overnor Bisi Akande got it right partly: Obasanjo will always be an embarrassment to himself, declared the sedate governor of Osun State. Perhaps because of that self-same reluctance of the Yoruba power elite to publicly confront the tragedy which the Yoruba nation faces with the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, Akande failed to add the more crucial dimension of the emergent embarrassment: Obasanjo will always be an embarrassment to the Yoruba nation.

By the time he finished his first term, or second term - as he proposes - the fate of the Yoruba in the Nigerian union would have been partly sealed - at least, most probably, for many years to come. The other ethnic groups, particularly the Fulani, the Hausa - and the Igbo - would gratuitously say to the Yoruba, in matters of administrative competence (in the running of the Nigerian state), "Shut Up!"

Some among the torchbearers of the grand interests of these other ethnic-nationalities would know better than to accuse the whole Yoruba nation of what is basically a constitutive lack in a single individual who does not, at any rate, represent the Yoruba race. But they will not reflect such understanding. Their politics will not allow them to take Obasanjo as an example of the same administrative incompetence - which Yoruba intellectuals have always said was - natural to a Tafawa Balewa or a Shehu Shagari. It will be transformed into a constitutive lack in the Yoruba, even though, unlike the Balewa and Shagari, Obasanjo does not represent the core political elite, let alone the core interests of the (Yoruba) nation. Therefore, his failures should ordinarily be difficult to project unto the political totalities of his assumed people.

But that is a difficult argument to sustain where some Yoruba intellectuals and political elite, in what would appear an infantile misconception of their long-term corporate, collective interests, affirm the Yorubaness of Obasanjo daily and scurry to his defence - as if he were a defensible example of how to be Yoruba in national life. They ought to know that Obasanjo is not a tribalist or ethnic jingoist; he is a 'personal jingoist', if anything like that exists. Obasanjo's tribe is Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo. His 'ethnic nationality' is his pride and ego. But that is another matter entirely.

It took 85 years to have a semblance of the hijack of power from the Fulani power bastion, in spite of all the imperfections of this hijack. From 1914 to 1999, the Fulani power elite had subjected the rest of Nigeria to one of the most sophisticated political domination on the African continent. As the sun of the Fulani suzerainty was setting with their defeat by the British around the close of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, Fredrick Lugard gave that power bastion another lease of life in an Anglo-Fulani pact - an unusual pact between the conqueror and the conquered - that was to be partly worsted, after almost a century, by the democratic struggle which was heightened by the annulment of 1993. Since independence, with many others in other ethnic-nationalities, particularly, the Hausa and other minority groups in the North, helping them to organize for power, the Fulani power elite had ensured the continuation, perpetuation and 'sovereignty' of their interests in virtually every national formation. It was such a comprehensive hegemony - save for the six uncertain months in 1966 in which the Igbo disrupted them, for which they are still suffering today - that it was not absolutely necessary for them to have a Fulani man in power to have the bidding of this consumptive, retrogressive, parasitic and totally unproductive power elite loom large in our national life.

It was also 85 years of struggle during which the Yoruba insisted that, in the circumstances of the Nigerian Union, they were the best placed and best equipped to institute a competent, modern, efficient, (liberal) government and consequently lay the foundation of a Nigeria of the future. (The Igbo were to have similarly resolved around the middle of the twentieth century until the possibilities of such resolve was first harmed by a spineless leadership and later seriously damaged by the civil war, which they lost.)

If this - Yoruba resolve - was regarded as a lacerating insult on other ethnic nationalities and a sickening example of what Karen Barber, the British scholar, who worked with the late-Oyin Adejobi theatre group in Osogbo, had described as "Yoruba's competitive ethos" and "predilection for personal aggrandizement", Obafemi Awolowo and his team were to give it concrete validation. By establishing an efficient, modern government, with a leadership that displayed an administrative genius that is non-pareil on African soil, Awolowo offered a solid foundation, which the Yoruba can boast of, and, which has leveraged them in national politics up till date. This obviously prompted, Dillebe Onyeama, the Igbo writer, in an article in late 1980s to describe the Yoruba, in terms of administrative genius, as "homo secundum".

But then Onyeama overlooked the besting, if you like, of the Yoruba by their main rivals, the Igbo. Apart from catching up with the Yoruba in the area of education and even surpassing them in the 1950s, the dominant, but short-lived, Igbo state of Biafra, within 30 months, could claim to have established the first technologically efficient, aggressively modern, putative Black power, which technological effectiveness, mental resourcefulness, and human endurance in the pursuit of set goals, remain to be equalled, let alone surpassed, in contemporary African history.

