Prof. Banji Akintoye Elected to Become the New Yoruba Leader at Anniversary Lecture in Ibadan

EXCERPTS FROM THE PROF BANJI AKINTOYE’S KIRIJI WAR ANNIVERSARY LECTURE IN IBADAN, September 24, 2019:

“At this point in time when our nation and most other Nigerian nationalities have been reduced to the status of near-slavery in Nigeria, what ought to be the Yoruba nation’s manly response?

“A shrouded federal establishment controls almost all powers and resources in Nigeria, almost totally monopolizing all command positions in the hands of one small nationality. The continually seeking with impunity to seize more and more powers and resources, reducing the homelands of most nationalities to disrespected, subdued and distressed peripheries in Nigeria. They reduce the elected government of most Nigerian states into impotent and timid leaders of their peoples. They treat the citizens of the subdued nationalities who get to serve in the “federal” establishment as persons who hold their positions by sufferance and tolerance of the master class. In all these ways, they generate deeper and deeper levels of poverty, insecurity, instability and hopelessness in Nigeria.

“Above all these, in recent years, members of the small nationality that controls the powers and resources of the Federal Government have launched an invasion on the rest of Nigeria threatening to kill, maim and destroy, and actually killing, maiming and destroying. They bring large numbers of their non-Nigerian ethnic Fulani kinsmen to help them, in an ethnic-cleansing campaign that is aimed at permanently seizing all the land and resources of all other indigenous peoples of Nigeria.

“In these conditions and circumstances, the masses of the people, youths, women and children of the large and resourceful Yoruba nation want to know what the leadership of their nation will do. The peoples of the other nationalities of Nigeria and decent people all over the world want to know too.

“Therefore, the greatest and final question before the Yoruba people today is as follows: in the face of coordinated assaults on Yoruba farmlands, cities and towns and highways by the Fulani, will the Yoruba fail again to harness the enormous and variegated resources of power at their disposal for the defense and liberation of their homeland and their people?