Igboho has always been an absolutist. He is one-eyed and one-track-minded. Activists are infamously so. Igboho is worse because he is an illiterate dude with a motor mouth and an ego the size of the Redemption Camp. Combustible combo, that. He wanted a Yoruba Nation and decided we all wanted it and anyone who did not want it was an illegitimate child of Oduduwa and deserves a horrible life.
By Bamidele Johnson
I just watched a clip of Sunday Igboho, founder of the imaginary Yoruba Nation, warning that anyone planning to campaign in the Southwest for a presidential candidate other than Tinubu should think twice. No surprises there.
Igboho has always been verbally and emotionally incontinent. Still, it helps to remind him of a basic fact. The Southwest is part of Nigeria, not that of his comic-book republic. In a democracy, people are free to campaign for whoever they like, wherever they like. That is not a radical idea. It is the barest minimum requirement.
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What Igboho said is simply another expression of the intolerance that often hides behind political activism and noisy nationalism. The same intolerance showed up in Owerri over the weekend when the Village Boys Movement disrupted an event organised by the City Boys Movement.
The logic appears to be that political support is acceptable only when it favours one’s preferred candidate. Otherwise, everyone else should keep quiet or stay home. That is thuggery and it will birth more thuggery in a country with prodigious thug-producing capacity.
The irony is that Igboho, a bonafide political thug, spent years marketing a breakaway republic he created in his infirm mind. At one point, he even threatened that any Yoruba man who dared to run for president in 2023 would be shot because he had already declared his cartoon republic.
Today, the same man is loudly defending the campaign space of a Yoruba president within the Nigerian federation he supposedly rejected. It takes next level moral flexibility to move that quickly from secessionist warlord to enthusiastic cheerleader of the very system one claimed had collapsed.
His earlier performances were not exactly models of judgment either. He mocked Pastor Enoch Adeboye over the death of his son because the preacher did not think it was part of duty to turn the altar of the Redeemed Christian Church of God into a campaign platform for Yoruba Nation. Only a person completely unmoored from reason and tradition would think a personal tragedy is a legitimate political weapon.
The same man, during a 2021 virtual townhall meeting, said Tinubu and other Yoruba leaders are Fulani slaves. And just in case traditional rulers thought they were a special class, Igboho said the Ooni of Ife should be dealt with.
“Our leaders are lazy and slaves to Fulanis… Tinubu and other Yoruba politicians are Fulani slaves. Ooni should be dealt with,” he said in typically deranged fashion.
He would quickly apologise to the Ooni, following the nuclear blast of public disapproval his comment attracted. But those words had reconfirmed his status as an outstanding idiot and one fluent in poppycock.
What makes the whole spectacle more worrying is that there are still people who applaud this behaviour. They cheer threats, excuse intimidation and pretend it is all part of political activism. It is not. It is simply the politics of intolerance.
Igboho has always been an absolutist. He is one-eyed and one-track-minded. Activists are infamously so. Igboho is worse because he is an illiterate dude with a motor mouth and an ego the size of the Redemption Camp. Combustible combo, that. He wanted a Yoruba Nation and decided we all wanted it and anyone who did not want it was an illegitimate child of Oduduwa and deserves a horrible life.
Nations are usually negotiated into existence. They are not produced the way someone launches a new barbershop. Yet, we had people following him, including my former professor. This time, we will have people following him and his ilk to spread his gospel of intolerance.
Bamidele Johnson, journalist and public relations practitioner, wrote from Lagos