But the Igbo tragedy is even more understandable. After forcibly breaking and interrupting, in January 1966, the then 52-year-old political hegemony imposed by the Anglo-Fulani pact, which necessitated and created the Amalgamation of 1914, the "Igbo gains" were violently reversed by the storm-troopers of that power bastion in July 1966. What followed was a comprehensive routing and humiliation of the Igbo. This manifested in the genocidal actions of Northerners against the Igbo, the Civil War, the post-Civil War problems, including abandoned property and even the issue of Igbo presidency. But this is another matter entirely.

Core to the subsisting problem is that the Obasanjo rule contains a duality: Two faces representing the same personality beamed large on national space. One is the reformist, even quasi-radical, face that seeks a break with the rot and established fraud of the past. It is this face that first denied telecommunications license to those that did not deserve it, takes the human rights violators and assassins to court, pursues the return of serial loot, etc. The other face is the one that seeks to maintain the status quo and disallows radical elements from their transformational struggles; it is this that keeps the dead horses in government, that seeks understanding with the venal tribe and corrupt elements while denouncing corruption and that accommodates disgraceful acquittals, which constitutes what Tom Paine would have described as a "violent and batty flight in the face of Providence".

Obasanjo as "reformer" and Obasanjo as "preserver" are too isomorphic for the man to engineer any meaningful or long lasting change in Nigeria, beyond the petty-reformism conditioned by his linear politics. In any case, it was the fact that he possessed the latter face and the assumption that he lacked the former that made Babangida and co. to recruit him from Ota to save them from the feared ramparts of a social revolution in 1998. What has Obasanjo done about those who see Nigeria as a perpetual bullion van returning again and again to their compounds, delivering its contents and scurrying back and forth in 'siren-ed' afternoons? Beyond once in a while delaying the convoy of their bullion vans, has he banned it? What has he done about the fraternities of graft that have prevailed over our national economy and turned it to an economy of plunder - which Babangida, in his 'genius', had pronounced "structural adjustment"? But for the 'natural dowry' - his life - which God took from Abacha for 'wedding' our national coffers, if he were alive today, wouldn't he be allowed - as his family is - to keep a substantial part of his loot and be safe in the comfort of his Kano lair? Even the anti-graft panel which seems to have been created to investigate only opponents, has been systematically robbed of its much-needed credibility by the elected cretins lurking in the corridors of our national 'dome'.

Obasanjo has blown up the myth of Yoruba administrative competence - about which Dillebe Onyeama wrote. But the mainstream Yoruba leadership - of which the Obasanjo-supporting Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE) is one - ought to and can claim that this was not the kind of man they have been pushing to lead Nigeria. Who does Obasanjo represent? Not even the Northern cabal who put him in power any longer. The quartet (Generals Ibrahim Babangida, Abdusalami Abubakar, Mohammed Aliyu Gusau and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar) that 'shamed' the Yoruba people - and by extension the mass of Nigerians - by imposing Obasanjo on a bruised people are now at loggerheads with him - whether in a latent or manifest manner.

We should not allow this quartet to go scot-free however - that is not to talk about the myriad other political crimes for which they are all singly or collectively guilty including responsibility for previous tragedies. They stand singly and collectively condemned by the Obasanjo tragedy. They were the ones who usurped the collective wisdom of the people by foisting a man who had hardly collected his breath after escaping from the cage of a bestial terminator and primal rogue, Sani Abacha, on Nigerians. He is 'their' candidate, 'their' president, 'their' burden. And we should not allow them to just announce that, "ok, we are tired of this man, we want another". That will be tantamount to another coup, which at least three of them are used to. And it will confirm, if they get away with it, that Nigeria is, at best, an extension of their fathers' compound.

Part of the political and intellectual limitation of the Yoruba High Command was that they thought they could take a leap from 1993 Nigeria (pre-June 12) to 1999 Nigeria (post-May 29), leaving behind the crises, betrayal, problems, fundaments and even political evil, represented, in the intervening years, differently by Anenih, Yar' Adua, IBB, Abacha, Shonekan, Obasanjo, Dasuki, Tofa, Nzeribe, Abiola, Diya, Kingibe, Nas, ABN, YEAA, etc. They have since found out, as Bennette advanced so long ago that, "there are no leaps in nature: everything in it is graduated, shaded". How to confront this reality and surmount it in the construction of a strong people and united country is a dilemma that the mainstream Yoruba leadership is yet to respond to.

