My uncle, Akinjide Osuntokun, Emeritus Professor of History, has the rare privilege of living post independent political history of Nigeria in a relatively unique manner. In large measure, the uniqueness derives from his membership of the larger Osuntokun family- in which resides the potential to serve as a case study of the dynamics of recent Yoruba political history. As indicated above, you can also see he is a historian by learning and occupation.
I did not use the term professional because I’m not sure if historians can be called professional historians, in the same manner that I have never heard of professional physicists or biologists. Politically, he is a committed supporter of the South-west wing of the All Progressives Congress (APC), particularly the Ekiti State chapter, whose governor, Dr Kayode Fayemi, is a protégé of sorts to him. Both of them are extremely fond of each other. They share the commonality of attending Christ’s School, Ado Ekiti, for their secondary education and one was student of the other at the University of Lagos. I could not even get him, I mean my uncle, to agree with me that the naira guzzling government house under construction in Ado Ekiti is a white elephant project and a misplaced priority.
I suppose I’m now the most politically active member of our family and I tend towards the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). I’m a card-carrying member. He urges me, now and again, to reconsider my PDP partisan hue and seek family reunion with him in association with the APC. That is not likely to happen anytime soon. I do not believe in one party state (zone). My uncle is the last child of my grandmother and my father was the first and in between them is a gap of 20 years plus. And by dint of this peculiarity, he became the honorary first son of my dad.
Intellectually, he began to bloom between 1963 and 1966 when he studied for his first university degree at the University of Ibadan. These years were also the most politically difficult years for the Yoruba in the history of Nigeria-until 1993. They were doubly difficult for our family. My dad, Oduola Osuntokun, was western regional minister from 1955 to 1966 straddling the Premiership of Chiefs Obafemi Awolowo and Ladoke Akintola. The highly consequential and extremely bitter fractionalisation crisis of the Yoruba dominated party, Action Group (AG), played out within these three years. My dad took sides with Akintola and stoically grappled with the negative fallouts attendant on this choice all his life. To give you an idea of the kind of person my father was, he was one of the two ministers in the Akintola government cleared and exonerated by the late Justice Kayode Esho of any financial impropriety in public office.
Henceforth, it became inevitable that the political inclination of my dad marked him out as an ‘enemy’ of Awolowo and his camp followers. My father’s junior brother and Akinjide’s senior brother, the world famous medical scientist, Olukayode Osuntokun, was at the precise period of this political enmity, the personal doctor to Awolowo. It says a lot of Chief Awolowo that he could practically entrust his life to the brother of an ‘enemy’. The dialectics progresses further.
At the time his senior brother was ministering to the health of Awolowo, and when there was Yoruba tribal censure of any positive portrayal of Akintola, the junior brother defiantly opted to bring his intellectual prowess to the unsolicited service of the late Premier and authored a first class and sympathetic biography of the Akintola: ‘the life and times of SL Akintola’. On account of this effort, the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi, bestowed on him the traditional chieftaincy title last held by Samuel Johnson, the Arokin of Oyo-the royal historian of the imperial court of the Oyo-empire. Chief Awolowo was so impressed that he invited him to come and hear his side of the story and maybe write a sequel on him.
He was Nigeria’s ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany when the crisis over the annulment of the 1993 presidential election broke out and was recalled by General Sani Abacha in 1995 for his pro ‘NADECO’ views. He returned to his post as professor of history at the University of Lagos and continued from where he left in Bonn. I joined the Guardian newspaper as a columnist and member of the editorial board in 1996 and with the support and encouragement of the managing director and editor-in-chief, Mr Lade Bonuola, I took to a weekly challenge of the annulment in particular and the military dictatorship of Gen. Abacha. For my notoriety I was awarded membership of 13 Nigerians who typified opposition to Abacha by the newswatch magazine in 1997. The deliberate or inadvertent obfuscation of my name-Akintola and my uncle’s-Akinjide, was the last straw that broke the camel’s back and resulted in hauling the former diplomat into Abacha’s gulag. My published clarification to the effect that he was not the author of the weekly menace to the military dictatorship went unacknowledged
The last time I saw him, he gave me the surprise news that Akintola’s first son, Yomi Akintola, was the chief launcher at the presentation ceremony of the biography of late Rev. Oyediran-the legendary principal of Offa Grammar School and more significantly, the father of Professor Kayode Oyediran-Awolowo’s distinguished son-in-law. Long before now, Akintola’s son, Diran, had married the daughter of Sir Dele Ige-the younger brother of late Chief Bola Ige.
