It is almost like a dream, to imagine someone like General Obasanjo mouth divisive rhetoric dripping with hate: like “islamization” and “Fulanization”, fake news that he unleashed on President Buhari last week, which he attempted to walk back with his wrong footed letter of “fake prayers and concern” more recently. A man, who in seeking power severally in Nigeria acted nationalist (even to the detriment of his Yoruba kit and kin), but suddenly finds his ethnic and divisive voice at the departure lounge of life is truly saddening!

Clearly, Obasanjo must be in it for himself (as he always is) and not for the Yorubas; and definitely not Nigeria! Heck, a man complains loudly about open grazing in Nigeria but failed to remind Nigerians he stole 35,000 hectares of land from under the Upper Benue River Basin Authority at Gassol, Taraba state which easily could have been a pilot location for how to raise cattle and could have prevented the crisis President Buhari is now having to deal with. These greedy men won’t stop at anything!

When one reads a General TY Danjuma, whom after feeding fat on Nigeria treasury after securing oil blocs by collaboration with thieving dictators, suddenly discovered the art of screaming and punching back at President Buhari because he feels his oil bloc may be threatened one cannot but feel sorry for our Generals out of power.

I mean, did he suddenly just discover that Christians, Moslems and the Faithless occupy the country he once led at the highest level? The crazy thing about the divisive views of these Generals is the seeming hook and line sinker the gullible population seem to be aping these “owners of Nigeria”.

All pointers to the seeming incoherent noise from the hallow chamber of the “discontents” point to a sinister agenda, driven by a desire to seize power in 2023.

The gamble of the discontent is simple: with President Buhari not on the ticket, and the ruling party pulled in different directions by politicians with competing ambitions, 2023 offers the most suitable re-entry point for the “owners of Nigeria” even if it has to be obtained by duplicity, blackmail and forging unholy alliances!

The calculation of the “discontents” is simple: they realize the simple formula of 2015 that continued to hold true in 2019 was the enduring alliance between the North and Southwest Nigeria. Hence, to undo this political arrangement something must be done to pry the Southwest away from the grip of the ruling party, and cause disaffection between the core North and Southwest, while hoping for collateral damage in the North Central to produce the Goodluck Map of 2011 that gave the discontents the longest and most dramatic rape of the treasury yet in the history of Nigeria!

To do this, the job of discrediting the APC in the Southwest began way before the 2019 contest, with mass hate messages and fake news circulating in the Southwest Media. Indeed, knowing that the singular most effective bulwark against their strategy is Vice President Osinbajo, the discontent have recently sought to discredit him or raise the fear of the Yorubas that he is being undermined by some “cabal” – to further poison their minds against the ruling party. These gate messages crafted on Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram continue to circulate persistently, some even as voice notes proclaiming the Vice President is resigning or has resigned. What a load of balderdash!

Naturally, practitioners in the media industry know the role of “brown envelopes” in gaining favorable media coverage. The fact that President Buhari’s team has not been playing ball did not endear them to the Lagos-Ibadan media, whose program and promotion of a particular form of hate speech designed to drive a wedge between the Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani has reached a certain dangerous crescendo that can plunge the nation into political and security crisis if left unchecked.

In recent times, a coordinated action between Wadata Plaza, which houses the PDP headquarters, Otta Farms and certain rogue elements in Yorubaland who continue to raise the temperature of the land as regards security must be alarming to security agencies. Particularly the activities of perpetual enfant terrible, Yinka Odumakin, who went on Channels TV to demand that the President, order a shoot at sight of all Fulani Herdsmen that supply 100% of meat needs of Yorubaland in the Southwest is troubling. This demand, and the criminalization of the “herdsmen” profession and weaponization of crime that bears no semblance to facts or data, continue to be the primary challenge of security agencies.

On social media, they’ve curated and infiltrated several platforms especially on a WhatsApp and Facebook, circulating fake videos of kidnapping and voice overs on seemingly innocent scenes of herders. They even paraded one old supporter of Goodluck Jonathan, one belligerent Suleiman to threaten southerners after they exploited the Ruga crisis. More recently, they’re circulating fake news on everything from registration of illegal immigrants to imagined invasion by Fulanis of ancestral homes of Yorubas- despite long years of living peaceably. The frustrated Diaspora audience who feeds daily on imagined news from Nigeria is a natural recruit for them, even as the large horde of unemployed youths in southwest Nigeria have been employed as e-rats in the Fayose tradition to unleash these ungodly materials on innocent minds now at the mercy of misinformation and disinformation tactics. It is all propaganda!

For example, despite the well know security challenges of Nigeria’s highways particularly Benin-Ore-Lagos road, Mr. Odumakin and his “fake news” purveyors were the first on air to associate the unfortunate shooting of the daughter of the Afenifere Chieftain just last week, with “Fulani Herdsmen”. This is despite the oral and documented evidence of police and the co-occupants of the vehicle that identified “masked gunmen” and spoke of no herd neither of assailants of Fulani extraction. Indeed, this tactic deployed by the Odumakins of the world, working for their paymaster in Yola and Otta, is deliberate.

The idea is to drive a permanent wedge among Yorubas and the Northern political elites. Their calculation is that with this in the bag, what will be left is for the PDP to field their Cameroonian Prince in 2023, with a thoroughly discredited Southwest APC on the back foot, and ride to victory with a South Eastern Vice President: the very arrangement the Otta General is said to be promoting to get certain strain of puppets he has pre-planned to be installed as usual.

This “Eastern Plot” which will see power shift from the NW-SW alliance to NE-SE axis, despite the numerical disadvantage of the later, relies largely on blackmail and discrediting veritable political structures. This alliance is what is driving the “Massobization” of the Opposition, who have suddenly embraced the secessionist manifesto: albeit short term, and conveniently to achieve their pre-determined goal.

As such, no one should be surprised when Presidential Wannabe Sowore, was found embracing Nnamdi Kanu in New York last week, and the same internationally sponsored Sowore whose nexus to foreign intelligence agencies is well known: is now said to be acting unwittingly in concert with Olusegun Obasanjo for a revolution – a senior colleague to Sowore in the cloak and dagger world of foreign intelligence elements in Nigeria.

The international dimension to the “Eastern Plot”, self evidenced by the increasing interest of foreign intelligence agencies in President Buhari’s policy of “Open Trade” with China, which has suddenly increased their chatter much similar to the way it did in 1984 is a prelude to destroying any legacy of “self dependence” developed by President Buhari’s administration. Nigerians must resist them.

All in all, the ace holder in this game is the ordinary Yoruba man and woman on the streets of the 6 Southwestern States, and 2 North Central states of Kogi and Kwara, whose ethnic and age-long tribal sentiments are daily being appealed to by the hatchets of the “Eastern Plot”. Their bet is that just like 2011, when Yorubas were convinced to vote for one Goodluck Jonathan, they will also be gullible in 2023.

But Yoruba folks are wont to forget the same Jonathan working in cahoots with international criminals turned on them by ensuring that not even a single South westerner made the first eleven in governance under his watch in Nigeria, while abandoning capital projects including Lagos-Ibadan and Lagos-Ore roads (setting the grounds for criminality on those highways today) and letting thugs like former Governor Fayose lose on the citizenry.

The only way to convince people to vote against their own political and economic interest is to scare them of their safety. This is the summation of the purveyors of the “Eastern Plot”. Will Yorubas fall for the banana peel the second time?

Yoruba ronu. The battle for 2023 has started. No distraction.

• Lolu Akinade writes from Kabba,