Since the “Omo a ni, e je o se” campaign of 1982/83, Ibadan has come a long way in pressing its base politics of democratic domination.
Back then, during the 2nd Republic (1979-1983), it launched a desperate bid for its own to occupy the Agodi Government House, at the expense of Chief Bola Ige, the great Cicero of Esa-Oke and honourary Ibadan son himself, though of Ijesa ancestry.
Now, Ibadan makes even a more desperate stand, which likely might blow up in its face : that because it boasts the numbers, no other sub-ethnics in Oyo State: Ibarapa, Oke Ogun, Oyo Alaafin, Ogbomoso etc, is good enough for governor, no matter his or her brilliance or proven talent.
Ibadan — “running splash of rust/and gold-flung and scattered/among seven hills like broken/china in the sun”!
That’s classic and rustic Ibadan from the poetic lens of J.P. Clark-Bekederemo, famous Nigerian poet and playwright.
Being proud host to Nigeria’s first-ever university, the University of Ibadan, Ibadan is toast of poetic muses. It is also the undisputed capital of Yoruba culture and politics.
Grab Wole Soyinka’s Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years, and you’d savour how our own Nobel Laureate and this charmed city, of happy-go-merry yokels, intimately interacted: his boyhood and teen years at the Government College, Ibadan (GCI); and his precocious years at UI as one of the UCI (University College Ibadan) pioneering students.
You’d also see, post-Leeds University, UK, how our own WS, as research fellow at UI’s Institute of Drama, embarked on his first local series of experimental theatrical engagements and travel drama — the golden age of the Mbari Literati.
There, he cut his difficult tooth in life-long socio-political activism, in his intimate cut-and-thrust with the Nigerian state, across its many power generations.
Why in Ibadan, Maren — WS’s alter ego — as a Police detainee at Iyaganku, tasted a heart-rending spousal snub: dumped at his feet were his three tots by an irate wife, the cascade of dust, trailing madam’s vanishing car, spewed the ultimate disgust — others tended their young families like delicate flowers; you, Maren, blew precious time on arid activism!
It was during the rough-and-tumble of the “wild, wild West”, with Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Groupers and Chief Ladoke Akintola’s Demo army trying one another for size. From Ibadan accounts, Maren was an integral part of that campaign.
Aside from WS, UI was also nursery to Nigeria’s foundational intellectuals: Chinua Achebe, doyen of the African novel, Christopher Okigbo, the euphonic poet, historians J. F. Ade-Ajayi and Tekena Tamuno, lexical Solon, Prof. Ayo Banjo, who would later become pivotal vice chancellor in UI’s trying years of the 1980s, not to talk of later-generation poets and writers, like world-renowned poet, Prof. Niyi Osundare and ace playwright and essayist, Prof. Femi Osofisan.
So, in culture, taste and intellect, Ibadan is always up there, in the Olympian clouds.
Not so its politics — always the rut of antediluvian politicking. No wonder, WS grafted “Penkelemes” into his Ibadan autobiography. Ibadan politics is always a peculiar mess!
That obviously was ode to Adegoke Adelabu, aka Penkelemesi — perhaps Ibadan’s brightest and best politician of all ages, but patron saint of its atavistic politics.
Like the great Adelabu, the more Ibadan dazzling minds embrace modernity, the more their core craves their rambunctious past, like some powerful muse and compass. That has more or less defined Ibadan politics.
But back to “Omo a ni, e je o se”! Ige, the Kaduna Boy (title of his early life autobiography) had made quite a life for himself in Ibadan.
The boy whose Esa Oke folks once teased as gambari (northerner) when he first came down South (for his faultless Hausa: he could speak no word of Yoruba!), had become a formidable political Iroko in Ibadan, and beloved of Awo.
But then, came the split in Awo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). Ige’s razor-sharp tongue slashed and sliced former UPN friends-turned-foes; and ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) defectors, including ace bouncer, Busari Adelakun aka Eruobodo.
Ibadan threw, into the fray, one of their own, the maverick Dr. Omololu Olunloyo, for an epic Ibadan vs Ijesa/Ijebu political rumble, in the old West’s swashbuckling capital!
Olunloyo was — still is — a numbers and engineering genius. But his run was driven less by his acute mind; more by his crowing, gangling Ibadan nativity: Omo a ni, e je o se! (He’s our son, let him rule!)
It was Ibadan’s 1983 do-or-die dash for the Agodi Government House, long before President Olusegun Obasanjo made do-or-die the unfazed PDP battle roar of 2007. Little wonder: both polls, though 24 years apart, teemed with slashed throats, crushed skulls and hewn limbs!
Ige lost the battle — and kissed bye-bye his governorship. But everyone lost the war. Three months later, both Ige and Olunloyo, fierce rivals for Agodi Government House, were horrid guests at Agodi Government Jail — captives of the new military overlords!
Still, since that sweet-sour, jinx-breaking triumph, Ibadan has corralled the Oyo governorship as the virtual political arm of the Olubadan stool: Kolapo Isola (1992-1993), Lam Adesina (1999-2003), Rashidi Ladoja (2003-2007: with an interregnum of illegal impeachment), Abiola Ajimobi (2011-2019), Seyi Makinde (2019-date).
The only interregnum, in the Ibadan full-sweep, was 2007-2011, when Adebayo Alao-Akala, Ogbomoso native, held sway — but just because Ladoja and Lamidi Adedibu, self-named Alaafin Molete, and PDP’s Ibadan “garrison commander”, were feuding.
Ibadan’s saving grace? That Alao-Akala lacked class and dash; and his government dour and dull, as Ajimobi’s was sparkling and brilliant, perhaps?
Might a brighter, more charismatic or even more Machiavellian Alao-Akala have played the end of a hopelessly fissured Ibadan against its middle, unite the irate minorities and lock the Oluyole out of Agodi for a long, long while?
Right now, without Ibadan nativity, hardly anyone, across party lines, is considered fit for the Oyo governorship. It’s quite an epidemic!
Why, even supporters of Bayo Adelabu, then APC 2019 candidate but now Accord Party defector, were ecstatic the wild rumour that PDP’s Makinde was ethnic Ijesa, not Ibadan, was enough to prise off the Ibadan hoi polloi and knock off Makinde’s momentum. What neo-Penkelemesi, distinct from the original!
Thus far, Ajimobi, all class and dash, policy depth and glitz, has shone brightest in Ibadan’s galaxy of “omo a ni” governors: bested all his predecessors. It’s doubtful too if Makinde, his lone successor thus far, can hold a candle to him.
But the crunch might come when Ibadan plumbs its relay of own Alao-Akala, and a future Alaafin Molete feuds to the death with him, claiming a heady democratic right to feudalistic pork — as Adedibu did with Ladoja.
With its democratic plebs pissed beyond measure, and the minorities coalesced behind a brilliant pan-Oyo rising star, it’s then the Ibadan would realize — too late? —Nelson Mandela’s wise quip: better cement democratic rule, with solid minority rights and aspirations, than push crass majority rule that parasites on grubby numbers.
