Mohammed Oluwatimileyin Taoheed reports,
The leader of the Yoruba self-determination group, Ilana Omo Oodua, Prof Banji Akintoye, has said that the emergence of Bola Tinubu as the next ruler of the country cannot be a barricade to the demands for the Yoruba Nation.
He made this known over the weekend in an exclusive interview with Track News Nigeria, stating that Tinubu’s presidency cannot stop the agitation as a result of the fact that the Nigerian system has been buried in corruption
Track News Nigeria understands that the 87-year-old Professor believed that the Ilana Omo Odua group will not leave the agitation because a Yoruba man emerged as the next Nigerian leader in 2023.
He explained that Ilana Omo Odua is an intellectually well-informed group, stressing that the emergence of Tinubu as the President will add nothing to the South West.
He asserted: “No way. We are an intellectually well-informed group, at least, at the top. We know that one Yoruba person becoming the president of Nigeria for four or eight years will add nothing.
“No Tinubu or Olusegun Obasanjo can change the system because the system has been entrenched.”
Speaking on how the group gets its funding, Akintoye put it that it banks on occasional gifts for well-meaning Nigerians for particular purposes.
He said: “As regards finance, unfortunately, most of the young people running around don’t have money and I, their father, unfortunately, have never done business. So, I don’t have money.
All that we depend on is occasional gifts for particular purposes like when there was agitation for a secretariat in Lagos. We all agreed but how does one get a secretariat in Lagos? It involves a lot of money.
“Things are not cheap in Lagos. It was God’s intervention as one young man called me one morning and said he just got back from the USA and that he was so impressed with what we were doing. He said he wanted to see me and he offered to give us money to start a secretariat. We were able to pay for three years on the building that we finally found.
“When Sunday Igboho was arrested and we started negotiating with our lawyers, the amount was huge. In the end, we had to pay the lawyer CFA9.3million and the CFA is equivalent to the Naira now.
“They gathered the money, mostly from the USA and Canada, to pay for legal fees. That’s how we have been getting money.”
