Opinion
Feeble dance of the Tinubu, Osinbajo masquerade
The most appropriate representation of the impending 2023 presidential election contest for the Yoruba is what is called the Odun e’gun or the Egungun Festival contest. It is a festival cum contest in which masquerades file out in their rainbow colour regalia, with a mammoth crowd gathered to watch them dance. As of today, Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Yemi Osinbajo are the Yoruba people’s two biggest masquerades in this odun egun.
The Alagbaa, one entrusted with the traditional right to preside over the ancestral rites of the festival is however a Fulani – Muhammadu Buhari. By the way, the Alagbaa is very central to every masquerade festival. He is a hereditary chief who heads the Egungun society and who determines the tone and tenor of the festival. Preparatory to the contest, the Alagbaa of the 2023 Nigerian Egungun Festival had literally decapitated the masquerades, succeeding in destroying the masquerades’ worth and credibility in the estimation of the mammoth crowd at the marketplace.
The masquerade festival is also a time to offer sacrifices to divinities, one of whom is Èsù-Òdàrà, known as the mediator divinity. Yoruba do not joke with making such propitiations to their dead. It is believed that if the wrath of these divinities is not appeased and in this case, through the Egungun festival, incongruities will besiege the land, so much that rats in the forests will lose their divinely ordained squeaking sound and birds, their chirps – “eku o ni ke bi eku, eye o ni dun bi eye”.
The masquerades, wearing long, multifarious colourful robes to court the aesthetic sense of the spectators, are masked according to the insignia of the spirits of their deceased ancestors and are welcomed to the marketplace by shouts of excitement and melodious drumming. The Egungun then file to the marketplace to perform several shades of dances. Though humans, but generally perceived to have transmuted into spirit beings on account of their regalia, the Egungun is expected not to be in conformity with the sedate norms of this world, and are thus held on a leash by men who wield cudgels, preventing intruders from coming close to spirit beings. Worshippers then dance to percussions of bata drum and in the process, become possessed by ancestral spirits, with those holding the whips flogging everybody within the precincts of their whips.
A religious practice of the people that has lasted centuries, the Egungun Festival is a ceremony in which the Yoruba honour what they perceive to be the annual return of their ancestors to the world of the living. At the marketplace, when the Egungun dances eclectically to the front to contest, he invokes the spirits of his ancestors long deceased, precursors of such interventions with the people, to grant him the grace of making brilliant dancing strides in the contest and go home with the village’s trophy of success.
For the Yoruba, however, even at this preparatory stage for the Nigerian 2023 Egungun festival, it is getting ominous. The omen writ large is that, even with Tinubu and Osinbajo dancing this spasmodically to the crowd’s frenzied excitement, the opportunity for the Yoruba Egungun to coast home with the trophy by succeeding in occupying the Aso Rock seat of power in 2023 is becoming almost a mirage. Either as a reflection of that hunch or premonition, in the last couple of weeks, especially on social media, Yoruba analysts and commentators have drawn three unpleasant anchors and images in the service of an explanation for the race’s impending plight. One is that they are drawing a similarity between the 2023 contest and the First Republic consuming fight between two of their recent ancestors, Chiefs Obafemi Awolowo and Samuel Ladoke Akintola.
Second is that these analysts are fleeing into Christian eschatology to locate their plight in a similar relationship that went haywire in Israel some 2000 years ago, between Jesus the Christ and his sidekick, Judas Iscariot. The third of their engagements is to go into the ancient Yoruba narrative of the curse of Alaafin Aole who, miffed at his betrayal, had reportedly cursed generations thereafter that they would be afflicted by rancour at critical points of their national development.
Whichever way you choose to look at their dilemma, the Egungun still represents the best explainer of the Yoruba crossroads. A secret society, on the day of the Egungun festival, masquerades come to the marketplace in various long, coloured regalia to perform the dual role of deity, listening to the requests of the living who gather by their feet in supplication and who are then believed to carry the supplicants’ requests back to their ancestral community in heaven, ultimately depositing them by the feet of Olodumare – God. Thus, women facing challenges of procreation beseech the masked spirit to grant them children and the people as a whole ask for continued guidance from the spirit being. The Egungun, in a high-pitched voice, in turn, prays for the supplicants, to which they answer ase – amen.
