I fled Nigeria to stay alive for Yoruba nation struggle – Prof Akintoye
The leader of the Yoruba Self Determination Movement, Prof Banji Akintoye, speaks with WALE AKINSELURE on moves by the movement to achieve its agenda and the President Bola Tinubu administration
It’s been a while since the letter by the Yoruba Nation proponents was submitted to the United Kingdom government. What’s the feedback?
Yes, we knew from the beginning that we were dealing with one of the most powerful governments in the world and that it is not something you can expect a response to in a month or two. But we have got a general kind of acknowledgement that our letter was being attended to.
When was that?
It was after we submitted the letter.
Do you think the UK government is giving your letter the needed consideration?
It’s the British government. We cannot rush them; so, that does not mean they are not giving it the needed importance. They are doing it in their own way.
Can you restate the precise requests in the letter?
Almost thousands of people have asked me that question and I’m not the only person they have asked. They have asked other people in the leadership of our struggle. The answer we have been giving is that this is a letter with great confidentiality. We’ve written it to one of the most important governments in the world. It will be diplomatically improper for us to be revealing the contents of it to anybody.
You sent another, most likely similar letter, to the Nigerian President, demanding a peaceful breakaway. Any feedback yet?
They are working on it. We have seen evidence that our letter is causing them some trouble. But they really don’t have to have any trouble with us. Certain things they must take into consideration. First, we have a right to ask for the self-determination of our people. The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People affirms very clearly that indigenous people in the world have a right to self-determination and separation from the country to which they currently belong; that they must do it peacefully and not violently and in a disruptive manner. And we are following those directions very carefully. We published a manual before we sent our letter to the United Nations because we knew that that was the kind of thing they would ask. They would look at, in judging our requests, whether or not the people making the request are acting violently, or disruptively. And we want them to be sure that we are not. So, in 2020, we sat down and wrote a manual. I sat down and wrote a manual for our struggle. The title of the manual is, “The Yoruba Nation Chooses the Noble Path To its Noble Goal.” We have sent it to many countries in the world. We have sent it to the United Nations. We sent it to former President Muhammadu Buhari. All over the world, we have received acclaim for what we have written.
So, in all your letters, you claim that your demand for self-determination stands!
Yes, of course, why are you asking that? Did you think we would give it up? Don’t you hear our voices in the streets? Yoruba Nation now, no going back.
But there’s a Yoruba man presently as the President of Nigeria. Don’t you now see the need to rally around a fellow kinsman?
Yes, that’s not unreasonable. But it is also not unreasonable for us to look at what is happening to our people. You are talking of only one Yoruba man. We are talking about the 60 million Yoruba people. And we should abandon them into a terrible fate because one of us is the President of Nigeria? Or ignore what has been happening to us in Nigeria since independence and say now our boy is President of Nigeria? So, we should behave as if those things don’t matter! As if they don’t matter today and will not matter in our future? No sensible people would do a thing like that.
Some might argue that herdsmen’s attacks on Yoruba people, which fuelled the Yoruba self-determination agitation, have subsided compared to the period under President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, suggesting that you should reconsider your push for Yoruba nation.
It has not calmed down. I don’t know where people get the information that it has calmed down. The thing is that our people are better prepared to meet them and to handle them. They have the instruction from the leadership of our struggle that when they have an encounter with the Fulani, they must not make the usual kind of noise that they were making in the past. So, there is a statistics published here by the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics, published in December. It has the following very scary details. It says that between May 2023 and the end of April 2024, 614,935 people were killed, while they kidnapped 2,235,954. In the Yoruba South-West, the number of people killed in those 12 months is 15,693. I am in a tough situation, this tough position, whereby I get the reports of every one of these encounters. In Yoruba land, it is still rampant.
So, no going back on the agitation?
We are not going back. We must get out of Nigeria. Or our nation will perish.
What form of getting out are you talking about? Is it that Yoruba in Nigeria or all over the globe would move to a particular location?
We mean, the Yoruba people in Nigeria, roughly 55 to 60 million people. We want to establish a country of our own.
Are you establishing that Yoruba country within the geographical space of Nigeria?
There will be no Nigeria where we have our country. But if the rest want to continue as Nigeria, they are okay.