The Yoruba too, like the quartet, cannot disown Obasanjo. At least the leadership and the intellectual class - wherever they are located, in the media, arts, academia, government - can not disassociate themselves from his failures. In the face of the onslaught from the cabal, they have had to rally round him. The logic was clear: 'He is our own'. Again, 'he is at least not as bad as their own'. And 'at least, he is not hurting us as theirs did'. Yoruba support for Obasanjo is not and cannot be because the man does not carry a historic and continuing stigma of subverting the agenda of his people, but because of what his adversaries are not: They are NOT patriotic, detribalised, honest or public-spirited. So, why allow them to sway or castrate Obasanjo?

These series of argument may eventually constitute the greatest undoing of Yoruba interests in the Nigeria of the future. Most Yoruba power formations - political, intellectual, commercial and religious - are articulating, in whatever way, at least one, if not all, of these 'fundamental logics' in the defence, or toleration, of the Obasanjo tragedy. For one, this line of argument has been used by some visible Yoruba buccaneers in their failed attempt to create a Yoruba oligarchy which will plunder the Nigerian state in turn - like the Hausa-Fulani oligarchy - under the shadows of an Obasanjo presidency.

'He is our own'. There is a popular saying in Yoruba land that argues for chasing off the fox before chastising the hen. But one thing that is integral to this fundamental practice in Yoruba society is the assumption that the hen is "our own". Can the Yoruba with all sense of seriousness and clarity of purpose claim Obasanjo as theirs? What is it that the man has done in three years that proves this? He has put Yoruba in crucial political offices, they say. Alright, let us calibrate this. First, who are the Yoruba that he has put in office and what have they done for anybody? Apart from Bola Ige who really had a constituency in Yoruba land, who were/are the other ministers and appointees representing? You can say Dupe Adelaja represents the House of Adesanya; Olusegun Agagu represented his own ego; Sunday Afolabi's presence in the cabinet was a triumph of 'old school-boyhood' over public good; Olu Agunloye is the quintessence of the victory of personal manoeuvres over collective purpose; Bode George exists to spew forth factional and fictional intrigues in the service of personal interests; Otunba Fasawe on his part is the temporal equivalent of Abacha's marabou….

If Obasanjo's government truly represents the Yoruba, why was Ige - regarded, particularly by Yoruba nation's adversaries as the 'Arch-Bishop of Yoruba cause' in contemporary Nigeria - planning to leave the cabinet? Having discovered, as he was warned by some people before he joined the government, that Obasanjo could not lead the kind of Nigeria that he (Ige) had lived and worked for, the man sought to depart from the charade even while been careful not to strengthen the hands of those agents of doom whose grouse with Obasanjo was due to infernal reasons.

In the banality of prebendal politics in Nigeria, to have your man there is to have patronage for 'your own' people. Beyond that, it is also the reality of Nigerian politics that every ethnic nationality expects that its interests get a fair space while one of its own is in power, even where others are not neglected or ignored. That can only be one of the more elemental reasons sustaining the calls for Yoruba, Igbo, or minority president. So, what has Obasanjo done in almost four years for his people? Is it even possible for Obasanjo to understand, let alone, accept, those ground (and grand)-norms which underwrite and authorize Yoruba politics?

What do the Yoruba want? A modern, efficient administration, one in which whoever is at the centre cannot harm them. How? Through a workable census, true federalism, just revenue allocation, etc. What has the 'retired' Ota farmer done about all these? Hardly anything. Although, admittedly, even the token 'achievements' of Obasanjo cannot be rivalled by his predecessors from that power-besotted, semi-evil, semi-criminal cabal that now so strongly oppose him. Of course he has accomplished some limited things. But all these are cosmetics that any bare and barren government of a modern state should be able to accomplish - these things were never accomplished before he got to power precisely because we have never had a government in the real sense of the term, but just ascendant mafia is charge of state power. The Nigerian crises are too deep for us to be content with these. At any rate, such 'accomplishments' as these can be reversed in a day.

It is only in a country where shame has no meaning that a Muhammadu Buhari, that repellent character, an 'acclaimed' terror-monger while in power, who later headed a drain-pipe and 'hegemonic-sharer' of national resources, called PTF, would stand up to run for the presidency in a democracy which even the temper of his being repudiates. But the Buhari candidacy and the untidy nature in which he was practically imposed at the ANPP (All NORTHERN Peoples Party?) CON-vention, was more a comment on the way Obasanjo has been running Nigeria in the last three years-plus than it was a statement on the desperation of the incompetent and insolent cabal.

