9 - Ethnicity & Nigerian Politics: The Past in the Yoruba Present

Summary

NIGERIAN politics since the early 1990s has turned the Yoruba into the principal focus of national discourse. The Yoruba political class has now had its turn to have one of its own as the country's President, after its struggles since the 1950s. The Igbo expressed a similar aspiration, and the assumption that the Yoruba had actually benefited more from the system than they claimed. The northerners’ support for a southern candidate was partly because of the political crises that the military had created and the need to use a pro-north candidate to retain control.

Ethnic calculations remain deep, very much as before, only slightly altered to give the Yoruba greater visibility. This reverses the long trend that privileged the North and its quest for political domination, the short-lived fear of Igbo domination in the 1960s, and the secession and civil war that followed from 1967 to 1970. The rise of Chief M. K. O. Abiola in the early 1990s, his victory in the 1993 elections and the annulment of these elections by the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida dominated Nigerian politics for the rest of the decade. The rise of General Abacha to power met with organized opposition among the Yoruba and pro-democracy movements. During Abacha's tenure, various Yoruba groups not only emerged to advocate democracy; some wanted secession or, at the very least, the re-negotiation of the basis of the federation to give power to the different nationalities to shape their own policies, free of a powerful center. The discourse of democracy put ethnicity at its very center. It was no longer how a group of nationalists from different parts of the country would govern and bring progress, but how the representatives of the component units would share power and resources along ethnic lines. The assumption was that the military generals and politicians would always represent ethnic interests, and in this kind of arrangement, the North would always seek domination at the expense of others. If a number of Yoruba politicians had advocated forging alliances with the northerners, many now regarded them as ‘dangerous enemies’.