Psychophancy and Hypocrisy: OPE BANWO, a quisling spits on his fatherland, defends desecration

By Dr Doyin Odebowale

I have been reading some pieces of hagiography penned for a target audience, who must be appeased, even if it requires the wholesale disposal of one’s patrimony, to earn a space of infamy at a dinner reserved for scums. These scurrilous idiocies strive for currency in national discourses at moments of agitation impelled by insensate assails on a people’s sensibility.

The trivialization of issues which touch on the essential core of a people deserves excoriation anytime a suborned peddler of mendacious mandates of belongingness jumps into an arena of disquisition.

The urge to portray difference, always, from the natural response of the aggrieved, driven by crude intrusions aimed at subverting the socio-economic cum political order, mirrors an ingrained narcissism. Audacious hypocrisy, the very charge, erroneously thrown at a most hospitable people, serially abused and exploited in a polity designed to crumble, appears an apt description for the unearned uppity often displayed by one Ope Banwo, a supporter of the seemingly marooned Peter Obi and the contumacious horde of oriental rustics.

The Yoruba world view is about order and certitude. All our towns and villages have distinctive histories attached to them. Our traditional markets were sited within the precincts of the palaces and abodes of community leaders. We have an established kinship system spanning over a millennia. The European explorers met not only a political system.

They were equally amazed at the depth of socio-economic interactions among the major settlements. Being addressed as Oba or Chief was deeply rooted in tradition. There were clear functions allotted to these offices in the service of the people. No straggler just picked any title and bore same, without approbation, to showcase affluence.

Ope Banwo rushed to create the false impression that the sacrilegious and clearly subversive practice of having a nonentity declare himself as “Obi of Lagos” is pervasive and should be generally acceptable. He posited, dubiously, that since certain anonymous elements parade themselves as “Sarkin Yorubawa of Kano”, “Oba Enugu”, “Oba Yoruba in Awka”, “Oba Yoruba of Zaria”, “Oba Yoruba of Abuja”, “Oba Yoruba of Funtua”, among other artifices of grandiose buffoonery displayed by rootless simpletons living in other people’s lands, the Yoruba people are dishonest to insist on preserving their heritage. After all, if one Ishaq Bello, an evident alien in Yorubaland judging by his name, adopts the moniker of “Oba in Kaduna” among the Hausa people, he is representing the interests of the ethnic group known as Yoruba.

No submission indicates lack of perspicacity worse than this excursion in desultoriness in approaching matters bordering on the challenges encountered by a state in transition. The dubiety inherent in the pretensions that an indigenous ethnic group, which faces existential threats as a consequence of an expired Ordinance imposed by fiat, which throws up, continually, centrifugal pulleys, must embrace assured erasure to assuage sycophancy and palliate rabid expansionist tendencies, brazenly and constantly displayed by invaders from a section of the country, must accept anything and everything. Nation-building is not a process, which culminates in the near-complete annihilation of an ethnic group, emburdened with the misfortune to harbour hostile guests with manifest malice aforethought.

The over-simplification of the current aberrant phenomenon, which seeks not only to undermine traditional authorities in towns and villages, but, more disturbingly, mocks reverent practices and the very essence of these institutions into tragic caricatures, betrays a certain cognitive bereavement. Any support extended to drug peddlers, fraudsters and traditional outcasts, Osu, from Iboland to adopt the titles unknown to their ancestors, is not about sophistication but treachery. The grandiloquent vacuity often displayed by opportunists, who leap into serious issues of social engineering via a veneer of hypocritical permutation for relevance, will be challenged.

Any “Oba Yoruba” outside Oodualand is not only an impostor but a bastard. All beaded crowns and upgraded coronets are contained in the various Chiefs Laws of States in the 36 States and the FCT. Each State has traditional rulers who are prescribed authorities in their domains. No head of a socio-cultural group is permitted, under the law, to wear any crown, howsoever described, and parade himself as the head of a Colony of immigrants in a community. It is a sure recipe for anarchy. This issue becomes all the more worrisome when those who should know play to the gallery for political expediency.

The British colonial administration created warrant chiefs in Iboland around 1927. Prior to this period, the Ibo people had prided themselves on being republicans. Social mobility was assured through the dint of hard work. There is no recorded history of any Ibo Empire at any time in contemporary history. The Igala, Efik, Ibibio, among other ethnic groups indigenous to the current South East, had kingship systems disrupted by the British imperialists while creating warrant chiefs to introduce the indirect rule system. The worst among those who had embraced Christianity and presented themselves as obsequious assistants, became the new local rulers. There is nothing dignifying about an Eze, even in the South East. The Uthman Dan Fodio Jihad of 1904 subsumed the indigenous Hausa communities under a theocracy grounded in Arabian culture. It is the nadir of insensitivity for a peripatetic hustler to adopt a traditional title which not only appears to support the stamping out of indigeneity but also, and more instructively, evidences a total disconnect with the parent culture which the rootless impostor attempts to appropriate.

It is irresponsible of Ope Banwo to describe the open rejection of insult by the latest criminal, one Chibuike Azubuike, the self-styled “Obi of Lagos”, as dishonest and hypocritical. The position taken by him on this issue reveals so much about a man battling with an identity crisis. Any lunatic, who ventures out of the territories delineated and accepted as Oodua land, to proclaim royalty unknown with his lineage must not be encouraged by reasonable people. The mockery and public opprobrium, into which our traditional institution has been dragged, can only be supported by a deluded subaltern, who confuses a cold, conscious programme of displacement with heterogenous cosmopolitanism.

Any hustler suggesting that we throw open our space and embrace Vikings bent on erasing our ancestral footprints cannot be considered a serious person. He is not one of us.