By especially shuttling into the First Republic to bring out the ghosts and personas of Awolowo and Akintola as referents and explainers for the 2023 contest, I submit here that this trait has always been part and parcel of the Yoruba. Indeed, in African cosmology, ancestors play very conspicuous and important roles. They represent very important sources of power and are believed to be capable of acting on behalf of or against their descendants. Ancestors also function as divinities even though they exhibit less spiritual power than the gods – Orisa, somewhat. When a descendant of an ancestor faces existential challenges in life, they go to their family groves, offer sacrificial offerings and invoke the destiny – ori of their fathers in heaven to intervene in their plights. Ancestor worship is very central to the religion of the Yoruba.
While the two big masquerades, Tinubu and Osinbajo, prepare to dance in the marketplace, their supporters have been invoking several epithets, parallels, epigrams and symbols as prologues to explain the two masquerades’ impending dancing steps. The epilogue has been coming in the form of a narrative put in the public sphere that Osinbajo, foremost professor of law and attorney general was moulded by Bola Tinubu while he was governor of Lagos state. Indeed, the strategy of interfacing Tinubu with the public by his supporters has been an audacious carving of the ex-Lagos governor in the mould of the Yoruba god, Orunmila, the orisa of wisdom, knowledge, and divination. Orunmila’s epithet is one who moulds the destinies of his appendages, the “mo’ri mo’ri omo tuntun“. Tinubu’s apologists have since cited people at the top who, upon coming in contact with this orisa, got their destinies moulded and catapulted to the top.
One of a series of devious stratagem used in the service of this bid is drawing a parallel between Awolowo and Akintola’s feud of the First Republic as an explainer of the interface between Tinubu and Osinbajo. This came to the fore with brute force immediately after Osinbajo’s declaration for the 2023 presidency. Upon examination, however, it will be found to be very hollow, shallow and lacking in any rigour of a historical understanding. Let me explain.
After being systematically rigged out of the 1959 federal election, Awolowo decided not to go back to his premiership of the western region. This is unlike eastern region premier, Nnamdi Azikiwe, who accepted Prime Minister Balewa’s overture to form a government with him, thereafter becoming Nigeria’s only ceremonial president. Azikiwe left his turf in the hands of Michael Okpara, a very grits-full medical doctor with a very strong mind of his own. while Ahmadu Bello of the northern region sent a junior politician, Balewa, to the centre to become Nigeria’s prime minister.
It is no longer news that though Akintola was his deputy in the Action Group, Awolowo favoured either Anthony Enahoro or Chief FRA Williams as his successor. He however had to succumb to party elders like Dr Akanni Doherty and Akinola Maja who articulated the need to pick Akintola who had then become the deputy leader of the AG after the death of Chief Bode Thomas. In his own words, however, Awolowo maintained that those who dissuaded him from picking Chief Williams as successor were Chief S. O. Gbadamosi and Dr Akanni Doherty.
In late 1961, the Action Group constituted a group of young men who prepared memoranda for a cogent ideology for the AG. The party’s federal executive council meeting thus agreed on the adoption of democratic socialism as its ideology and, among others, that, “nobody, especially government or party functionaries must have more than one plot of government land; fringe benefits and perks for ministers and parliamentary secretaries were slashed; and thirdly, the party pronounced that the party was supreme and that anybody who held office did so at the pleasure of the party and that anyone who held any governmental position must see that his policies were either laid down by the party or were in line with party policies”. This did not go down well with the premier, Akintola, who mocked the ideology of democratic socialism openly. More fundamentally, while Akintola believed that the west should bond with the north to gain power at the centre, Awolowo believed that the west must go eastwards in seeking allies.
To buttress this, Akintola, in his witty aphorisms and government policies, slammed the managing director of the Nigerian Railways, Dr Ikejiani Clark, for nepotism in his recruitment of staff into the railway company. This he did in his famous “ikeji a ni, iketa a ni” and in the squabble for the VC-ship of the University of Lagos between Professor Eni Njoku and Saburi Biobaku, Akintola played on the Yoruba common denominator of “death” in the names of the VC contestants and asked why the Lagos university community would prefer someone who ate dead bodies (literal translation of Eni Njoku) as against someone who did not want to die (literal meaning of Biobaku).
