Olayomi Koiki and Morakinyo Akinosun
Yoruba activist and philanthropist, Chief Dr Sunday Adeyemo, popularly known as Sunday Igboho, has cautioned the Federal Government of Nigeria against intimidating Richard Montgomery, the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, over the activist’s recent petition on the Yoruba Nation movement.
However, the activist described a reported summoning of Montgomery by the Nigerian government as unnecessary, labeling it an attempt to pressure the diplomat.
Sunday Igboho, 52, insisted that such moves would not derail the ongoing push for a Yoruba Nation.
“The British government colonized Nigeria, and we are well within our rights to submit a petition to them regarding our demand for a sovereign Yoruba nation. Nigeria gained independence on October 1, 1960, from the British government, but the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates in 1914 was a decision made by the British,” he said in a statement on Wednesday.
Igboho argued that Yoruba people have a constitutional right to demand secession 100 years after the amalgamation, and branded the union a “marriage of inconvenience.”
“The main reason we submitted our letter to the UK government is to have them serve as a witness before the United Nations whenever the issue of the Yoruba nation is brought up at an international level,” the activist said.
He added that the standard response time for such official letters is around two weeks, suggesting that Prime Minister Starmer might not have even read the petition yet.
However, Igboho reassured the Yoruba people that the intimidation tactics of the Nigerian government would not deter the movement.
“We remain committed to peaceful, non-violent, and legitimate methods of ensuring the birth of a Yoruba nation. Our people should remain calm and resolute, confident in our collective struggle for emancipation so that we can harness our great potential in a vibrant Yoruba nation once it is created out of the current Nigerian contraption,” he said.
Igboho further stated that the summoning of Montgomery in Abuja would not halt the campaign, adding that he would not hesitate to rally global support for the Yoruba sovereignty cause.
“We will continue to seek international backing and bring our agenda before the global community,” Igboho’s statement added.
NIGERIA AND SELF-DETERMINATION ISSUES
Agitation for self-determination is a burning issue in modern day Africa, and Nigeria is not left out.
The right to self-determination is a fundamental and inalienable human right. It is enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations (UN), the International Covenants of Human Rights (common Article 1) and the Covenant of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO).
Essentially, the right to self-determination is the right of a people to determine its own destiny. In particular, the principle allows a people to choose its own political status and to determine its own form of economic, cultural and social development. Exercise of this right can result in a variety of different outcomes ranging from political independence through to full integration within a state.
Self-determination has two aspects: the internal which is synonym with democracy, and the external which is also known as secession.
Regrettably Nigeria through the wordings on its constitution has no provision for the external aspect of self-determination. The preamble of the Nigerian Constitution which starts with “we the people” demonstrates the colouration of the Nigerians democratic entity which detached itself from secession. Hence, the various agitations for self-determination in Nigeria can only survive on the premise that the internal aspect of self-determination is prioritized.
The External aspect of these rights ceased to be fashionable within the comity of Nations in post-colonial era in Africa, rather the principle of utipossidetis is well articulated in every region for stability and co-existence of people. Although in extreme cases, outright break-away could be permitted as a last resort, this is usually when human survival is precarious and no hope for remedial solution in co-existence.
People of the southeast Nigeria had cordial relationship with the rest of the country prior to January 15, 1966 coup which was misconstrued as Igbo agenda together with General Aguiyi Ironsi’s (the then Head of State) failure to execute the coup plotters who lopsidedly killed Northern leaders. This resulted in the July 29, 1966 counter coup which led to radical turn of events for the southeasterners following an eventual pogrom against them.
Over two hundred people of southeast origin were killed in one night in Lagos. Women and children were also killed in the North. The high incidence of massacre made southeasterners to seek self-determination as their lives and properties appeared unprotected by the federal government, hence the Nigerian civil war. After the war, government formulated policies that impoverished southeasterners, ranging from abandoned property to twenty pounds policy and indigenization decree.
These policies fueled some feelings of exclusion and marginalization amongst them and have continued to form the basis of their suspicion coupled with herdsmen’s nefarious activities which have contributed to renewed agitations for self-determination. Using secondary data derived from scholarly publications, the study adopted social contract theory as the theoretical thrust of the paper to ascertain the causes of continuous agitations for selfdetermination in southeast, Nigeria.
The remote and immediate causes of the agitations were descriptively discussed and analyzed. It was objectively deduced that people of the Southeast are marginalized and excluded in certain critical areas of governance. The study recommended all-inclusiveness among others as panaceas to halt further escalation of agitations.
YORUBA NATION
In 2021, Chief Dr Sunday Adeyemo demanded end to Fulani herdsmen attacks that have cost lives of thousands. He asked the Fulani people to vacate all the forests in South-West.
As the Akoni Oodua of Yorubaland, Sunday Igboho is known for fighting for the rights of the Yoruba people. He is currently advocating for a sovereign Yoruba country.
On the 1st of July, 2021, the combined team of the operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS), Nigeria Army and other security agencies – carried out a deadly raid on Adeyemo’s Ibadan residence around 1 am in the mid-night.
The raid — which lasted for nearly 2 hours left 2 unarmed persons dead, the security operatives went away with their bodies. The remains of the victims are yet to be released.
