Cracks In The House Of Oduduwa Republic

While it had been predicted that there would be no concrete agreement among the people of the South West (Yoruba) on the formation of an Oduduwa nation outside of Nigeria, the current situation and voices emerging now appear to be proving otherwise.

There were no dissenting voices at first when the clamour for the Republic began and grew in strength, especially when outrage over Fulani atrocities in the region grew.

It’s likely that they were afraid of being targeted or branded traitors.

Even those who would stand to benefit greatly from the republic’s creation and those who felt threatened that their interests in Nigeria’s current system of governance would vanish were deafeningly silent.

They stayed silent and pretended that nothing was at stake because the tension was so strong that they couldn’t afford to say something that would contradict the crowd’s mood or could be misinterpreted.

But now that the tension has dissipated, and knowing the people of the South West for who they are, as people with independent minds who believe in freedom of expression and who cannot be cowed when it comes to speaking their minds, some of them have come out of their shells and determined to speak what they believe to be the true positions of things, as they see them.

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Given the current situation in which the people of the South West find themselves, a number of people have come out to either condemn the Oduduwa Republic outright or indirectly tell the agitators why it would not work. They prefer restructuring of Nigeria, which would give all the federating units the autonomy to develop in the way they want.

The argument of such people thus was that the region would benefit more than when it goes as a separate entity because it has contributed so much to Nigeria than other regions or geopolitical zones as it were.

They also argued that, while some zones appear to be involved in the agitations and appear to be siding with the southwest, they are concerned that, at the last minute, these zones, especially the South East, which believes the South West scuttled her attempt to leave Nigeria in the past, would abandon the agitations out of fear or determination to avenge or inflict more wounds their struggles.

It was also suggested that the South South and the Middle Belt, which tend to be involved in the same step based on what they are currently witnessing, are likely to back out in the end, exposing the Southwest to a civil war they did not bargain for.

Other schools of thought, on the other hand, assumed that the separation could be accomplished if other elements were decided and agreed upon, allowing the separation to be achieved by mutual consensus at a round table, similar to what occurred in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and other places in the past that were in the same situation as Nigeria.

It’s worth noting, however, that some of the loudest critics of the Oduduwa Republic are some of the region’s most powerful leaders and even traditional rulers. The outburst of the sitting Governor of Ondo State, Arakunrin Rotimi Akeredolu, who dissociated the state from the plans to leave Nigeria, perplexed the citizens of the region the most.