July 22, 2025
By Ayinde Adeleke
The Yorùbá Global Alliance has dissociated itself from the “Yoruba National Diplomatic Passport,” a move prompted by concerns over the passport’s legitimacy and the implications for Yoruba self-determination efforts.
This alliance, part of various groups advocating for separation from Nigeria, expressed disapproval of the passport’s creation by another Yoruba self-determination group, the Yoruba Self-Determination Movement.
In a statement signed by National President Dr. Amos Arogundade Akingba and Council Chairman High Chief Tola Adeniyi, the Yoruba Global Alliance questioned the logic behind designing, printing, and marketing a national passport for a non-sovereign entity lacking an issuing authority—a requirement for international passports.
Part of the statement reads:
“The attention of the Yoruba Global Alliance has been drawn to the existence of a ‘Yoruba National Diplomatic Passport’, designed, printed and being marketed to unsuspecting ‘Yoruba Nation’ enthusiasts by one of the several Yoruba Self-Determination Groups, to wit, Yoruba Self-Determination Movement.
“We thought it was a wicked rumour or an April Fool joke stretched far until we saw a copy of the so-called passport on the screen during a presentation by a leading and popular US-based Talk Show channel ‘Yoruba Gbode’ hosted weekly by a veteran upscale Broadcast Journalist Yeye Sola Yussuf. It was shocking. An ordinary Primary 3 pupil of Civics Studies knows that a non-sovereign country cannot have a ‘national’ passport. In the same vein a national passport must have a legally recognized ‘Issuing Authority’ to confirm its validity.
“The International community will ask ‘Who is the Issuing Authority of this bed-room conjured ‘passport’? A National Passport is universally accepted as the property of the issuing sovereign country. The question that begs for an answer is, ‘Whose property’ is this strange passport? Of what need or use or timeliness is this passport? Is it a travel document? So many questions. So many queries. We do not want to input motives for the creation of this obvious desperate search for martyrdom, but are concerned that the Yoruba nation, home to some of the brightest, most knowledgeable, most educated, most urbanized people on the surface of the earth is being driven to opprobrium by the action of a negligible few.
“The Yoruba community forcibly yoked with the choking and retarding strange bedfellows is very eager, anxious and desperate to live this imposed prison, but the people should not be taken advantage of by feeding them with unfulfilled promises, calculated mirages, and smart designs that continually drain their purses and raise their blood pressure.
“The Yoruba nation shall have her sovereignty. And as we all have elected a peaceful path to that a-must goal, we must be guided by a methodology devoid of self glorification and reasonable aggregation of knowledge enriched by critical mass inclusiveness. Advocacy. Advocacy. Advocacy. We should not delude ourselves by climbing a tree from the top! The Yoruba Global Alliance would like to seize this opportunity to plead with the Oyo State Government and other authorities concerned to kindly release all the misguided rag-tag ‘army’ that sought to ‘overthrow’ the Agodi government last year April 13.
“The individuals concerned who are currently languishing in jail, abandoned, without a thought or care from anyone must have learnt their lessons. It will be unfair to keep them incarcerated while their principal instigator is left untouched.”
