respective careers in very bitter, reckless animosity; the more you also ponder over the cost of that fight and whether it was worth the troubles.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos are two big men who are not equals. One is the boss, the other the boss’s boy. They are not equals, so, there cannot be a rivalry between them over feats and achievements. But they fight; and it is right here in the open. I’ve heard people demanding to know what they are fighting over. We do not know. Let no one talk about Lagos speakership. The sack of Mudasiru Obasa, which was as abortive as Dimka’s coup of 1976, was just what it was – a symptom; it was a reaction to something; there was an underline cause. What was it?
Sanwo-Olu and his boss are no Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz and so their fight couldn’t be over who takes the priority on a matter designed to help humanity. If there is a delectable Queen Cleopatria somewhere, I would have drawn a parallel between what is unfolding in Lagos and what unfolded between Rome’s Octavian (Augustus Caesar) and Mark Anthony. But there is no seductress in the mix, I will, therefore, not deliver to age what it is no longer capable of tweaking.

So, what did Sanwo-Olu do? Or what did he not do? Both sides are not talking. All we’ve seen was an ungracious rejection of a friendly gesture; the snub of a handshake by the more powerful potentate. We’ve also seen a convenient skip of the junior power where he ought to speak.

Politics is a fast-paced game. You slept yesterday at the war camp and woke up today to news of a ceasefire. But the wise knows that political feuds inflict invisible wounds. They use that to explain why political wounds never heal and wars never end even when you read texts of forgiveness consequent upon atonement for unknown sins and apologies for unstated crimes.

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Some people are happy, clinking glasses over the power buffetings in Lagos. They drink to the health of the feud; they wish it greater vigour; they wish its fire is unquenchable. These are people who do not like Lagos and its politics at all and who have been their victims. They see the fight as the elixir that would cleanse the land of all its sins and cure it of its sicknesses. They talk of power and its excesses. They point at Akinwumi Ambode, the man who was brought low so that Sanwo-Olu could ride high. They remember Babatunde Fashola who escaped breathlessly simply because he was like Coca-Cola, more popular and successful than the parent company. They point at a Governor Bola Tinubu of Lagos who serially used three deputy governors in a tenure of eight years. If I were the president, I would also look at this unedifying statistics and repack my big and small intestines.

A leader should be very careful on the way he treats his people, particularly, the companions who look up to him. There was an Orangun of Ila who bulldozed his way to power with charms, and then elevated the humiliation of his principal chiefs to an art. An Ila historian wrote that the king’s “humiliating treatment (of the chiefs) reached intolerable proportions when he frowned at seeing the Iwarefa (the kingmakers) in decent attires. When a chief made a new garment, he was obliged to excise the breast and patch it with a rag.” But every reign, no matter how glorious or inglorious, must come to an end. How did it end for that oba? He didn’t die on the throne. His character gave him a fate which made him farmer outside power. Ó fi’gbá ìtóòrò mu’mi nínú oko (he drank water with ìtóòrò melon calabash on the farm). I suggest you read ‘The Orangun Dynasty’, a very rich 1996 book on the history of the Igbomina stock of the Yoruba, authored by Ila Orangun’s very first university graduate, Prince Isaac Adebayo; check pages 40 and 41.

A leader is a masquerade; he must not tear his own veil. When a leader makes and unmakes subordinates, he rends his own cover. “Ènìyàn l’aso mi” is a Yoruba expression which, in English means “people are my clothes; they are my covering.” As a Yoruba proverb, it emphasizes the importance of people in people’s lives. Whatever cloth the masquerade wears is that ‘thing’ that makes the wearer an Egungun. He must protect it because it is his store of power. But my people say power is like medicine; it intoxicates. A researcher adds that “ultimately, the accumulation of power becomes dangerous even to its owners.” Is that why someone saw “a link between mask and menace”?

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So, when we interrogate the use of power by the one we have come to call Lagos, we should always remind him that the costume is the sacred adornment which people see, respect and venerate in the masquerade. For a leader, his principal boys and girls are his costume, they are his cover. He needs them when harmattan comes with its fury. And harmattan will come whenever the masquerade repairs back to the grove when the festival is over, and it will be over.

Even lions, kings of the jungle, place great value on strong bonds within their prides for survival and well-being. There is an old Irving King song on this: “The more we get together/The merrier we’ll be.” That song emphasizes human interconnectedness; the support embedded in community.

Jackals are opportunists, and they are many in this Lagos fight. Newton’s feuding-lion imagery is an evocation of the themes of strength, of hierarchy, and of consequence. It defines the strained relationship of one big expert with the other big man. The other part of his proverb ‘bombs’ the miserable jackals, minions who lurk around the battlefield, who thrive in chaos and on scraps from the feuding powers.

American novelist, Herman Melville, says a thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men. We should not live our lives as if we exist only for ourselves. Public ‘spanking’ of a governor for unknown and unsaid sins is petty. A president should have snubbed rebuff as his option of engagement. If I were him, If a ‘boy’ offended me, I would just ‘face front’ and concentrate on delivering the Chinaware I carry unbroken. If your load is a pot of palm oil, avoid stone throwers.

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But the president is not pacifist me. He enjoys fighting wars after wars. He is like Sango who desperately desired a fight but found no one to fight. Sango looked round and pounced on the wall and wrestled with it. There was also an Aare Ona Kakanfo who itched for a battle and could get none. He stoked a rebellion at home against himself and by himself violently put it down. Because of this and many more like it, the man was nicknamed Aburúmáku (the wicked one who refuses to die).

