"THE POWER OF ETHNIC FURY" READ AND DIGEST AND REMEMBER TO COMMENT

THE POWER OF ETHNIC FURY

Yoruba tradition is elegant and rich. It has a place for old and young. The race has a great sense of history and that is why those who cling to the past do so with great risk to the future. The Yoruba has a word for every occurrence. They have rules and order as well as check and balances. Their rules and order has remained a template and a feat for their strategic brilliance.
Their quest for freedom and independence-craving resistance against internal colonisation hastened their launch into civilisation and modernisation. It was a spirit of cultural democracy and economic liberty. It was the spirit that took over control when people have had enough and cannot take it anymore. That spirit resides in every race, human group and in every human being.
From the North to South and West (Central) of Kwara State, the people are endowed with a mix and rich tradition laden with memories of economic and political resistance. But regrettably today, the varying tribes in the state have not allowed this richness to do good things against those that hold down their progress. The Nupes of Patigi to those of Lafiagi and the Barubas of Kaiama and Baruten, all have rich traditions that do not yield to the erosion of their freedom of conscience. They all hold dear their obsession with hard work and detest laziness and parasitism. While the Nupe class also have a history of insatiable appetite for territorial control because of their prowess, the Baruba – brawn and guile are full of poisonous spat that signifies a resistance to enslavement of their able bodied men and women.
The Igbomina and Ibolo stock are majorly proud, rich and cosmopolitan, they took the advantage of western education and commerce early enough to project themselves into civilisation. Confident and egregiously compassionate, this race has no stomach for exploitation and they also have abiding faith in their cherished values.
The West (Central) is a mix of Yoruba and Fulani. Both have a long and historic and evangelical relationship with a devotion lined and often disturbed by old wounds of tribal animosity. However, the dominance of Yoruba tradition laced with Fulani’s disdain for parochialism had served a fundamental impulse for its embrace of modernisation.
The significance of all these is to determine whether there can be a more unifying and dignifying route through which Kwara can reclaim its dignity and identity as a state and be free from servitude in spite of its peoples present and obvious failure to identify ways to confront its political and ideological challenges. It is settled here that no tradition espouses human surrender to evil. The preachment of our values only emphasised that genuine human beings with moral conscience must exploit those core values as a weapon to redesign and redefine its manifest destiny. If those values had in the past served as a check and balance mechanism in our conduct, it is only wise enough for Kwara to aggregate all of these as a weapon against any internal oppression. The Yoruba of Western Nigeria once exploited this route shortly after the demise of Chief Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo when his daughter Tokunbo Dosunmu attempted to wear her father’s garb. She was told in plain language that their tradition and values do not permit them to worship father and daughter. Kwara must have the courage to also do this. What we cannot do with our minds, we should do with what our tradition and forefathers bequeathed to us.  Kwarans history is a history of a great and inspiring state but regrettably we have allowed those who hold down our progress to redefine our history.
While our thinking is so clumsy we have been deluded by the narrowness of our self-interest  that we failed to see the falsehood surrounding the cult –like aura in Senator Bukola Saraki to the point of self-harm. Sympathetic outsiders say we have continued to bungle our chances by even creating artificial divisions that should have been bridged long ago by our determination to exploit the opportunities of our rich tradition and all its attendant possibilities. Kwara is in a contest of order versus chaos. It is in this state that we have witnessed how too many people have died and more will. Even though there are competing accounts of their death, those in whose hands they died never offered us any explanations. Rather what we get is a reminder that throughout history, it has been extremely difficult to prosecute a ‘civil war’ without killing your own people. And that in a war he who wins at the point of his bayonet dictates the peace.
Kwara must be particularly accursed to suffer first under a homicidal father then a son who has sadly remained obedient to his father’s benighted creed. The truth is that their goal is not to remake Kwara but to cripple it and its people. But this market is about to close. But for our inability to do something breaks to Senator Saraki's advantage. And not to be a conduit for his perpetuation, we must have recourse.
From Kwara North through Central and South, it is really a dire moment for a once proud people. Kwara was not conceived on falsehood but why is it that its people are paralysed and cannot think their problems through. It took the sweat and sacrifice of great men and women who recognised the richness of our people to fight for Kwara to be born. It is doubtful if some of these people who with grace still lived, would regard what Kwara is going through today as their happy ending.
This surely is not the Kwara of their dream neither is it ours.  The richness of our values has offered us with innumerable ways we can stand-up to our challenges. Whether Yoruba, Nupe, Baruba or Fulani, our values are our heritage and have in the past offered our forefathers recipe to some of their major problems. We can take opportunity of this and effectively use it to unblock the wedges between our transits from first degree oppression to modernity. Senator Bukola Saraki may be basking in temporary triumph and be thinking differently but he cannot remain happy for long. I remind him that happiness itself has a delicate body and one cannot always be too sure of its treacherous embrace.

Postulated By: Chukwudi