OyoState: The Rotational Matter and the Demand for Revisit by the Oyo Civil Society Group

The OSC/OGF argument is coherent on one plane—history and symbolism. No serious Yoruba scholar denies the outsized civilisational role of Oyo or the enduring cultural resonance of the Alaafin of Oyo across the Yoruba world and the diaspora. As a cultural and historical symbol, the Alaafin occupies a unique place. On that score, the statement is persuasive.

Their statement is intellectually sophisticated, rhetorically powerful, and deeply emotive, but it also illustrates the core fault line in the current debate: the tension between civilisational symbolism and modern statutory governance.

However, where the argument becomes vulnerable is in conflating symbolic primacy with administrative supremacy.

The Council of Obas is not a civilisational archive; it is a statutory body created and regulated by law. Rotational chairmanship does not erase history, nor does it flatten culture—it governs procedure. Treating administrative rotation as “historical vandalism” risks overstating the case and turning heritage into a veto over governance.

The Alaafin’s absence is indeed a signal, but signals do not invalidate law. Nor does disagreement amount to cultural rupture. History shows that Yoruba institutions have survived precisely because they adapted after disruption, not because they froze arrangements at moments of past glory.

The call for government to reverse a duly enacted law on civilisational grounds alone is therefore politically unrealistic and constitutionally weak, even if emotionally compelling. Reform can—and should—acknowledge history, but history cannot substitute for statute.

In the end, this statement is best read as a cultural manifesto, not a governing template. It powerfully defends patrimony, but it underestimates the necessity of plural authority and negotiated coexistence in a modern state.

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The real task ahead is not reversal by decree, but bridging symbolism and law—honouring history withoutimmobilising governance.

That balance, not absolutism on either side, is what will preserve Yoruba unity in practice, not just in prose.

• Lanre Ogundipe

Ogundipe is a former National President of the Nigerian Union of Journalists