During the burial ceremony of my mother, earlier in the year, Segun Awolowo, came to support me for two days at Okemesi. I’m so comfortable and welcomed at Ikenne that mama, on occasions, sends me to either get water for her or call somebody at another part of the house. We are so much confident in our friendship and brotherliness that I routinely write critically of Chief Awolowo without any worries at how it would sit with Segun or Dr Tokunbo Awolowo-Dosunmu. When the inner caucus of the Yoruba unity forum was being constituted, I was the only member of my generation nominated to the nine-member group-at the instance of Dr Awolowo Dosunmu. I take no political position without consulting Segun and vice versa. Femi Fani-kayode and Jide Adeniji complete the quartet.
The late Ooni of ife, Adesoji Aderemi, was the grand patron of the AG and went on to become the first Nigerian Governor of the Western region. His protégé, Awolowo, deposed the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Adeyemi Adeniran in 1954. Yet it was the same Ooni Aderemi who recommended the deposed Alaafin’s son, the present Alaafin, as fit and proper for the Oyo throne, to the Western state commissioner of local government and chieftaincy affairs in 1970, Omololu Olunloyo. The struggle for the revalidation of the election of Chief Moshood Abiola as the President of Nigeria gave an instructive and unique interpretation to Yoruba political history. And it is that when confronted with a common affront, heroes emerge regardless of prior partisan affiliation. The martyrdom of Abiola himself proves the point. Before 1993, he was at the other end of the political spectrum from Awolowo.
A sizable number of personalities who stood up to be counted in the real time combat against the affront of the annulment between 1993 and 1998 had no association whatsoever with Afenifere and the Awolowo political camp. Many people, individually, took this decision because they felt their dignity as Yoruba was being challenged and assaulted not as membership or partisan obligation of any Yoruba pressure or interest group. The leader of the South-west APC, Senator Ahmed Bola Tinubu, falls in this category. He was a member of the late Shehu Yar’Adua’s political family, the Peoples Front (PF), in opposition to the Awoist camp in the Peoples Solidarity Party (PSP) -both of which were subsequently coerced and herded into the Social Democratic Party (SDP).
The persistent and tendentious mobilisation strategy recourse to the division of Yoruba politicians into heroes and traitors is ahistorical, ignorant and tragic. The logic of this recourse may even cast the Yoruba in APC as the traitors for collaborating with the historical ‘enemies’ of the Yoruba coupled with their sudden political flexibility on the strategic issue of national conference and restructuring. How is Akintola’s crime different from the new political formula of the South-west APC? Was he not the original philosopher of Yoruba alliance with the ‘North’? Equating Yoruba interest with membership of APC is self-serving and abusive. As far as Yoruba identity politics goes, there should be absolutely nothing that qualifies Tinubu as championing Yoruba cause and does not apply equally to Governor Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo State. Any definition of pan Yoruba vanguard that directly or indirectly precludes luminaries like Chiefs Reuben Fasoranti, Olanihun Ajayi, Ayo Adebanjo, Olu Falae, is to that extent a terminological misnomer and stands logic on its head.
I have mostly heard and sometimes witnessed the ‘spectacular achievements’ of the APC governors in the South-west and if they are so spectacular, there should be no need for anxiety driven recourse to McCarthyism and its latter day Yoruba variant of elevating an unresolved ancient political contention to the status of the holy grail of Yoruba politics. Those spectacular achievements should constitute free and automatic passage to reelection. Succession to the front row seat of Awolowo does not reside in stigmatising fellow Yoruba who disagree or disassociate with a particular political party, it is to be found in a body of solid intellectual work and personal discipline. The ultimate implication of hankering after Yoruba political monism is that a futuristic Yoruba nation is going to be a one party state; and makes the purveyors of the criminalisation of dissent a dangerous throwback to the era of one party dictatorship.
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