By Suyi Ayodele

What Nigerians saw in Ibadan on Saturday and the reaction from Abuja were settled by Ifá, very long ago.

An Odù Ifá— Ogbè Ìresà, which, through ellipsis, can also take the morphological realisation of Ogbè’Sá.—speaks to it. You won’t have here every line of the Odù Ifá (Ifá Corpus), but I will make its essence clear through the Ese Ifá (Ifá Verse), Òsá Eleye.

Leaders of opposition political parties gathered in Ibadan last Saturday under the hosting of Governor Seyi Makinde. At the end of the meeting, they took a far-reaching decision: for the 2027 general elections, they would field a single presidential candidate against President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

I called an elderly friend of the government to discuss the development, drawing his attention to the communiqué—particularly the resolve “to work towards fielding one presidential candidate…to rescue our nation and her long-suffering masses.”

He responded with an esoteric dismissal: ““Fi wón sílè. Ìmò tú, ìmò jo; ìmò enini kìí bá enini dal.é” Let them be, he meant; plans made in the morning by dews disappear before nightfall. I told him he was being fatalistic. “That,” he replied, “is what the moment demands.”

I suggested the opposition might actually mean business. He disagreed. To him, the ruling party and President Bola Tinubu already have the field secured; no coalition, however grand, can upset the President’s political permutations.

I kept silent. When he pressed me, I told him he was ignoring history—particularly the lessons encoded in the Yoruba religion, Ifá. He sounded amused. “Then be specific,” he said. Heaven knows I dislike explaining our own culture to those who should guard it. Here is the story.

A people, oppressed by a powerful and unseen force, went to consult Orunmila. The victims were the Irúnmolè mókànlénírínwó—the 401 deities—tormented by the Eleye, the witches. One by one, they resisted. One by one, they were broken. Their children were taken, their strength drained, their labour turned into servitude. Disunity was their undoing.

When the burden became unbearable, they sought counsel. The leader of the deities spoke to the Òpèlè (divination chain), inaudibly, as all Ifá clients are wont to do. The old diviner cast the divination, studied it and uttered the following words: “Òsá Eleye kángun kàngun.” The uttered words are praise names of the Odù, which deals with the activities of witches and other wicked elements. Whenever our mothers show up in any divination, we were told in those days, they must be praised.

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Ifá’s message was simple: what you cannot defeat alone, you confront together. They were told to return after ìtàdógún (seventeen days) to agree on a common front. Unity, Ifá, insisted, would make them like the elephant no sword dares confront.

They returned, resolved. Sacrifice was prescribed. Strategy was given. And one instruction stood out: when the enemy comes, speak with one voice.

Then came the turning point. Èsù, who was given a generous portion of the sacrificial items, carried his share of the sacrifice into the camp of the witches and planted distrust among them. How? With a single wrap of èko presented, he said it was 200; he thus provoked suspicion, envy, and rebellion. The once-cohesive force began to fracture from within.

The witches lost trust in each other. Betrayal and rebellion became the order of the day. Those who lost out in the sharing of the one wrap of èko mistaken for a basketful became suddenly bold and confronted the Àgbà Eleye (the lead witch). Members of Àgbà Eleye’s kitchen cabinet left her and joined the 401 deities. There, they leaked all the secrets of the Eleye to the deities.

By the time Àgbà Eleye knew what was happening, it was too late. Whenever the witches tried to attack the 401 deities, there was always a renegade Eleye to tell the deities the secrets behind the moves, and the deities would be ready with the antidote. The biggest of Àgbà Eleye’s lieutenants who joined the deities was the one called Emèrè (the spirit child, intimate with both worlds). Our elders knew, from time immemorial, that Emèrè ni oko àjé (Emèrè is the husband of the witch).

Emèrè did incalculable damage to the Eleyes. This is why, to date, among the real Babalawos, whenever the Odù on witches surfaces on the divination board, Emèrè is the messenger that will be sent to go and confront the witches. This is so because it is axiomatic that: omo iná làá rán sí iná (it is the child familiar with a furnace that is sent to combat combustion).

The defections from the camp of the witches were devastating. Secrets were leaked. Emèrè’s defection became the decisive advantage. What force could not achieve, fracture did. The hunters became the hunted.

By the time the witches understood what was happening, it was too late. Against a united front, weakened by internal betrayal, they had lost.

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My interlocutor asked me who among the opposition leaders the Emèrè is. I politely asked him to figure it out. He never liked it. But I reminded him that a diviner’s job ends after reciting the panegyrics of the Odù on the divination board. I could not have contravened the practice of our fathers of old!