What the above signifies is that the duo of Awolowo and Akintola disagreed and fought on the place of their Yoruba people in the scheme of things in post-colonial Nigeria and not on inanities of who made who and who betrayed who. I scooped many documents, newspapers and magazines on the tiff between Awo and SLA and never for once did I stumble on that petty magisterialism of Awo ascribing Akintola’s rise to the premiership to his imperious power. So, when supporters of especially Tinubu try to reduce the contest to betrayal, it smacks of a spurious attempt to leave the substance of the right of a sixty-something-year-old man to aspire to any office in the land and pursue shadows of tar-brushing him as a turncoat.
In the last eight years of Tinubu and Osinbajo people’s sufferings under Buhari, both of them never demonstrated any fidelity to them or the boldness to wear their Yorubaness on their lapels. They never demonstrated that their people’s plight was worthy of any amplification and resolution. When kidnappers killed and ransomed their people of the south-west without let, the duo of Tinubu and Osinbajo bonded with the Alagbaa in his taciturn cold-bloodedness. They even literally abetted him in his nepotistic embrace of his Fulani people and discard of others. While Tinubu told the world that, to become the Nigerian president has been his lifelong ambition, Osinbajo has not demonstrated that he is possessed of any unique love for his Yoruba people, nor that Yoruba people should queue behind him as a matter of mutual kinsman fidelity.
Yes, while in their respective political offices, they have both favoured their political and religious clienteles – apologies again to Professor Farooq Kperogi – I am not aware that any one of them bent over backwards to articulate the plight of the Yoruba in a different pitch, in a federal Nigeria under Buhari.
With the above in mind, it then means that those haranguing supporters of both Tinubu and Osinbajo on account of their disparate views, citing the so-called Aole curse of disunity among Yoruba, are merely walking on a barren historical route. While it is a feel-good feeling to have one’s kinsman as president of Nigeria, the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency exemplifies that Yoruba wise-saying that one’s benefactor is not necessarily your kinsman – “ajumobi o kan t’anu…” It is arguable if Yoruba’s south-west was not the least considered for development of Nigeria’s six zones under Obasanjo.
So, while the two masquerades – Tinubu and Osinbajo – prepare to have their individual day at the marketplace to dance, Yoruba should clap their hands for any one of them that catches their fancy, feel free to get scintillated by their multi-coloured Egungun masquerade regalia. They may mop up as many frills and personal excitements as they can from the eclectic dance steps of the masquerades, get entranced by their beautiful costumes and be awed by the whiplash that each of them lashes on each other. To now Yorubanize the presidential bids of these masquerades and approximate their travails and baggage as the Yoruba race’s is is absurd and inappropriate, something in the mould of a journey doomed to fail.
Dr. Festus Adedayo, a lawyer, journalist and columnist writes
The most foolish person in a burning house is not the one who cannot find the exit. It is the one who knew the house would burn, watched it happen, and only ran when the ceiling collapsed. That is Nigeria’s governance posture toward insecurity—a pattern so consistent that it has become normalized.
“Ikú tó pa ojúgbà ẹni, òwe ló fi pa. (The death that kills your neighbour is a proverb directed at you).
The bandits did not simply arrive. They sent warnings ahead of them through a trail of violence that crossed state lines and appeared in every massacre headline we filed away as someone else’s problem.
When Insecurity Was Still “Someone Else’s Problem”
When the North was burning and the Middle Belt bleeding, the South West treated it as distant noise. Kwara became the first warning sign—the bridge between North and South—slowly slipping under the shadow of insurgency. The question every serious observer should have asked was simple: what happens when it crosses the border?
South West governors issued statements—careful, brief, and reactive. None moved with the urgency the threat demanded. Before long, violence arrived at our doorstep: herder brutality in Oke-Ogun, attacks in Oyo and Ekiti, kidnappings along the Ibadan–Ijebu-Ode expressway, and forest camps emerging in Ondo.
The warning signs had matured into reality, yet we were still searching for an exit strategy that should have been built years earlier.
The Problem: We Only Count the Dead
In safety performance management, there is a critical distinction between lagging indicators—outcomes after failure (deaths, destruction, losses)—and leading indicators, which measure prevention before failure occurs.
Aviation, oil and gas, and other high-risk industries understand this clearly: a system that obsesses over lagging indicators will always arrive after the accident.
