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OPINION: For the Yoruba Of Northern Nigeria [Monday Line]

Published

4 months ago

April 14, 2025

By Lasisi Olagunju

“As an Offa citizen, I am made to look like an inferior being. While competing for anything in the North, I would be told that I am a Yoruba man. If there is something to compete for in the South-West, I would be reminded that I am a northerner. Permanently, I am an inferior citizen until this lopsided, skewed, warped national structure is re-configured.”

Chief J. S. Olawoyin was the leader of the opposition in the Northern Nigerian House of Assembly from 1956 to 1961. On Wednesday, 5 February, 2025, I was in his hometown, Offa, Kwara State, to review a book launched by his family and the Offa community to posthumously mark his centenary. Olawoyin was the first Asiwaju of Offa and a Yoruba patriot who used his entire political lifetime fighting against his people being put unfairly in northern Nigeria. For this, he was jailed, released and jailed many times. At the book launch event, I used the review to interrogate the dilemma – actually the tragedy – of a floating people; bats who are neither south nor north. The quote above is on page 22 of that book.

Heaven is God’s throne; Earth, His footstool. Whether throne or footstool, whichever you are, you are part of the palace. But some people are neither throne nor stool; they are neither on earth nor in heaven. They float. That is what we see in the recent NNPCL appointments and the subsequent noise over the Yoruba of northern Nigeria’s Kogi and Kwara states, and the perceived privileges they enjoy under a south-western Yoruba president.

My Zaria friend came for me at the weekend. He called (calls) me Tinubu’s man. I don’t know what I have achieved to merit that badge of honour. He accused me and everyone around me of marginalising the North in federal appointments. “Once you people can’t get a Yoruba from Lagos, you go pick one from any of the SW (South-West) states. If none exists, you slide to Kwara or Kogi to get one. Tinubu will be an OTP (One Term President). It shall be well.” That is his WhatsApp message to me.

His mention of Kogi and Kwara strikes me. Butterflies are not birds and can’t be birds unless their Creator recreates them. Think about this: If you were born a Yoruba, and Kwara or Kogi is your state, can you ever be president of Nigeria? If you contest a major political party’s presidential primary and there is a freak, and you win the ticket, where will your running mate come from? Will he or she come from the North where you geographically belong or from the South where, ethnically, your home is? Can you even be vice president? The same factors that make you unfit for number one cancels you out for number two.

But, sometimes the butterfly enjoys birdy bounties. You are Yoruba from the North Central. You will be lucky if the president is your brother Yoruba from the South-West. Because blood is thicker than water, he will give you jobs that are zoned to northern Nigeria. Only he can do that. To any other, you are a nobody. And, if your brother does that for you, he will say Eni ò dùn mó kò gbodò wí. Those unhappy won’t be able to shout because they also need you tomorrow. You have been that lucky twice: Under Olusegun Obasanjo, you produced, twice, the Chief of Naval Staff (Admirals Samuel Afolayan and Ganiyu Adekeye). The officers, in 2001 and in 2005, respectively filled a northern slot – because they were northerners. And now under Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the Yoruba of Kogi and Kwara become, once again, northern Nigerians.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: [OPINION] Omololu Olunloyo: An Egret Flies Home

Every ethnic group should be a ruling house in a just Nigeria. But no. There are Royal Houses, long decided. It is a huge misfortune to be a minority here. It is worse if your tiny conchie has to contest a space with regional hawks. Think of how really the minority have fared in the North since the beginning of Nigeria. The British were not tentative in anything they did here; they left records. And, through those records, we get great insights into what they did with the country, where we are and the likely face of the future.

I use their records to address here the spectacle of spectators called the Yoruba of the North Central. Those who created Nigeria divided the regions (north and west) along the lines of pre-colonial conquest. With painstaking dutifulness, they also maintained interesting profiles of the tribes that inhabit each of the regions. For the North, they observed and kept a meticulous account of the peoples, their features and their characters. They then decided who would rule and who would serve the rulers.

Major G. Merrick, researcher and officer of the colonial government, wrote a long list of tribes in his ‘Languages in Northern Nigeria’ (published in October 1905). Beyond listing the tribes, he has a cross-ethnic comparison of each of the peoples’ mental and physical fitness. The first group he identifies in our North are the Shuwa Arabs whom he says “are a good class of men” who have “a certain independence of spirit, objecting to being commanded by Yorubas…whom they hold to be inferior races.” This feeling, he says, “has earned them a reputation for insubordination.” The Hausas, he says, “make the best soldiers”. The (northern) Yoruba are “useless as soldiers.” The Fulani, he writes, are “an intelligent race” but they are “somewhat exclusive, and the negro is, in general, somewhat afraid of them.” The list is long. Every ethnic group mentioned in that publication has a mark of the beast.

