December 14, 2024
By Architect Akinola George
Dr. Femi Adegoke was the leader of VOICE OF REASON, a Yoruba socio-political organisation affiliated to Afenifere.
As at 2021 when we had just formed YORUBA WORLD CONGRESS, a lot of broad based meetings and consultations were held to determine the path of Yoruba in a minefield gulag set up by Buhari to politically strangulate Yoruba, kill them off their farms and take over their land.
To stave off the impending food insecurity, we all agreed to partner with the Middle Belt to secure certain food items and their safe passage to Yorubaland in the event of a conflagration.
Three people were chosen for that trip, viz: Otunba Deji Osibogun, a prolific media mogul, Dr. Femi Adegoke, a medical doctor and leader of Voice of Reason (a gathering of seasoned intellectuals, the upper middle class and the nouveau riche) and myself, an architect and the concept developer of the Digital Food Village.
The three day journey afforded us the opportunity to share notes on Yoruba survival within or outside Nigeria, and to choose between restructuring, regionalism and self-determination.
While Otunba Osibogun tended towards self-determination, he was willing to work with regionalism if properly deciphered and put together.
Dr. Adegoke preferred a restructured Nigeria where the Yoruba Nation would have full autonomy.
I was very unequivocal about my stance on total self-determination, independence and sovereignty for the Yoruba Nation.
Both of them found my position a bit extreme, but my argument was that if you want the Yoruba to reclaim the trajectory of their phenomenal developmental stride of the 1950s and early 1960s, we had to cut our umbilical cord linkage to the slave yard, British commercial enterprise called Nigeria. It has to be and unencumbered Yoruba Nation.
Subsequent events thereafter had swayed both of them to my viewpoint before Dr. Femi Adegoke passed away some two years ago.
He left a legacy of firmness, diligence and committed leadership. A proud son of Ondo City, in Ondo state, where, incidentally, I come from.
He died believing in the inevitability of a sovereign Yoruba Nation.
Dr. Olufemi Adegoke was the father of Olukemi Badenoch, nee Adegoke, the incumbent leader of the British Conservative party!
Her fiery directness has a root.
Her precise surgical dichotomy between Yoruba and a failed Nigeria is traceable to a laudable antecedent.
Now, we know the pedigree of who we are dealing with.
We shall yet get to a particular point in our journey where we must work with her.