Is there a timeline for achieving this?
People who fight this kind of fight always believe that it can be achieved tomorrow. We believe that we can achieve this in the next month or two. And everything is pointing to the probability that we will be able to do so. Nigeria will soon become incapable of holding us down. Okay.
Who are those on the same page with you, those at the forefront of this struggle because just you and Sunday Igboho seem to be the very focal points?
They are within Nigeria and in the diaspora, large numbers of people, millions of people, are in this struggle.
Some people claiming to be fighting for the Yoruba nation stormed the Oyo State Secretariat, Ibadan, last year. They are presently languishing in prison. Though you distanced yourself from them, they claimed to be pushing the same agenda as yours. Have you abandoned those people to their fate?
My attitude is that all Yoruba people are mine. I don’t abandon Yoruba people. However, in the case of these people, led by the woman, who claims to be a former wife of our leader, MKO Abiola, we have discovered that she’s doing all she’s doing for pay. Some people, some powerful northerners, are sponsoring her to do what she’s doing to disrupt our struggle, to tag us as a terrorist group, so that the Federal Government will then proscribe our movement. That was why we needed to come out quickly and let the world know that we have nothing to do with them, they have nothing to do with us. She’s not acting honestly, she’s acting for pay.
You are still a Nigerian, notwithstanding the Yoruba nation’s struggle. What is your impression of the policies and programmes of President Bola Tinubu?
I’m still a Nigerian until we have our country. I’m travelling the world and I still use a Nigerian passport. The big question is, do I want to continue to be a Nigerian? The answer is no. Regarding the current Nigerian president and his governance, I’m sorry for my brother. He has entered into a very tough quagmire. The economy has collapsed. The economy collapsed before he came in. The Nigerian economy collapsed. The amount of stealing, the amount of robberies, and the amount of corruption was unbelievable. We know that the Fulani have a mighty war chest in the world for the project of conquering all the peoples of Nigeria, all the indigenous peoples of Nigeria, and seizing their homeland and turning everything into a Fulani homeland. We know that they have large caches of weapons located in various places in West Africa, in the Sahel, and even beyond the Sahel, in the southern deserts of North Africa. It’s not politics. This is a matter of life and death. When I say the economy has collapsed, everybody agrees. Dr Chukwuma Soludo, who was formerly the governor of the Central Bank, made a statement soon after Tinubu became president. He said by the time Tinubu was being sworn in, the Nigerian economy had collapsed. He said it was like a dead horse, that some people were somehow managing to keep looking like a horse. The Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Wale Edun, said before the session in the Senate that we have reached a point where we cannot even hope to be able to borrow money anymore to run the government because already 98 per cent of the federal revenues are being consumed on servicing foreign debts. That is a big thing. A day or two later or earlier, the security adviser, Nuhu Ribadu, told a meeting of security chiefs from all over Nigeria that this government inherited a bankrupt economy and that there was no money anywhere to run the country, the government. That was two days after Wale Edun’s statement at the Senate. So, with what Tinubu is facing, I admire his courage, but I don’t think anybody can accomplish what he is trying to accomplish.
What if Tinubu personally reaches out to you to back down on the self-determination struggle?
Tinubu knows me very well. He knows that I act on principle and also have a lot of information at my disposal. So, he is not going to do that. I am sure that he will believe that I will feel insulted if he asks me to back down.
One would have thought Prof Banji Akintoye would be in Nigeria, leading the agitation from the front. Why are you not in Nigeria?
Every living thing wants to live. I want to live too. I want to live to accomplish the struggle and to hand the Yoruba nation to the Yoruba people. There were plans to get rid of me. Fortunately, we got the information and, within 24 hours, in fact, the next morning, I had to leave Nigeria. It was that desperate. I had to leave Nigeria that morning, the next morning. I got the information about this time today and by tomorrow at 7 am, I was driving out of Nigeria. That is it. You see exactly what happened to Sunday Igboho later. Igboho also left. That’s what they had planned for me. Unfortunately, the young men who gave me the tip-off didn’t say it was also for Sunday Igboho. So when it happened to Sunday Igboho, about two to three weeks later, I was very unhappy. If I had known, I would have told him before and he would have left the country and they would not have come to his house.
