THE BETRAYAL OF ODUDUWA: HOW BOLA TINUBU BROKE THE PEOPLE WHO MADE HIM
Letters from Stockholm
By Kio Amachree
When Bola Ahmed Tinubu ascended to Aso Rock in 2023, the expectation across the Southwest was simple: a son of the soil would, at the very least, not preside over the ruin of his own people. Three years later, that expectation lies in the dust of Oyo, Ondo and Osun, alongside the shattered schoolrooms from which Yoruba children are now dragged into forests by armed men.
Let us begin with the voices of the Yoruba themselves, because this is not the complaint of outsiders. The Yoruba Union, Ìgbìnmó Májékóbájé Ilé-Yorùbá, has declared bluntly that Aso Rock is not Tinubu’s family house, that his economic policies have crippled businesses and sent many to their early graves, and that the people of the Southwest have felt no positive impact from his leadership — only intimidation, harassment, and the arbitrary arrest of journalists and critics to suppress dissent. When a pan-Yoruba cultural organisation tells a Yoruba president not to bother contesting again, the family has spoken.
The security collapse is the most unforgivable charge. When terrorists abducted schoolchildren, teachers and a principal in Oriire, Oyo State, the Yoruba Union declared that Tinubu and the Southwest governors had failed the Yoruba people, accusing them of concentrating on 2027 political calculations while Yoruba children languish in the dens of terrorists who have occupied the land with an agenda of taking it over. The Union says it warned Tinubu when these terrorists overran Kwara South and desecrated ancestral land, urging a joint surveillance system across the forests — and was ignored. In May 2026, scores of teachers and students were seized in coordinated attacks on three schools in a single local government, and kidnapping — once a Northern affliction — now spreads across the Southwest, with bandits operating with absolute impunity, posting videos of their abductees and making demands at will. This is the Yorubaland of Awolowo’s free education revolution. Under Tinubu, the classroom has become a hunting ground.
Then the economy. Afenifere — the very organisation whose name means those who wish good for all — refused to support a government whose first year alone pushed over 14 million people into poverty with anti-people policies. The persistent devaluation of the naira and harsh economic policies have made life unbearable for millions, choked small businesses, deepened poverty across the region and driven an alarming rise in out-of-school children. The market women of Ibadan, the artisans of Abeokuta, the traders of Lagos Island — these are Tinubu’s own people, and they are the ones being ground into the earth.
And here is the cruellest twist of the knife. While ordinary Yoruba people starve and hide from kidnappers, Tinubu has draped the commanding heights of the Nigerian state in Yoruba names — and in doing so has made the entire nation resent us. Afenifere itself condemned what it called his outrageous bias in placing Yorubas at the head of the criminal justice system, the economy and the security forces, warning that this threatens inter-ethnic relationships and peaceful co-existence, and declaring that having fought Fulani hegemony for decades, it would not now support a Yoruba hegemony. Understand what this means. Tinubu has taken the collective name of the Yoruba and mortgaged it to his personal power. When the reckoning comes — and in Nigeria, the reckoning always comes — it will not be Tinubu alone who answers. It will be every Yoruba trader in Kano, every Yoruba civil servant in Abuja, every Yoruba family living peacefully outside the Southwest, who will carry the resentment his selfishness has sown. He has spent our name and pocketed the change.
The result is that even his presidency has not quieted the agitation for a Yoruba nation. Despite Tinubu’s ethnic background, his own kinsmen insist Nigeria remains a contraption under the 1999 Constitution, and separatist agitators have continued to press for a sovereign Yoruba nation throughout his tenure. Why? Because the Yoruba can see with their own eyes that having “our man” in power has delivered nothing but hardship, insecurity and a stained name. Even the newly formed Omo Odùduwà Collective, comprising respected Yoruba professionals, has said the government must be held accountable for the consequences of its policy choices, as citizens grapple with rising living costs, collapsing purchasing power, food insecurity and unemployment.
Tinubu’s politics were always the antithesis of the omoluabi ethos — the code of honour, character and integrity that the Yoruba hold as their civilisational inheritance. He has governed as he always operated: for himself, his family, and his network. The Yoruba people were merely the ladder. And a man who kicks away his own ladder should not be surprised when his people let him fall.
History will record that the first Southwest presidency of this generation impoverished the Southwest, exposed its children to terrorists, silenced its journalists, and converted the proud name of Oduduwa into a byword for one man’s ambition. The Yoruba deserved a statesman. They got a landlord collecting rent on their heritage.
The Yoruba will endure, as we have always endured. But we will remember.
Kio Amachree writes from Stockholm.
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