About 12 Igboho’s associates were also whisked to Abuja during the raid that occurred during former President Muhammadu Buhari administration, they were later granted bail by a competent court.
An Oyo State High court sitting in Ibadan branded the invasion of Adeyemo’s residence a breach of his fundamental human rights, and subsequently ordered the federal government to pay him N20 billion for damages. The verdict was set aside by an Appeal Court.
The conflict between Fulani herdsmen and farmers in Nigeria has been a longstanding issue, resulting in violence and loss of lives.
The Fulani people are believed to be the largest semi-nomadic group globally, found across West and Central Africa. In Nigeria, some continue to live as semi-nomadic herders, while others have moved to cities. Unlike city dwellers, the nomadic groups spend most of their lives in the forest and are often involved in clashes with farming communities, and also engage in kidnapping for ransom. They herd their animals across vast areas, frequently clashing with local farmers.
The herders now bear sophisticated weapons and use them to terrorize many parts of the country, with security operatives ignoring many of the attacks for allegedly not getting orders to go after the criminals.
Several brutal attacks happened under former President Muhammadu Buhari, who was born to a Fulani family on 17 December 1942, in Daura, a town in Nigeria’s northwestern Katsina State.
The continuous unprovoked attacks triggered resistance in South-East region, inhabited by Igbo people and South-West region, inhabited by the Yoruba people.
No fewer than 29,000 Yoruba people have been killed by Fulani terrorists in South-West Nigeria, according to the National Leader of the Yoruba Self-Determination Movement, Professor Emeritus Adebanji Akintoye.
Prof Akintoye said that the suspected criminals continue to rape women and subject others to all sorts of atrocities.
BIAFRA
Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) was formed in 2012 as a peaceful movement, and launched an armed wing in south-eastern Nigeria in 2020, saying it was doing so to defend the Igbo ethnic group.
IPOB wants a group of states in the south-east of Nigeria, which mostly comprises the Igbo ethnic group, to break away from the country and form an independent nation called Biafra.
Biafra campaign first gained impetus in the 1960s, when an Igbo army officer, Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, declared the birth of Biafra following killings of south-easterners in northern Nigeria.
But that attempt ended after a bloody three-year war that led to more than a million deaths from fighting, starvation and a lack of medical care.
The idea of Biafra has never gone away and despite arrests of its members, illegally detained Nnamdi Kanu’s IPOB movement has seen a recent swell in its numbers, with the group currently running a government in-exile led by its Prime Minister Simon Ekpa.
Simon Ekpa came to national prominence after he announced on his Facebook page in 2021 that Nnamdi Kanu had ordered him to assume the role of broadcaster on the group’s radio station, Radio Biafra.
HOW NIGERIA WAS FORMED
On January 1, 1914, Lord Frederick Lugard, the governor of both the Northern Nigeria Protectorate and the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria, signed a document consolidating the two, thereby creating the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. Forty-six years later in 1960, Nigeria became an independent state.
Anniversaries are times for reflection, and given that today, just 110 years after amalgamation, the country is still grappling with its national identity and a reanimated separatist movement, it is worth reflecting on how exactly Nigeria became Nigeria.
Before Europeans arrived in the territory that is now Nigeria, a number of different civilizations existed whose presence is still felt today. For example, in the north, Islam was predominant. In the nineteenth century, there were two Islamic empires, the Sokoto Caliphate and the Bornu Empire. To the southwest lay numerous Yoruba city-states that generally had in common animist religion and were only sometimes united. To the southeast was an Igbo kingdom, Nri, and a collection of semi-autonomous towns and villages in the Niger River delta. Such regions were linguistically, religiously, and politically distinct.
While other colonial powers, such as the Portuguese, became involved in the region by way of the slave trade as early as the fifteenth century, the British arrived in force only in the eighteenth century. It was not until 1861 that they formally occupied their first Nigerian territory, Lagos, in a bid to protect Christian converts and trading interests, and to further their anti-slavery campaign.
In 1884, the British occupied what would later become the Southern Protectorate and the Northern Protectorate piecemeal from 1900 to 1903. By 1903, the British controlled the territory that comprises modern-day Nigeria, but as three separate administrative blocks.
As early as 1898, the British considered combining the then-three protectorates to reduce the administrative burden on the British and allow the rich south to effectively subsidize the much less economically prosperous north. (The Lagos colony was later incorporated into the Southern Nigeria Protectorate for budgetary reasons).
This is what Lord Lugard was referring to in his infamous description of how a marriage between the “rich wife of substance and means” (the south) and the “poor husband” (the north) would lead to a happy life for both. Some have suspected that Lugard was also referring to the political supremacy of the north over the south.
The name “Nigeria” was coined by the future Lady Lugard in an 1897 London Times article.
With Lord Lugard’s arbitrary conception of Nigeria in mind, one can begin to see the many and varied problems colonialism created in Nigeria, across West Africa, and around the world.
Not least among these problems, for Nigeria in particular, was the problem of a unifying national identity. It is no wonder that diverse peoples, forcibly united into single states, sometimes turn to separatism. Contemporary examples range from Biafra (Nigeria), to Ambazonia (Cameroon), to Somaliland (Somalia), and to Azawad (Mali).