Lord Frederick Lugard in his ‘Northern Nigeria’ (published in January 1904), has a deeper (political) assessment of the groups that make up his favourite Northern Region. To Lugard, the Hausas are “the business-men of West Africa” who also “make admirable soldiers, and are brave and reliable.” The Yoruba, Lugard notes, “are hardly less keen traders than the Hausas, at least equally industrious, and much quicker to learn.” The Fulani, he calls “the ruling race” but whose “misrule has compelled interference” by the British. Lugard, however, declares that “bad as their (Fulani) rule has been…the future of the virile races of the protectorate lies largely in the regeneration of the Fulani.” Lugard explains how he arrived at that conclusion. He says the Fulani’s “…coloured skins, their mode of life and habits of thought, appeal more to the native populations than the prosaic rule of the Anglo-Saxon can ever do.” He then declares a resolve “to regenerate this capable race, to mould them to ideas of justice and mercy, so that in a future generation, if not in this, they may become worthy instruments of rule under British supervision” (page 8).

Note what those two gentlemen wrote on the principal tribes of the North. The past is forever true with our present. It explains why some people rule forever, and others, till eternity, rue their exclusion from power. Think about T. S. Eliot’s “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past.”

My Zaria friend was angry because of the appointment of the NNPCL Managing Director, Bashir Bayo Ojulari, a native of Oke Ode in Ifelodun Local Government Area of Kwara State. My friend would not listen to me when I told him that Kwara and Kogi are in the North and Ojulari, from that axis, is a northerner like him. He insisted that the reason the man got the job was because of his Yoruba ethnicity. From my friend’s tempest, it would appear that the far Muslim North is the only North. He forwarded to me a social media post comparing Buhari’s nepotism with that of Tinubu. My friend gave the trophy of dubiety to Tinubu.

A very long list of Yoruba appointees of Tinubu is slithering across the World Wide Web. I looked at that list; I read through Buhari’s records. One mirrors the other. They mock Nigeria; they shame decency; they laugh at whatever our old and new national anthems say about unity and brotherhood; about truth and justice.

The government is scrambling to say the Tinubu list is a lie. The regime stutters, very embarrassingly. Can we also have lists of appointees made from other tribes? Tribe and tongue are the new identifiers. States and regions are dead.

Whatever the North does to the Yoruba and their Tinubu now and in the future serves right the Yoruba elite. They used to demand a restructuring of the Nigerian federation for better delivery. They harassed regimes after regimes with that demand. They said it was the cure-all for what ailed Nigeria. But they are quiet now; very quiet. They are either with their brother, eating with both hands and with ten fingers or they are sharpening their teeth, expecting to be called to the table. It is a shame that they forget that this Egúngún festival is never forever. At the end of this season, priests and all, including their children, will have to pay before they eat àkàrà and èko.

We read statements that talk of “Tinubu’s Yoruba government”. Can I be allowed to say that Tinubu is not building a Yoruba cult for Nigeria? The strongman is, instead, carefully building a sect of personal devotees. A majority of his worshippers being Yoruba (from Lagos) is just normal. But how far can one region, one ethnic group, or a cabal, or a family go enjoying Nigeria alone? We saw how fleeting, brief, and transient it was with the insular, north-centric regime of Muhammadu Buhari. The streets of the North enjoyed it while it lasted. And, I think some of us warned the North that time that today would come; and it is here. Where I come from, we say that if you eat alone, your eyes would be red twice: the first time is when you eat yours, the second is when others eat theirs. If I were of Buhari’s persons and region, I would be too ashamed to complain that someone is using my fake coin to pay for my service.

Ikú nde Dèdè; Dèdè nde ‘kú – Death baits Dede; Dede baits Death. Tinubu plays the tongue-twisting game. The president took the chairmanship of the NNPCL from his bosom friend in the South-West; he gave it to an ‘outsider’ from the North-East. He took the Managing Director of that company from the North-East and gave it to the North-Central. The two top jobs went to the North, yet the North is in pains. The South-West has neither of the two juicy positions, yet it is rejoicing and dancing. The region that lost the chairmanship of the oil company is grateful; the one that gained the firm’s two topmost posts is angry. Oxymoronic reactions. Outsiders would be confused. But the child that is crying knows why it is weeping; the mum knows why the child is inconsolable. From the two divides are reactions that confirm the artificiality (or superficiality) of what we call zones and states, and Nigeria. It is a stain on our claims to a banner of unity and strength.