Nigeria’s security governance is built almost entirely on lagging indicators. We count attacks after they happen. We rebuild after a collapse. We mourn after preventable deaths.
We rarely ask:
How many attacks were prevented this quarter?
How many threats were neutralized before execution?
How many cells were dismantled at the planning stage?
We do not know the answers—because we are not measuring them. The system was never designed to prevent. It was designed to respond: loudly, visibly, expensively, and always too late.
Another Base. The Same Question Nobody Asks
The presidency is reportedly considering a military base in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo state. It is a familiar pattern: a major security incident, public outrage, and an institutional response designed to signal seriousness.
But the critical question remains unanswered: what has been the leading-indicator performance of existing bases?
How have long-standing military formations in places like Jos, Benue, and Zamfara—some active for over two decades—actually shifted the security outcome?
A military base without actionable intelligence is a stationary slaughter ground for soldiers. It does not prevent attacks; it often becomes a reactive outpost in a repeating cycle: attack, deployment, statement, investigation, and then silence—while underlying threat networks remain intact.
The Incentive Structure Behind the Chaos
The deeper issue is not the capability of security forces. It is the incentive structure of the system.
When leadership is judged only by incidents that have already occurred, governance shifts from prevention to performance management of failure. The objective becomes managing optics, not reducing probability.
Nigeria’s security budget has grown significantly over the past decade, yet insecurity has worsened. Kidnappings have become more brazen. Why? Because funding is justified by the persistence of the crisis, not its resolution.
If the problem is solved, what justifies the next budget cycle?
For years, decentralization has been proposed as the structural reform that could change the system—but it remains trapped in political rhetoric. Why? Because decentralization disperses power, and power in Nigeria’s political economy is not dispersed. It is concentrated.
Sixteen Days. Full Stop.
Forty-six children and teachers were kidnapped in Oriire. It reportedly took sixteen days for the presidency to authorize a specialized rescue framework.
Sixteen days before the Commander-in-Chief treated the abduction of forty-six human beings as a crisis requiring formal executive activation.
But responsibility in moments like this is not singular.
The Oyo State Governor, by constitutional convention regarded as the Chief Security Officer of the state and a recipient of security votes, also occupies a central coordinating role in the security architecture of the state. Within a crisis of this scale, expectations of rapid intergovernmental coordination, visible command urgency, and sustained pressure on federal response mechanisms are not optional, hey are inherent to the office.
Yet, the response cycle, from abduction to high-level coordinated action and physical engagement with affected communities, unfolded at a pace that raised legitimate public concern about the speed and intensity of institutional reaction.
By the time visible field visits and coordinated engagements occurred, the delay had already become part of the public record of the crisis itself—shaping perception as much as the incident shaped fear on the ground.
In a functional security system, crisis response is measured in hours, not days. Not for symbolism, but because time directly affects outcomes: every passing hour in an active kidnapping reduces the probability of safe recovery and increases the leverage of perpetrators.
Sixteen days, therefore, is not merely a lapse in timing. It reflects a deeper structural problem—where urgency is often declared after pressure builds, rather than operationalized when intelligence first breaks.
And in that gap between incident and action, citizens are left to absorb the consequences of delayed coordination across all tiers of authority.
The Verdict
Nigeria does not primarily need more military bases. It needs a new security measurement architecture—one that prioritizes intelligence conversion rates, early-warning response times, and pre-emptive disruption metrics over post-incident operations.
Every threat must be treated as time-sensitive, where minutes and hours determine outcomes—not weeks and statements.
Most importantly, citizens must shift the accountability question:
Not only “why did the attack happen?”
But “why was it not prevented?”
Nigeria’s security challenge is ultimately a leadership and systems failure—an institutional preference for reaction over prevention, because prevention is politically invisible.
You cannot hold a press conference about the attack that never happened.
Until this reality is named and confronted with precision, the cycle will continue.
Growing support has continued to trail a youthful politician and technology advocate, Hon. Khalil Mustapha Adegboyega, popularly known as Repete, as many youths in Ibadan North Federal Constituency expressed confidence in his leadership style and vision for development.
Across several communities within the constituency, residents, particularly students, artisans and young professionals, described Repete as one of the emerging political figures with strong grassroots appeal and a passion for youth empowerment.
