Leader of the Yoruba World Congress, which is the umbrella body of over 300 Yoruba groups worldwide, Prof. Banji Akintoye, has said that the Nigerian environment has been consistently harsh to the Yoruba people of the South-West part of the country.
The professor says that though the association is committed to peaceful activities, and peaceful purposes, the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari has already begun to make step against it by removing the Yoruba World Congress from the list of state-registered organizations.
He also adds that members of the security agencies are preparing to clamp down on members of his organization who have the objective of promoting and achieving the growth, prosperity and sustenance of the Yoruba people and culture.
Akintoye says this on Saturday at this year’s General Assembly of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO) which held virtually as a result of the travel restriction imposed to curtail the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The UNPO, founded in 1991, is an international membership-based organization created with the aim to empower voices of unrepresented and marginalized peoples of the world and to protect their fundamental human rights.
At the General Assembly of the UNPO on Saturday, the Yoruba World Congress is inducted as a member of the UNPO alongside four others including the Movement for the Actualization of Sovereignty State of Biafra represented by Chief Ralph Uwazuruike.
Akintoye tells the assembly“From 1962 to 1972, under a limited self-government arrangement and federal constitution which the British granted to Nigeria, the Yoruba Nation proceeded to make mostly the Western region of Nigeria, the pacesetter in Nigeria, and even in Africa, in virtually all aspects of development and modernization.
“But the Nigerian environment has consistently been hazardous to the Yoruba Nation. From the beginning, the British colonial rulers feared the considerably educated and professionally sophisticated Yoruba and proceeded to do everything to limit their influence in Nigeria. From the British, the tradition passed on to the non-Yoruba people of Nigeria that the Yoruba Nation needed to be stopped and to stop the Yoruba Nation became the constant purpose of Nigeria.”
He narrated, “At Nigeria’s independence in 1960, the British manipulated everything to impose the Hausa people and the Northern people of Nigeria and to have dominance over other arms and to exclude the Yoruba group from governance.
“All the military coups from 1966 July to 1999 were led by military dictators from Northern Nigeria. This was so because the northern political elites whom the British had manipulated into political dominance over Nigeria at independence had used their control of federal powers to ensure the enrolment of Northern officers into military ranks.
“Inevitably, the Yoruba Nation was sucked into this deepening disaster. The military dictatorship seized important Yoruba assets that have been created in 1959. Most such assets were then poorly managed and or deliberately allowed to decline or even perished.
“Deepening poverty became the lot of the Yoruba Nation in Nigeria. Also, Yoruba leadership increasing fell for most of the mess like corruption characteristics of most public offices in Nigeria.