Our president does what he wants when he wants it while leaving the dazed asses to bray. But, across the Niger is a humming volcano called the North. It is very evident that the North is mobilizing for battle. The northern establishment has gone to exhume Buhari from provincial Daura. They’ve replanted him in their regional capital, Kaduna, for proper coordination of the street and the boys. I think Tinubu knows what is going on; but he is not bothered. He thinks he is the other power bloc and is on very firm ground. He truly is. If he were in Italy, he would be addressed as Capo di tutti capi – boss of all bosses. He thinks he is Nigeria’s very first real strongman. And he acts and lives it. He has money in super abundance – his wife and son show this off dropping some billions here, some billions there – in a season of famine. The man has power and he knows how to use both with precision and to maximum effects. He combines Muhammed Ali’s stings with Iron Mike Tyson’s bulldozer punches. If I were part of his enemies, I would be very worried. This man won’t go the Goodluck Jonathan way.

In all of this, the ordinary man, north and south, are the losers. They lose life, they lose living. Under Buhari’s ‘Change’, their lives took a plunge. Today, they battle to breathe.

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FULL LIST: CAC Removes 247 Companies From Database, Urges Public To Disregard Them

Published

10 hours ago

August 17, 2025

Editor

The Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) has removed 247 companies from its database, declaring that they were never duly registered as limited liability companies.

The Commission announced the move in a notice posted on its official X handle on Friday, saying the purported incorporation of the affected companies was invalid.

According to the CAC, the Registration Certificates (RC) numbers allegedly linked to the companies had never been assigned to any entity.

It urged the public to disregard any claims suggesting that the delisted companies exist as legal persons.

Check full list here

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OPINION: You Be Terrorist, I No Be Terrorist!

Published

11 hours ago

August 17, 2025

Editor

By Festus Adedayo

When the weight of words spoken is weightier than whatever response it may attract, my people say Oro p’esi je. The English say such wordless period is an ineffable moment. In its literal rendition, perhaps saying it better than the English and more graphically too, the Yoruba say ‘word has killed response’. Even at the height of his musical wizardry, the dictatorship of the Nigerian military government killed appropriate response from Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. So, in one of his songs, Fela turned the wordlessness into musical rhapsody. With the declaration by a Canadian court on June 17, 2025 that the two leading Nigerian political parties, the PDP and APC, are terrorist organizations, the court declaration provokes similar wordlessness. What immediately jumps up one’s lips is Fela’s “Oro p’esi je o… rere run”.

In Nigerians’ faintest imagination, no one expected such extreme labeling from Canada. Certainly not from a temple of justice. While delivering judgment in an asylum case involving a Nigerian national, Douglas Egharevba, Justice Phuong Ngo upheld an earlier decision of the Canadian Immigration Appeal Division (IAD) which denied asylum to him. It cited Egharevba’s decade-long affiliation with the PDP and APC. Justice Ngo then affirmed that, under paragraph 34(1)(f) of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), “mere membership of an organization linked to terrorism or democratic subversion” could trigger inadmissibility of an applicant for asylum – even without proof of personal involvement.

Earlier court filings by Canada’s Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness had submitted that the two Nigerian political parties were implicated in “political violence, democratic subversion, and electoral bloodshed” which were further buttressed, among other incidents, by the PDP’s alleged violent conducts in the 2003 state elections and 2004 local government polls. The minister cited widespread ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, and the killing of opposition supporters in those elections. The IAD said its findings indicated that the two parties’ leadership benefited from the violence, didn’t see a need to stop it and that, under paragraph 34(1)(b.1) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), such acts met Canada’s legal definition of subversion and terrorism.

Expectedly, both APC and PDP are blowing their tops. Fulminating, the PDP labeled the classification as “misinformed, biased, and lacking evidence,” and deserving outright dismissal by any right-thinking person. Its Deputy National Youth Leader, Timothy Osadolor, was quoted as saying this.

The APC, through its National Secretary, Ajibola Bashiru, in his characteristic gruff persona, chose to descend down a logical pitfall called ad hominem. Rather than the issue, persons accused of this argumentative pitfall attack persons. So, to Bashiru, the judge was “an ignoramus.” Thereafter, he queried the Canadian court’s jurisdiction to determine the status of a Nigerian recognised political party “not to talk of declaring it as a terrorist organisation… The so-called judgment was obviously delivered from a jaundiced perspective and within the narrow confines of determining eligibility for asylum by an applicant.” Lastly, Bashiru queried “some desperate and unpatriotic Nigerians” who seek greener pastures elsewhere, who he said “allow the name of the country to be brought to unpalatable commentary by racist judges on account of self contrived application for asylum.”

