THE Yoruba self-determination activist, Sunday Igboho (real name Sunday Adeyemo), presents a frightful dilemma for the Yoruba people and everyone enamoured of his style in confronting and defeating the atrocities of violent and rapacious herdsmen, particularly in the Southwest. On the one hand, the cause of freedom which he emblematises resonates very well with farmers and travelers in the region who have suffered violence at the hands of rampaging herdsmen. On the other hand, his style, tactics and general irreverence make many people who acknowledge the nobility of his cause to wince. They winced all the more last week when in a Facebook video Mr Igboho trivialised and politicised the death of one of Pastor Enoch Adeboye’s sons, Oluwadamilare, a pastor. That trivialisation probably reflects Mr Igboho’s iconoclasm and poses a great dilemma to many Yoruba self-determination activists who yearn for a better and more balanced and reflective man to lead them, someone whom they can trust and believe in.
In the widely disseminated video, Mr Igboho not only refused to offer his condolences, because he concluded, without evidence, that the respected pastor opposed Yoruba self-determination, he also rained curses on all who would oppose the cause he stands for, asking God to kill their wives and sons. In other words, the Yoruba self-determination cause has become, for him, a sacred duty both to Mr Igboho’s amorphous group and to God Himself. It has become a duty for which, in deference to Mr Igboho, God is obligated to commit mass murder. With the curses he rained on all those opposed to him and what he represents, Mr Igboho also suggests that every Yoruba man is bound to support him on pain of death. The interpretation is that he seemed persuaded that the death of Pastor Oluwadamilare was due to Pastor Adeboye’s presumed opposition to Yoruba self-determination.
It is not just Mr Igboho’s presumptuousness that should worry the sensible and judicious, nor his poor logic and lack of reflectiveness; the Yoruba must also worry that they seem to repose extraordinary hope and confidence in the ability and judgement of a capricious man and activist. Though Mr Igboho tried to walk back his statement and curses, insisting that he did not mock the pastor over his son’s death, and even attempted to philosophise about death, no one believed him. The damage was already done. He recanted only because the backlash was total and unsparing, and perhaps fearing that he could lose the popular support he gorges on. He not only now comes across as unfeeling and irreverent in his purport to lead the Yoruba to secession, he also drives home the point many analysts, including this writer, have made about his immaturity, dictatorial inclinations, intolerance, and vaulting ambition which years of being a minor political enforcer has engendered in him.
Mr Igboho may be a man of courage, but he must ask himself, if he has the capacity, whether he is also a man of wisdom, or at least a man capable of even a modicum of reflection. He has found himself numbered among those whom the Yoruba cause means a lot, a man ready to stake all he has, including his life. His passion for the cause probably led some respected Yoruba leaders to repose confidence in him and to egg him on in his campaign for Yoruba self-determination. But Mr Igboho is incapable of self-reflection, and Yoruba leaders who accept him without constraining his volubility and abrasiveness must bear vicarious responsibility for his dangerous iconoclasm, an iconoclasm clearly not limited to his irreverence for elders and religious leaders. The leaders’ uncritical acceptance of Mr Igboho reflects more savagely on their maturity and idiosyncrasies than on the controversial character and intellectual deficiencies of the activist. Power – at least such as the little fame that has accompanied Mr Igboho’s actions in the past few months – in the hands of an untested man accustomed to years of political enforcement on the political and partisan fringes could become truly apocalyptic.
Pastor Adeboye has taken the death of his exceedingly gifted pastor son with considerable spiritual aplomb. It is partly because he understands far more than Mr Igboho, and others who think like the activist, that every parent is a custodian of his children, and that no one, not even the most anointed or gifted ecclesiast, could determine who lives or dies, who is healed or not healed, and who attains the peak of his calling in politics or in religion. Pastor Adeboye’s knowledge of spiritual matters has reflected admirably in his statements and demeanour since the passing of his son, and in his grief as a human being, which he has balanced between resignation and empathy. He has managed in the process to encourage the faint-hearted and those struggling in their faith in, and knowledge of, God. His fortitude has been tremendously helpful in demonstrating how to relate with God regardless of adversity. It takes a man of unfathomable spiritual depth to respond the way he has done, a response the impressionable Mr Igboho is clearly unable to muster, let alone understand.
It is suspected that many Yoruba leaders will henceforth be wary of Mr Igboho and his impetuousness. Though he recanted his views on Pastor Adeboye, the world now knows exactly who he is as a Yoruba activist, what he thinks of those around him, how his mind works, and what drives him. They will now suspect that his Yoruba self-determination cause simply masks a viler instinct for narcissism and tyranny, an instinct that is doubtless dangerous to himself and the cause(s) he claims to champion. It is the tragedy of self-determination campaigns that their many promoters are often motivated by ambition, greed, messianism, and dangerous behavioural flaws. It is, therefore, clearly not enough that a cause is right, noble or even sacred; it must also ineluctably be championed by people who exemplify exalted beliefs, by people who are psychologically balanced, able to deploy ethical tools to prosecute great causes, and in the face of opposition and provocations, maintain the sanguineness, foresightedness, level-headedness and composure that canonise their causes.
Source: www.thenationonlineng.net
May 16, 2021
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