WHY YORUBAS ARE PROGRESSIVE RASCALS By Dare Adelekan

Yorubas have played and continue to play an outsized role in public debates concerning the future of our country. We have consistently and doggedly condemned unjust power, tyranny, oppression, dictatorship, and all forms of political brutality and economic repression. We are a very tolerant, accommodating, accepting, and warm people. We have strong humanitarian values. There is no ethnic group that has sacrificed and suffered so much to liberate Nigeria from the dark forces of feudalism, nepotism, barbarism, backwardness, and tyranny.

In the long walk to bring Nigeria into the comity of civilized countries, we recall with great indebtedness and gratitude to Yorubas who set the pace for political and socioeconomic strides for other ethnicities to follow. Chief Obafemi Awolowo gave us the first TV station in Africa even before France had a TV station. Awolowo was the first to introduce free universal primary education in the country. Other firsts by Awo as he was fondly called, included a housing corporation, Liberty Stadium, sky scrapper (Cocoa House), Asejire Dam that provided pipe-borne water, road networks, first-class education system, to mention but few among many infrastructural and economic developments.

Yorubas produced the first African Nobel laureate in English literature in the person of Wole Soyinka. Lateef Jakande was the first African to be elected unopposed for two terms as the President of the influential Geneva-based International Press Institute (IPI). Tai Solarin, Nigeria’s moral powerhouse, was a social crusader extraordinarily unmatched by anyone in the country. Alhaji Babatunde Jose as chairman successfully managed the defunct Daily Times as the newspaper with the largest circulation in Africa.

Olabisi Ajala was the first African to travel the world on a motorbike. In entertainment, music, and movies, Yorubas are trailblazers and continue to dominate the field. Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, the erstwhile military governor of the former western region offered himself as a sacrificial lamb. Fajuyi had insisted that the former military head of state Aguiyi Ironsi as his guest, must not be killed alone by military coup plotters. The names of Yoruba political progressive rascals whose names are burned into our national consciousness as a country are inexhaustible.

Nature, culture, tradition, civilization, progressivism and liberalism draw indelible lines of distinction between Yoruba progressive political rascals and the rest of other ethnic groups. With the few parades of stars mentioned among so many of our successful impactful giants, we take exceptional delight and boundless joy in being called progressive political rascals.