The Federal Government, too, in a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ spokesperson, Kimiebi Ebienfa, described the judgment as “baseless, reckless and an unacceptable interference in Nigeria’s internal affairs.”

Now, the issues are not as straightforward as the persons above saw them. At least three issues are implicated in the Canadian judge’s ruling and its subsequent analyses. One, as Bashiru alleged, is racism; second, the state of Nigeria’s electoral/party system and third, the social status of Nigerian citizenship. There is the need to decouple them. First, we should be clear about one fact and it is that, electoral violence is as old as Nigerian electoral system. Violence as icing on the cake of elections gained notoriety during independence and since then, elections in Nigeria have been characterized by high-scale electoral malpractices, violence, money politics, and deployment of ethno-religious divide as weapon of influencing votes. Since September 20, 1923 when the first election in Nigeria was held, Nigerian politicians have scaled up, from one election to the other, the patterns of electoral violence that have today resulted in an epidemic of political violence. Yesterday marked the 42nd bloodied anniversary of Second Republic’s political violence in the old Oyo and Ondo States. On Tuesday, August 16, 1983, all hell was let loose with multiple political killings in tow in Akure, Ilesa and other parts of the states.

In the April and May 2003 elections that Justice Ngo referenced, according to Human Rights Watch in its report entitled, ‘The Unacknowledged Violence,’ “more than 100 people were killed in election-related violence with many more injured.” The EU Election Observation Mission, (EUEOM) in its ‘Final Report on the National Assembly, Presidential, Gubernatorial and State Houses of Assembly Elections,’ also claimed to have recorded a total of 105 killings in pre-election violence in Nigeria. Continuing, the report claimed that, from publications in the Nigerian press, at least 70 incidents of election-related violence were reported between November 2006 and the middle of March 2007 in 20 of Nigeria’s 36 states. It claimed that the press report “may greatly underestimate the true scale of the problem” judging by a report of another international organization with a comprehensive conflict monitoring programme in Nigeria, which also claimed it recorded 280 reports of election-related deaths and more than 500 injuries over an eight-week period ending in mid-March of the year. Other Nigerian elections are no less better.

In terms of political assassinations, the Human Rights Watch report said that between November 1, 2006 and March 10, 2007, quoting the Nigerian press and other sources, “at least four assassinations and seven attempted assassinations of Nigerian politicians, party officials and other individuals who were directly linked to various electoral campaigns” occurred. It further reported that two most notorious murders involving PDP primaries occurred in mid-2006, and were in respect of PDP gubernatorial aspirants – Funsho Williams in Lagos State and Ayo Daramola in Ekiti State, both of whom were murdered in July and August 2006 respectively.

But, was Justice Ngo wrong to have described what happened in the 2003 electoral contest in Nigeria as terrorism? Scholars have attempted to define what exactly is terrorism. Charles Ruby, in his book, The Definition of Terrorism, (2003), citing Title 22 of the U.S. Code, defined terrorism as a “politically motivated violence perpetrated in a clandestine manner against noncombatants.”

If you critically assess the above definitions, viz a viz the level of atrocious political killings and violence that have happened in the last 26 years of democratic practice in Nigeria, it may be difficult to fault Justice Ngo’s labeling of Nigeria’s two topmost political parties as terrorists. The judge alluded to Egharevba’s failure to prove that there were no “political violence, democratic subversion, and electoral bloodshed” in the Nigerian two political parties which the asylum seeker claimed to have been a member of. With this, it is my considered opinion that, faulting the labeling of the political parties by the Canadian judge may sound very impassioned and derisive of prevailing facts.

Yet, the allegation of racism against Justice Ngo may be sustainable. Of a truth, Canada wears on its lapel the myth of a “peaceable kingdom”. This is generally as a result of its genial political culture when compared to Nigeria’s. While the country today has had a limited political terrorism experience when compared to other forms of political conflicts or even other countries of the world, its pedigree does not totally acquit it of violence, nor does it give it a total sainthood. All considered, it could be racist for the judge to abandon his country’s violent past while criminalizing Nigeria’s present. Though there is no recency to the reports of Canada’s involvement in violence, Micheal J. Kelly and Thomas H. Mitchell, in their “The Study of Internal Conflict in Canada: Problems and Prospects,” Conflict Quarterly, Vol. II no. 1 (1981) examined publications of the Canadian newspaper called Globe and Mail from 1965 to 1975 which identified 129 incidents of collective violence in Ontario. Also, Julian Sher, in her White Hoods: Canada’s Ku Klux Klan (1983) examined case studies of terrorist groups or groups using terrorist tactics which operated in Canada. The scholar used the activities of the FLQ, the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to peel Canada of any claim to a sainthood pedigree where terrorism is concerned. Whilst numerous terrorist events have occurred in Canada since 1981, the period between 1968 and 1974 is actually the point a glut of such incidents can be located.

