They Forgot Yoruba When They Scheme, By Yusuf Ozi-Usman

What happened last week Saturday at the National Convention of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) can be explained in one word: self-pride.
Self-pride which could be likened to, but not exactly similar to complex, in the case of the PDP convention, resulted in the saying that might is right. As a matter of fact, it was a classic display of money-can-buy anything situation.
The character of the Convention spoke volume about the constant struggles among the different interest groups to possess the party, mainly for personal or regional and other mundane superiority.
But in trying to flex muscle, the governors in the party, led by Chief Nyeson Wike, might have shot themselves in the foot, by scheming out the most vital, vibrant and vigorous region, not just ethnic nationality, out of the calculation.
As a matter of course, Yoruba, as an ethnic group and the Southwest as the region they live in, cannot be pushovers for whatever reason. This is the ethnic group that is regarded as the most educated, most enlightened and well spread.
It is very unfortunate that PDP, this time, played Yoruba out of the mainstream of the party in the build up to the last Saturday’s Convention, to the extent that today, no Yoruba occupies significant position at the party’s National Executive Council (NEC) and other vital national bodies.
It looks like an afterthought for the remains of the party chieftain to now be running around, trying to pacify Chief Bode George and several others that were schemed out in the usual PDP style of using money to dribble opponents; this time, internal opponents!
Like Reuben Abati said in his column last week, the PDP leadership seems not ready to face the reality that you cannot pretend that all is well when you trampled on the internal democratic practice or comfort yourself that the party’s old strength and wide acceptability would always be there for it in the future elections irrespective of the wrong steps taken.
The governors, who now dictate the tune after paying the piper, appear to be trying to eat from both sides of their mouth or to eat the cake and still have it, which is more confusing than the situation the party is into now.
In other words, the new party controllers are trying to pacify the Yoruba leaders of the party after they had knowingly put the back of the Yoruba leaders to the ground.
In the local parlance, you cannot pacify the man you have thrown violently to the ground.
It follows that he who succeeds in having the power to do the throwing of the next person to the ground is certainly a macho man.
Pretending to be sympathetic to the victim or the weaker one amounts to adding more pepper to the wound.
Yoruba ronu.[myad]