One Nigeria Is a Yoruba Survival Project, Not a National Ideal

One Nigeria Is a Yoruba Survival Project, Not a National Ideal

One Nigeria Is a Yoruba Survival Project, Not a National Ideal

Between Hausa, Igbo, Fulani, and Yoruba, a hard truth stands out: the Yoruba man needs Nigeria’s unity more than anyone else, even more than the Fulani. This is not sentiment. It is strategy.
The Hausa/Fulani elite already control the spine of the Nigerian state security, military command, intelligence, and federal bureaucracy. Nigeria is useful to them, but not essential. Their power structure existed before Nigeria and will survive any reconfiguration of it. Unity strengthens their grip, but disunity does not erase their dominance.
The Igbo are different. Economically mobile, globally networked, and psychologically detached from the Nigerian project, the Igbo have learned to survive without the state. Nigeria has repeatedly excluded, punished, and marginalized them. As a result, unity is not their anchor; self-preservation and self-determination are. Whether Nigeria exists or not, Igbo survival mechanisms remain intact.

Now consider the Yoruba.
The Yoruba political class sits in the most fragile position. The Southwest is neither numerically dominant like the Hausa nor coercively powerful like the Fulani. Its economic pride, Lagos, is not an ethnic homeland but a national convergence point. Lagos survives because Nigeria exists. Remove Nigeria, and Lagos becomes contested space overnight.
This is the Yoruba dilemma.

Without Nigeria:

Lagos loses its federal shield.

The Southwest loses guaranteed access to national revenue.

Yoruba elites lose their role as Nigeria’s ideological and diplomatic middlemen.

Their leverage between North and South collapses.

That is why Yoruba politics has never seriously pursued exit. From Awolowo’s federalism to today’s restructuring rhetoric, the objective has always been control within unity, not separation.
Nigeria is the platform through which Yoruba relevance is maintained and this explains the pattern:

Loud sermons about “One Nigeria.”

Aggressive opposition to Biafra agitation.

Silence or accommodation when Fulani dominance expands.

Mockery of Igbo geopolitical realities while ignoring northern overreach.

The Yoruba man fears a Nigeria without Nigeria more than a Nigeria under Fulani control because, a broken Nigeria forces the Yoruba elite to stand alone, and standing alone exposes territorial vulnerability, internal fragmentation, and dependence on federal relevance.

This is not hatred. It is analysis.
The Hausa man has numbers.
The Fulani man has force.
The Igbo man has mobility.
The Yoruba man has Nigeria.

Take Nigeria away, and the Yoruba establishment must renegotiate identity, power, and survival from the ground up, a negotiation they have avoided since 1960.
So when unity is preached with moral urgency even when it is putting on agbada, understand what is really speaking: not patriotism, but fear of life without the Nigerian structure.
Nigeria is not sustained by love.
It is sustained by unequal needs.
And among all major ethnic groups, no one needs Nigeria to remain one more than the Yoruba political establishment because they are afraid of themselves.