Return of the native

Yoruba nation activist Sunday Adeyemo, better known as Sunday Igboho, is back on the circuit. He lately served notice that he is back to dislodge killer herdsmen from Yorubaland and would not be needing the assistance of conventional security agencies to do that, but only self-help collaboration of fellow natives.

Igboho only just returned to Nigeria from self-exile for the burial of his mother and has been spewing outrage against the incidents of banditry that had hobbled his native Southwest region, while not excluding other areas of the country. He said it was up to the people of the region to liberate themselves from suspected killer herdsmen who are terrorising them. Addressing cheering supporters on the heels of the funeral rites in his hometown, Igboho in Oyo State, he contended that conventional security agents deployed to Yorubaland, as in Ekiti State where monarchs were recently killed in broad daylight, could not tackle down the killers.

Self-help remained the gospel the kinsman-warrior espoused. Speaking in Yoruba language in a video that trended on social media last week, he argued that Southwest people did not need soldiers to drive away killer herdsmen from their farmlands. “We need to come together, (and) take charge of the security of the Southwest. We don’t need to wait for government or anyone,” he said, adding: “Let’s just work in unison. We cannot farm on our lands because of these herders. And our people are going hungry and angry. We don’t need the soldiers the government claims to have deployed to Ekiti State. We’ll work in the tradition of our elders and man the places ourselves. It was my mother who was my fear before but now that she’s gone, I have nothing to be scared of again. I am back to take back our land.”

Igboho had fled Nigeria following a lethal raid by Department of State Services (DSS) operatives on his Ibadan, Oyo State, residence on 1st July, 2021. The agency alleged that he was stockpiling arms and staged the midnight raid in which two of his associates were killed and 12 aides arrested. The ethnic agitator, who always boasted tradition-endowed invincibility, slipped away in that siege and was declared wanted by the DSS. He was arrested along with his wife in Cotonou, Benin Republic, on his way to Germany on 19th July, 2021, and he was detained at the request of the former Muhammadu Buhari presidency. Attempts by the Nigerian government to repatriate him following his arrest were however unsuccessful, and he was arraigned before Benin Republic judiciary and detained in a prison facility in the country. Charges against him bordered on arms smuggling, inciting violence and advocating secession of the Yoruba from the Nigerian state. Igboho’s legal troubles blew over eventually and he was set free by Benin authorities in October 2023. It was while he was in Benin incarceration that Nigeria transited to the Bola Tinubu presidency.

That tangle with the law has not cowed Igboho a whit from his jingoistic sabre-rattling. On the heels of his release from Benin jail and his taking refuge in Germany last October, he gave Fulani herders seven days to vacate the Southwest over reported killings of farmers in Oyo and Ogun states, saying people of the region could otherwise be forced to take the law into their own hands. In direct rejoinder to that ultimatum, a group going by the name Northern Consensus Movement of Nigeria demanded a retraction or it would retribute in kind towards Yoruba people resident in the North and as well orchestrate a halt to supply of food items from the North. “We will do everything possible to stop that move and if he (Igboho) will not listen, then we have no option than to ask the Yoruba who are living in northern Nigeria to also go back to their region,” the group’s leader, Awwal Aliyu, said inter alia at a press parley. He added: “We are requesting President Bola Tinubu to do something… If nothing is done, we are going on a peaceful protest, after which we will shut down all food supplies moving from the North to the southern parts of the country.” Also reacting to the ultimatum, Miyetti Allah, Kautal Hore, leader, Abdullahi Bello Bodejo, traded harsh words with Igboho, with both respectively defending their ethnic turf.

“If Igboho has any respect for the Bola Tinubu presidency, he will tone down his aggressively divisive rhetoric.”

In his return to the gadfly beat, Igboho has not hidden the fact that he is emboldened by the current dispensation of the Bola Tinubu presidency. He viewed the immediate past administration of President Buhari as having abetted the killer herdsmen syndrome, and he voiced that belief when he told the Miyetti Allah group late in 2023 to come to grips with the fact that acts of lawlessness perpetrated in the Buhari era would not be condoned under the Bola Tinubu dispensation. 

Igboho has as well been frontal in defending the records of the present administration. Recently, he canvassed patience with the government’s efforts in response to a statement by Sultan Muhammad Sa'ad Abubakar III of Sokoto that Nigeria sits on a time bomb with the extent of poverty, hardship and insecurity plaguing the country. His disposition had fuelled speculation in some quarters that he is working for political interests and, against the backdrop of his claim that the 2021 DSS raid was an assassination attempt, journalists recently asked him whether the powers that presently be would still want him dead. To this, he responded: “I am not working for any politician. In fact, if I accidentally slapped someone, the government would be ready to arrest me and put me behind bars. I know they are watching me closely now to know my next line of action. Still, I am ready to take steps to stop marauders’ activities in our lands.”

But if Igboho has any respect for the Bola Tinubu presidency, he will tone down his aggressively divisive rhetoric. He cannot be seen to cast the administration in the mould of abetting him, just the way he had accused the Buhari presidency of abetting killer herdsmen. Truce and mutual accommodation by Nigeria’s component groups is what the country needs, not divisive rhetoric that sets one group against the other. It was such rhetoric that apparently informed the 2021 raid by DSS operatives. And if the rhetoric does not change but only the government in power has changed, it could be argued that it is none other than the government holding the security agency’s hand if it does not stage another raid against the ethnic campaigner. That is not a good profile to cast the Tinubu administration in before the diverse ethnic groups that make up the Nigerian nationhood. 

Igboho’s rhetoric resonates with many community folk in Yorubaland, but that does not make his self-help gospel the best approach to the security challenge he seeks to address. The approach rather portends collapse of the societal order. Early in 2021 before his encounter with DSS operatives, the ethnic campaigner served an ultimatum on the Fulani community in Igagan, Oyo State, to leave the community. At the expiration of ultimatum, he stormed the community to expel the settlers and precipitated a communal clash. The townsfolk rallied to his side as he vowed to extend his mission to all Southwest states and Kwara. Those exploits, however, ended in dislocation of communal peace and breakdown of law and order. It was lawlessness writ large and should not be encouraged in a society governed by laws. Such was the threat of communal violence at the time that Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde had to warn that government would not tolerate persons stoking ethnic tension under the guise of protecting Yoruba interest and, without naming names, he invited the police to arrest such people and treat them like common criminals. 

Self-help unilateralism is a fast track to the Hobbesian jungle and Igboho needs a change of tack to address the security challenge he berates.