Banji Akintoye: Beyond Yoruba triumphalism as UNPO member
IN July 2011, this writer was one of the starry- eyed guests invited to witness the birthday fanfare organised for Otunba Gani Adams, now Aare Ona Kakanfo of Yorubaland. The 40th birthday was superbly twinned with a lecture titled “The Yoruba Race: Forging a Common Front”. The assemblage on the high table included a robust mix of Ambassador Segun Olusola, Professor Ibidapo Obe, Akogun Tola Adeniyi, guest speaker, Mohammed Fawehinmi, Dare Babarinsa, and Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, the people’s Oranmiyan. The guest speaker, Akogun Tola Adeniyi could not hide his passionate embrace of Otunba Gani Adams and his rebellious cause. Akogun fits the bill of any hardcore rebel in and outside his different personas. As Akogun, as Araba, as Aba Saheed what flows through these different personas is nothing but rebellious rebuke both in his journalism, his oratorical skill and other polemical exercises.
The baby- faced, seemingly ageless and handsome Akogun Tola Adeniyi, as the guest speaker, did not disappoint his Oodua audience. Akogun is the Yoruba irredentist, historiographer, cultural ambassador and connoisseur, defender, documentarian, provocateur, pundit and purist. There was a Delphic wisdom of ‘ Know Thyself’ in his “The Yoruba Race: Forging a Common Front” when he began to drop the bomblet of his lecture on the audience. Akogun Tola
Adeniyi calibrated the ugly dichotomies, complexities, the valour, heritage, cultural superiority, nomadism and trail blazing spirit of the race, its present maginalisation, its gloriana, past exploits and now its cultural, social, political, educational, economic and material subjugation by the exploding forces of modernity that had caught the Yoruba nation napping.
Akogun as a cultural rejuvenator, fixer and observer, observed: “our collective failure are in four core areas: first our dwindling, almost vanishing political relevance, our bastardization, vulgarization, subjugation and outright liquidation of our cherished cultural values, our loss of sense of history of who we really are, as well as the loss of our pride of place in the comity of nation.” The profundity of Akogun Tola Adeniyi’s observation and challenge went deeper than his moralizing rhetoric of Yoruba collective failure. To bail out the Yoruba nation out of its dwindling fortune and cultural cul- de- sacs, Akogun Tola Adeniyi found solace in the radical new concept of Omoluwabi as urgent intellectual and cultural imperative that will catalyze a new set of value systems among the Yoruba.
Today, Yoruba is forging ahead in the creation of Amotekun, the South West security outfit and the new induction into Unrepresented Nations and People Organisation, ( UNPO). UNPO, formed on February 11, 1991 in The Hague, Netherlands, is an international membership- based organisation established to empower the voices of unrepresented and marginalised peoples worldwide and to protect their fundamental human rights. Members comprise indigenous peoples, minorities, unrecognised peoples or peoples of occupied territories. Professor Banji Akintoye, President of the Yoruba World Congress, in a statement, noted that the Yoruba- speaking nation membership was contained in a letter addressed to him through the YWC Coordinator for Europe by the Secretary- General, Ralph Bunche. He said UNPO membership affords the Yoruba nation an opportunity to participate in advocacy training, worldwide cultural festivals, election monitoring/ observation and sports activities, among the unrepresented nations.
Akintoye said: “Some former members, such as Armenia, East Timor, Estonia, Latvia, Georgia and Palau have gained full independence and have joined the United Nations, UN, as full members. The peoples represented within the UNPO membership are all united by one shared condition: they are denied their equitable level of representation and voice in the institutions of the countries to which they currently belong and in international governance. “As a consequence, their opportunity to participate on the national or international stage is limited and unfair, and they struggle against difficulties in their effort to realise their rights to civil and political participation and to control their own economic, social and cultural development”. “In many cases, they live under pressure of the worst forms of violence and repression, such as is being perpetrated by armed herdsmen and militias, as well as by terrorist outfit like Boko Haram, that terrorises many peoples of Nigeria, including our Yoruba nation. This violence and repression are being adroitly and surreptitiously supported by the government of Nigeria. In some cases, members of UNPO need serious help because they live in countries and under governments that actively resist their progress and destroy their achievements, as our Yoruba nation lives in Nigeria. The UNPO is able to address issues that often remain hidden because UNPO has the freedom to raise issues that others cannot raise due to political or funding constraints.
Today, UNPO has more than 40 member- nations.” Professor Banji Akintoye is a concentrated Yoruba nation theorist, activist, mouthpiece, motivator, guardian angel and its most tireless advocate. Akintoye’s shining star in the struggle for Yoruba nationhood rests on his resilience, his digital activism, his angry cadences, his incantatory knack for organisation, his audacious call for the Balkanisation of Nigeria into many competing sovereign nations and his subjective passion for a reimagined Yoruba nation of prideful prosperity, power, peace and progress. He is the Yoruba nation’s independent- obsessed global diplomat! He understands the fierce urgency of now or never!
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