Obasanjo has clearly shown, perhaps, in a honest-to-goodness way, that he lacks the vision of the kind of national transformation that the Yoruba have always fought for. He also lacks the quality of mind that accomplishes such transformation. But, even these do not constitute the 'primary' problem. The primary problem is that Obasanjo actually lacks a rudimentary understanding of the need for such a transformation, produced as he was, by a politics that is wholly devoid of content save personal designs to loom large on the body-politic like a 'God-sent'. He shuns the radical possibilities of presidential power, while turning the challenge of Yoruba presidency to a risk. The power configuration in Nigeria seems to confound Obasanjo the way algebra confounds a school kid - as evident in the quandary in which he was thrown at the beginning of the Naa'ba menace on his presidency and the way he was treated by his vice, Abubakar Atiku, in the lead up to the party primaries in January 2003: It was his 'running-mate' that picked him, he didn't pick his running-mate.

Would the Yoruba consider giving Obasanjo the Shonekan treatment? In many ways, Obasanjo is only an extension of that same streak that produced Ernest Shonekan. And of course the Yoruba appropriately treated him (Obasanjo) thus during the electioneering campaign until he got to power and confused them - including, to confess, this writer - by pretending to be on the path of reviving, at least minimally, the Nigerian Union. Given his earlier pretension to re-inventing Nigeria, the Yoruba, with a predilection to claim credit for meritorious performance in the Nigerian Estate, quickly disclaimed their earlier disowning of the retired general and then re-claimed him as one of their own. Others maliciously and conveniently described this as "ethnic chauvinism". But this was not a nuanced conclusion, otherwise, knowing that he would be president anyway, (which to confess, was a political shame) the Yoruba would have supported Obasanjo, if all they wanted was just a Yoruba president.

They wanted a 'Yoruba' man who will be president; for one, because all those who have led the country have come preponderantly from one region of the country and the Yoruba were not ready to produce one who pretended to be a Nigerian, and not Yoruba, when it was their turn - after the battle that had lasted 85 years, as Uche Ezechukwu, competently described a similar yearning by the Igbos in his Tribune column, 'Ikenga', recently. The Yoruba knew, at any rate, that Obasanjo was/is not a Nigerian as he would want to be known, nor was/is he Yoruba (which, for the Yoruba was/is a tragedy) but just Olusegun Aremu Matthew Obasanjo. One who disclaims Achebe's statement in one of his classics, that "no matter how wise a man is, he cannot be wiser than his people; no one wins judgement against his clan". Obasanjo has lived all his political life with a marked attempt to win judgement against his clan, believing, with sterile arrogance, that he is wiser than his people.

Therefore, when the Yoruba started claiming him as if he were part of their dominant political heritage, championed by Obafemi Awolowo, and recently rearticulated by Ajibola Ige, they were running a risk that would soon blow in their face - as my compatriots, Waziri Adio and Loius Odion competently argued in their respective columns in recent weeks - and one that was capable of exposing some of the slender fictions on which contemporary Yoruba politics is based. The attempt to construct Obasanjo as a Yoruba man, let alone a Yoruba candidate, is doomed in advance. In his first coming, as some said, he was a 'Hausa-Fulani's Yoruba'. In this second attempt, he cannot transform to a 'Yoruba's Yoruba'. It was as if the gods were punishing the Yoruba, by answering their prayer for a Yoruba president. Never did they think that whenever a Yoruba man would emerge as president, he would emerge from the ranks of "Sokoto Yoruba", the 'famous' line from the nineteenth-century Yoruba Generalissimo, Afonja, through Ladoke Akintola and Adisa Akinloye, to Ernest Shonekan and Olusegun Obasanjo.

But that is what has happened always, with even Moshood Abiola, who spent most of his life fighting against that dominant power elite in Yoruba land, only to be supported and comforted by them in the twilight of his life and political career. And then, Ernest Shonekan, an enduring, unmitigated embarrassment to the Yoruba cause. And now Olusegun Obasanjo. "Sokoto Yoruba" are those Yoruba, who, against the general run of opinion in their homestead, are convinced that they can only get power by aligning with the Fulani power establishment and compromising larger national ideals and the settled, overriding political goals of their people at the alter of Nigeria's political 'lords' and personal calculations.