Nigerians are groaning under the yoke of the present administration. The opposition is daily deliberately depleted. The common man looks up to the heavens for succour. Only a collective will of the people can change the current political (dis)order!

So, the coming together of the opposition parties in Ibadan is too significant to be ignored. That move alone points at something: Nigerians would not fold their arms while the ruling party and the President make Nigeria of 2027 like the Nigeria of 1964-1965, when the then Western Nigeria Regional Government and the Central Government introduced a strange fire of ‘unopposed candidates’ on the sacred altar of democracy.

That was what the Ibadan Opposition Political Parties National Summit foregrounded, to wit: “That we shall resist all machinations by the APC to foist a one-party state on Nigeria and fight for the survival of multi-party democracy in our country.” There was no prevarication there. That, to me, is a strong message for the ruling party and President Tinubu to take a second look at their political strategies for 2027. The only option that Nigerians will embrace is participatory democracy!

Again, that thinking, I presume, informed why Governor Makinde, in his remarks at the summit, warned that: “For those that are carrying on as if there’s no tomorrow, they should remember that ‘Operation Wetie’ started from here. This is the same Wild Wild West.”

Makinde’s remarks have since generated heated debates. The ruling party and its supporters and sympathisers labelled it an incitement. I don’t think they are right. Governor Makinde’s statement does not come across as an incitement. It is more of a warning, warning against the calamity that may follow should anyone attempt to alter the political structure of a multi-party system to a sole candidacy of the incumbent President. The summit said that it would not work. Makinde merely re-echoed it with the warning of the dire consequences of such an anomaly!

We need to get a deeper understanding of ‘Operation Wetie’. The 1964-1965 political conflagration known as ‘Operation Wetie’ was the reaction of the Western Region people to the involvement of the then Central Government of Sir Tafawa Balewa and the ruling party at the centre, the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), in the crisis of the Action Group (AG), led by the Avatar, Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

What triggered the political inferno was the unholy collision between the then electoral commission and the ruling party at the central and regional levels, imposing candidates on the people of the Western Region by declaring the candidates unopposed.

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This is exactly what the APC is building its present electoral permutations on. It is useless denying the fact that the APC, in active collusion with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), and the supple National Assembly under the pathetic leadership of Godswill Akpabio, wants President Tinubu as the sole candidate for the 2027 presidential election! Tinubu and APC want a coronation and not an election.

The telltales are all over the place. The inherent dangers in such a political heist stare us all in the face. That is what Makinde’s warning is all about. A sole presidential candidacy will set the nation on fire. It happened over 60 years ago. Ibadan rose to the occasion and defended multi-party democracy. It is instructive that the opposition parties also chose Ibadan to issue the warning. All Tinubu, the APC, INEC and the Alájobí political philosophers have to do is to allow the dog and the red monkey to go a-hunting! The sky should be wide enough for birds of all plumage to fly without hindrances.

Operation Wetie was a dark period in the political history of the Western Region, in particular, and Nigeria in general. It was Wetie that set the stage for everything that is wrong with Nigeria – from the coups, to the civil war, to the failure of Nigeria to get its leadership right for over 60 years!

It is because we don’t want Operation Wetie that is why we are shouting that the ruling party should not ask its supporters to go and scatter opposition like Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff to President Tinubu, asked Leke Abejide, the House of Representatives member representing Yagba Federal Constituency, to do. Gbajabiamila, at Abejide’s wife’s 50th birthday ceremony, told him to remain in the African Democratic Congress (ADC) and “fight and scatter” it.

That was why we frowned on the un-presidential and un-statesmanlike charge of President Tinubu to the Senate President, Akpabio, to go and scatter the other side! We are loud enough: President Tinubu, the APC and INEC should not use the template of 1964-1965 of returning their candidates unopposed for the 2027 elections. If Tinubu has done creditably well, let his works speak for him. If the President believes that he has given his best, let his hawk strike in the open!

No candidate or party should be prevented from submitting either nomination forms or a list of candidates, as the case may be. The umpire, INEC, should not only be unbiased, it must be seen to be unbiased. This is why the clamour for the removal of Professor Joash Ojo Àmúpìtàn, the INEC Chairman, would not go away easily. It is fatal to license a compulsive murderer to perform surgeries.

The Western Regional Government and the ruling Central Government of 1964-1965 did exactly the same thing APC, INEC and Tinubu are planning or doing now, before all the genies of Operation Wetie were released from their bottle!

The appeal to Alájobí sentiment would not hold water. The proponents of Alájobí philosophy of ethnic loyalty should not forget that the economic crises created by the perfidious Tinubu administration spare no tribe and respect no clan. It is like the rain; it has neither foes nor friends!