When Bashiru now accused “some desperate and unpatriotic Nigerians” seeking greener pastures elsewhere of allowing “the name of the country to be brought to unpalatable commentary” through “self-contracted application for asylum,” he must have deliberately played the ostrich, apparently for political reasons. This must have blinded him from seeing the peculiar nature of Nigeria’s social crisis. Over the decades, at least in the last 26 years of the 4th Republic, both APC and PDP have literally socially and economically grounded this country. Many of the politicians in the ADC today are also complicit in this. Comfortable existence has become a mirage in Nigeria, yet politicians flaunt ill-gotten wealth. It is so bad that Nigerians desperately seek the citizenship of saner countries. Blaming Nigerians who seek bailouts from this socio-economic Gulag inflicted on them by Nigerian politicians will thus sound misplaced and self-centered.

The story of Egharevba in the hands of the Canadian judge is a replica of the aphorism of the “son” of an orange tree which invites multiple stoning and wood-beating from those who want to pluck it. If Nigeria had met his dreams of a place to live, I doubt if Egharevba would have openly disdained his country as this in the hands of a perceived racial judge and system. But come to think of it, this same “racist” Canada opens its arms wide to embrace thousands of Nigerians who possess legitimate papers!

In looking at the Canadian judge’s ruling, Nigeria should look inwards rather than outwards. First lesson to be learned is that, being a global village, not only is the rest of the world watching Nigeria with its binoculars, information about dissonances in our country are at the tip of the world’s fingers. Because they seek the consistent sanity of their countries, it is natural that countries of the world would want to guard against importation of social frictions into their territories. It was the lesson that same Canada was trying to pass across when it denied our Chief of Defence Staff visa last year.

Are Nigerian elections truly devoid of violence of the terrorism hue? The answer is No. As lawyers say, res ipsa loquitur; the facts speak for themselves. Our political parties have the notoriety of gangster violence pre, during and after elections. We shouldn’t be surprised if, very soon, a citizen is penalized, in a manner similar to Egharevba’s, over our country being where there are no consequences for negative actions. A country that reverses punishments and rules within few hours intervals, just because a street ally of the president is trapped in a criminal loop, cannot but receive the excoriation of a sane world.

Today, Nigeria is on the radar as a country where rule-breakers are garlanded. Rather than gripe and wail ceaselessly like a witch accused of killing her husband, we should rather embark on self-introspection because, in the words of Socrates, an unexamined life is not worth living. Another election season is coming. Will Canada and the world see a different Nigeria? If Fela were alive today, he probably would inflect his previous track and sing, “You be terrorist, I no be terrorist/Argument, argument, argue…” to explain this cacophony of denials between the APC, PDP and a Nigerian government which willingly leave the footpath and walk blindly in a maze of shrubs.

News

5 Benefits Of WhatsApp Business App For Small Entrepreneurs

Published

12 hours ago

August 17, 2025

Editor

The WhatsApp business app was built to help small entrepreneurs. This app has tools designed to reduce your workload. You can sort, automate, and quickly respond to customer messages — this enables quick interactions. You can also set up a profile for your business and catalogs, whereby you list your products, the prices, and other information for easy browsing.

Here are the benefits of the WhatsApp business app for small entrepreneurs:

1. Business Profile
WhatsApp Business has a feature where you can create a profile for your business. Here, you would share every necessary information about your business, including email address, business description, phone number, website, and physical store address if available. This is a way you can create visibility for your work and get customers to discover you.

2. Smart Messaging Tools
The smart messaging tools in the WhatsApp business app allow you to save and reuse messages you often send to customers. You would be able to answer many common questions with this tool, ‘quick replies.’

Another one is ‘automated messages’, which are sent to your customers when you’re not available to give responses, so they know when to expect your reply. Also, you can create a greeting message to introduce your business to buyers.

3. Messaging Statistics
This feature, messaging statistics, allows business owners to review every metric behind the messages being sent, such as the successfully sent messages, the ones that have been read, just delivered, and so on.

4. WhatsApp Web
You can use the account you use to send and receive messages on your phone on other devices such as a laptop, tablet, or desktop. So you don’t have to worry when you’re out of the house; you can still be responding to your customers.

5. WhatsApp catalog
Catalogs are for you to showcase your products to customers so they can check what they want and order from you. You don’t need to send every product price and description individually.

Catalogs allow you to group everything, including product code and any other information. This feature saves time, no need for multiple questions on what your items look like and the price.