It is one thing that the Yoruba power elites, say the YCE for instance, are able to identify with Obasanjo; but it is another thing whether they are able to affiliate themselves with the mess that Obasanjo has made of the Nigerian possibilities that were handed to him as executive president. Obasanjo is going on as if the Yoruba situation - and therefore agitation - in late 20th century Nigeria was not the historical and political conditions of possibility which made his presidency happen. Why does he then ignore, in fact, disparage, these ground-norms that is encapsulated in the call for reinventing Nigeria?

What is to be done? The dilemma that the Yoruba Political and Cultural High Command faces is clear, even if daunting: What is to be done about the threat that Obasanjo's presidency poses to long term Yoruba cause and interests in Nigeria? If the man wins election - as he most likely will - for a second term, what happens to the Yoruba after 2007 - if we get there - that is, after what is seen, with the connivance of the Yoruba High Command, as Yoruba's turn in power? How would the Yoruba respond to the feared "revenge" on them - which Abacha experimented unprovoked with bestial relish and zoological temper, until his predilection for 'singing Indian Waka' in the dark, saved the Yoruba from serial elimination of their leaders - at the expiration of Obasanjo presidency?

Unfortunately, the man who can be the visceral, intellectual and political centre of this re-thinking, Bola Ige, has been - understandably! - eliminated. Who can rally people round now? Papa Emmanuel Alayande, Papa Abraham Adesanya and Justice Adewale Thompson, let us face it, are too old for the rigours of the physical and intellectual tasks that lie ahead. They deserve their rest after such displays of painstaking commitment to the defence of settled ideals. They only need to provide the conducive environment for a new strategic planning and strategic thinking in Yoruba land, which can then be linked to such re-thinking in other parts of Nigeria.

The reason for this task is clear. If the Yoruba lapse again into some intellectual and political internecine war or low-intensity dissidence against the rest of Nigeria, in case Obasanjo loses or is forced out of office in whatever way, or after the expiration of his term, the Nigerian state may not know peace for several years, if it continues to exist at all. (And here one is not merely amplifying the empty boasts of some conservative, 'fugitive' Yoruba politicians that, "If Obasanjo is removed, that is the end of Nigeria". At any rate, it has been proved that their interest in this democracy starts and ends with the stuffing of every available position, elective and selective, with their OFF-springs.) Those Yoruba leaders who are pursuing, in an unrepentant manner, this singular, exclusionary, yet shallow, support for Obasanjo, without an eye on the future and the long-term strategic interest of the Yoruba in a truly federal, just, equitable, progressive and egalitarian Nigeria, will end up polishing the brasses of a sinking ship. It is indeed a tragedy that the Yorubaness, or more clearly, the Yoruba ethnic category, which was used assiduously, and largely justifiably, as a democratic resource particularly in the late 1980s and the 1990s, is now been used as a resource for supporting a gaping incompetence. It should be clear after three years - and at his age - that it is impossible to modify or mollify the president, or even rectify him.

For those - Yoruba youths - who neither want to be citizens of a diminished state nor want to spend the rest of their lives under autocracies of any kind - having had their early youth wasted by the perfidious generals, Buhari, IBB, Abacha and Abdulsalami, in that tragically serial order - there is the need for a strategic engagement with a leadership that seems to be rushing them towards ethnic and national perdition. Such strategic engagement, involving strategic thinking and planning, can now be linked with similar organizations, in the East of the Niger, then in the Middle-Belt and South-South and then the North-East and the North-West. After all, the average Fulani man has no fundamental problems with his fellow Nigerians; it is that power-besotted few who claim to represent him that drive a wedge between him and his compatriots and block broad national aspirations.

Unless this new thinking and planning begins now, the Yoruba might find themselves, as a reactive people than a pro-active one at the expiration of a culturally embarrassing presidency that Obasanjo's constitutes. It was due to the absence of such strategic thinking and planning that the June 12 struggle was largely conducted without much intellectual input. They asked Abiola to declare with a promise that all things would follow, but nothing concrete did, except the deaths and the oriental dance steps that heralded Abacha to Hades.

We may even see the tragedy that the Obasanjo failure represents for the Yoruba in a subversive way as ultimately useful for the Nigerian Union. Obasanjo's incompetence can be read as a much-needed subversion of the Yoruba (political and cultural) conceit. So that now that all the loci of power - including the "noise-making Yoruba" - have failed to push Nigeria towards its manifest destiny, it was NOT time to allow marginal centres to try their luck - the country has no luck! - but time to federate our failures in an attempt to have a deep look at them and restart the Nigerian engine.