Supporters said his growing popularity stems from his consistent advocacy for innovation, entrepreneurship and skills development aimed at addressing unemployment and creating opportunities for young people.
As an engineer and technology enthusiast, Repete is also said to possess a deep understanding of the evolving digital economy and the need to position youths for global competitiveness.
Many of his supporters noted that his approach to leadership focuses on practical solutions, mentorship and capacity-building initiatives capable of helping young people become self-reliant and economically productive.
Some community stakeholders who spoke on his rising profile said his humility, accessibility and relationship with the grassroots have continued to endear him to many residents within the constituency.
They added that Repete’s engagement with youths and community groups reflects his commitment to inclusive governance and people-oriented representation.
Observers within the constituency also maintained that the increasing support for the politician reflects a growing desire among residents for a new generation of leaders driven by innovation, competence and accountability.
According to them, many young people see Repete as a symbol of hope and progressive leadership capable of contributing meaningfully to the development of Ibadan North Federal Constituency.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) in Oyo State stands on the edge of a consequential decision—one that may define not only its fortunes in Ibadan North Federal Constituency but also its broader political relevance in the state.
As the countdown to the party primaries intensifies, the question before APC leaders is no longer routine. It is strategic. It is urgent. And it is decisive: will the party align with the clear preference of the people or risk repeating costly political miscalculations?
At the centre of this debate is Hon. Khalil Mustapha Adegboyega, widely known as Repete—a name that has, over time, evolved from a political identity into a grassroots phenomenon.
A Candidate Rooted in the People
In contemporary Nigerian politics, where voter awareness is rising and expectations are shifting, candidates are increasingly judged not by promises but by presence. On this scale, Adegboyega stands tall.
His political journey is marked by consistent engagement with constituents—far beyond the optics of election seasons. From youth empowerment initiatives that provide practical skills and startup support, to sustained interventions in healthcare access for the elderly and indigent, his footprint across Ibadan North reflects a model of leadership anchored on service.
Unlike the transactional approach that often defines political relationships, Adegboyega’s connection with the people appears organic—built on trust, accessibility, and continuity. These are not mere campaign attributes; they are political assets.
The Danger of Political Disconnect
History offers the APC a clear lesson: parties that ignore grassroots sentiment often pay a heavy electoral price. The imposition of candidates perceived as distant or untested has, in several instances, resulted in voter apathy, internal dissent, and eventual defeat at the polls.
Ibadan North presents no exception.
With opposition parties closely monitoring the APC’s internal dynamics, any misstep in candidate selection could provide a ready opening. A divided house, coupled with a candidate lacking widespread acceptance, is a formula the opposition is well-positioned to exploit.
The implication is straightforward: this is not merely about party loyalty; it is about electoral viability.
Echoes from the Grassroots
Across the length and breadth of Ibadan North—markets, motor parks, religious centres, and community gatherings—a consistent pattern emerges in political conversations. The name “Repete” resonates with familiarity and acceptance.
Such organic support is not easily manufactured. It is cultivated over time through visible impact and sustained presence. For a party seeking electoral certainty in a competitive environment, this level of grassroots validation is not just desirable—it is critical.
A Test of Leadership and Judgment
For the APC leadership in Oyo State, the moment calls for clarity of purpose. Decisions driven by narrow interests, personal alignments, or short-term calculations may carry long-term consequences.
The task, therefore, is to balance internal considerations with external realities. Elections are ultimately decided by voters, not by party caucuses. A candidate who commands public confidence offers the strongest pathway to victory.
The Stakes Are Clear
Ibadan North is too strategic a constituency for experimentation. The cost of error is not limited to a single seat; it extends to party cohesion, credibility, and future positioning within the state’s political landscape.
In this context, the argument for Adegboyega is less about sentiment and more about strategy. His visibility, acceptability, and record of engagement place him in a strong position to consolidate support and mobilise voters effectively.
Conclusion: A Choice with Consequences
As the APC moves closer to its primaries, the decision before it is both simple and significant: align with a candidate who reflects the mood of the electorate or risk conceding advantage to a watchful opposition.
In politics, moments such as this often separate foresight from hindsight.
For APC in Ibadan North, this may well be one of those defining moments.
Aderibigbe Akanbi, a political analyst, writes from Ibadan.
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