DOKUBO CAUTIONS YORUBA AGAINST ALLIANCE WITH NORTH

Leader of the Niger Delta Peoples Volunteer Force (NDPVF), Alhaji Mujaheedeen Asari Dokubo has warned Yoruba political elite to desist from alliance of any sort with their Hausa counterparts, saying such dealings could turn out to be doom for the former.

He said: “It is political suicide for the South-West to align with the North in the power equation; as far as I am concerned, it will be one of the greatest mistakes to be made should the Yoruba go into any merger with the Hausa.”

Speaking with Saturday Newswatch recently in Warri at the Isaac Adaka Boro Day organized by NDPVF, Asari-Dokubo recalled that though there were desperate moves by some progressives in the South-West to form same frontiers with the North towards wresting power from President Goodluck Jonathan’s Peoples Democratic Party, he cautioned: “Anybody desperate to form alliance with the North should be checked very well, his Yorubaness is in question.

“Nobody calling himself progressive would go and align with feudalists. It does not correlate. These are two parallels. Feudalists promoting feudal hegemony and progressives promoting egalitarian society, the two are opposite sides,” he said.

According to him: “They have rendered their people poor and sent them to the streets as urchins; for all these years that the Gambari have been manipulating political power and seizing the wealth of Nigeria, of what benefit has it been to their people? Yoruba can point to legacies left by Obafemi Awolowo; what legacies can they point to in the North.
“When names of Awolowo, Azikiwe are being mentioned, they mention Ahmadu Bello. What did he do? Their society is being run in such a way that it promotes primitivism of the crudest form,” he pointed out.

On the state of emergency declared in the three northern states, Asari-Dokubo said: “I think it is not enough. The political structures in those states should have been dismantled and replaced with proper emergency rule.

“The President is always dealing with these people with kid gloves. It is like it has passed the elbow. So that is the issue. Everybody should be prepared in the term of ‘they killed our prophets while we sit aside and look,’ we are not looking any longer. There will be no Abiola, there will be no Aguiyi Ironsi again,” he declared.

Hinting that northerners were desperate to reclaim power at all cost, Asari Dokubo said: “Power means a lot to the North; they are sending the signal gradually with some of them saying Nigeria could become Cote d’Ivoire. The implication, if you follow the Cote d’Ivoire politics, means they might use the military option.

“They are already sending the message out. Jonathan should not sleep; he should not behave like Aguiyi-Ironsi who left his flanks open. So we must speak out and tell the Yoruba political elite that the Lion that sacked them from Oyo-Ile is still a Lion. We must tell them, if they don’t remember that there was once Afonja. Obasanjo, without making too much noise, brought us to terms with the reality of our history. It would be wrong for us as a people to sacrifice it.

“If Jonathan, as a person, is not fighting the battle well, we should be able to tell him. Because we are not ready to go to the days when an Ijaw man cannot be an NSA, when a Berom man cannot be the GMD of NNPC, where it would be difficult for a Yoruba man to become Chief of Army Staff, for Igbo it is even unheard of.  If there was no Obasanjo, there wouldn’t have been Ihejirika,” he argued.

Source: Daily Newswatch