Are there no elders again where the feuding feudal lords come from? I read texts calling for propitiation. Why not? Appeasement without reason may look stupid but Napoleon Bonaparte settled it long ago when he said that “in politics stupidity is not a handicap.” Borrowing lines from Ulli Beier, I would say that now that men appear to have failed to stop this war with reason, women should be called upon to come and kill the fire. Our mothers are like Osun, “the wisdom of the forest; the wisdom of the river. Where the doctor failed, she cures with fresh water. Where medicine is impotent, she cures with cool water.”

The first lady should therefore step out, open her Bible (KJV) to Mark 4:39 and read to her husband: “And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.”

If she does that, I will be encouraged to give the president two lines from William Shakespeare: “Come, wife, let’s in, and learn to govern better;/ For yet may England curse my wretched reign” (2 Henry VI, IV, ix, 4).

If our president’s reign won’t be cursed for wretchedness, he should prioritise the people’s welfare over serial petty fights with his boys. Nigerians are panting at home and reeling in pains at work; on the road, they groan. They are not entertained at all by presidential beer parlour brawls like Musician Ayinla Omowura’s last fight. You don’t become king and still keep trysts with crickets. No.

By Lasisi Olagunju

One of the first jokes I picked when I moved to Ibadan 30 years ago is that failure of patronage is the only reason a drummer would go to Oke Ado. The Ibadan surmised that the Ijebu who lived almost exclusively at Oke Ado part of Ibadan never ever got moved to spend a dime on bards.

Those who minted that joke should come back from the dead and see what we see now with the Ijebu. When the day breaks tomorrow, I will go to Oja’ba in Ibadan and ask folks there why their ancestors with relish said that the Ijebu did not appreciate good music and would not put their money on it. The Ijebu I see today do what the Ibadan said they would not do. In a magnificent way, they mass in their capital annually and stage a spectacular festival of culture and splendour. They call it Ojude Oba (the King’s Forecourt). It is an annual festival of sumptuous songs and dance, a parade of success and cultural opulence. They held another edition yesterday, and it is already contagious. Other Yoruba towns appear to be getting bitten by the Ijebu bug. We watch as they evolve.

The Ijebu are a very scrupulous people. It is in their oríkì that their fathers had six tubers of yam: they ate two, sold two and offered two to their gods. You can ponder that again: with moderate six survival items, they did justice to their present; justice to their future through trade and investment; justice to the divine who held the rope of life. Anyone who approaches life methodically like this is not likely to fail in any enterprise. In nuanced ways, the oríkì suggests that those who managed the six tubers did not eat with ten fingers. Their descendants still do not do it today: they party hard but they also work hard and trade intelligently; they worship God with utmost devotion.

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I watched a short video clip of the Ojude Oba event at 8am Sunday (yesterday). I grinned seeing everywhere in immaculate lush green, meticulous. Sponsors of the event, Mike Adenuga’s Globacom, has done it for a record twenty years. And both company and owner say they won’t stop doing so forever. Patriotism is love of country. So, what is love of home? “In love of home”, says Charles Dickens, “the love of country has its rise.” That is what Adenuga and his Globacom commit themselves to with Ojude Oba till eternity. With Globacom’s heavy lifting, Ojude Oba has become the biggest cultural festival in Nigeria today. They say they are taking it even further than where it is. Something there to copy by every big, rich man and woman from other towns. The ones who feel too big to lift their homestead to glow will likely live ‘homeless.’ We all should know, as William J. Bennett did, that “home is a shelter from storms – all sorts of storms.”

I did not read history, but I am a lover of history and a believer in what it teaches. I keep seeing in the past the road that led to today, and a possible pathway to the future. T. O. Ogunkoya, author of ‘The Early History of Ijebu’ published in December 1956 offers some glimpses into the elements that make up the Ijebu gene:
“Nobody knows the date of the first migration to Ijebu or the course that it took. Tradition states that it was led by a man named Olu-Iwa accompanied by two warrior companions, Ajebu and Olode. Olu-Iwa settled at Iwade, for Ijebu-Ode itself did not, as yet, exist. Ajebu was instructed to mark out with fire the boundary of the new land. He went westward to the lagoon and marked out the boundaries to the North, South and East as well. To Olode was given the task of marking out and planning the future city, a task which took him more than three years. So well did Ajebu and Olode do their work that the new town was named after them as ‘Ajebu-Olode’, now corrupted and called Ijebu-Ode.”

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The writer of that history said “there was ample evidence in favour of this tradition. He wrote that “In Ijebu-Ode today there stands in a prominent place in Olode Street a tomb dedicated to him and bearing the inscription ‘The resting place of Olode.’ In Imepe Street there can be seen a tomb dedicated to the memory of Ajebu. It may be taken for granted that these two men are historical figures whose names have been perpetuated in the name of the city.

Ogunkoya wrote that there is another theory of the origin of the name. He said “Portuguese maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries showed cuidade de Jabu or ‘the city of Ijebu.’ Now it is argued that the Ijebu, in common with people of similar ancestry, used the word Ode as a generic name for a town. So the Itschekri people had Ode Itschekri (Warri). The Ondo had Ode Ondo and the Ilaje Ode Ilaje. In Wadai (Sudan) there was an Ode Ijebu, suggesting the transference of the name of the ancient home to the new. In support of this view it is to be noted that until very recently all the village people in the province referred to the city simply as Ode. As they themselves are Ijebus they merely point to their capital town without associating their name with it.”

Note the meticulous mapping of the boundary and the planning of the city. Note that the exercise reportedly took whole three years! Note the communal appreciation of the pioneers who got the job done. Put all those side by side what other chapters of their history say of their survival as a people. They pay attention to details. They valourize themselves as masters of money. They say they’d been spending shillings before the white man arrived (Omo a n’áwó silè k’Óyìnbó tó dé/ Òyìnbó dé tán owó òún pò si). I plan to ask my Ijebu friends what that means. I will tell you whatever they tell me.