In 2019, one of my ex-bosses who was a very staunch APC supporter called me into his office one day and said, "Johnmark, if you come to my village, you Igbos have taken over everywhere."
I asked him, "how, what did they do?" He told me point blank that the youth in his village have nothing to do because the Igbos now sell everything there, and are buying up their property. This was 7am in the morning, I just resumed work at Alausa.
Fast forward to today, the progenitors of "na statistics we go chop?" have now inundated my last posts with a statistical paper reference from the tabloid, "Statisense," which apparently, places the South East as the poorest in the South.
These emergency lovers of statistics have suspended the eye test -- well-grounded anecdotal evidence apparent in every locale in the South about the immense significance of the Igbos to both do business, and invest in where they are domiciled, however temporal.
In most of Yoruba land, your leaders have made you leeches. You've trademarked "owo dá" and other appellations that qualify this fact. By the way, no, the person who sells to you by offering services to you, while you hand over monetary value, is not leeching off you. A leech, by definition, is a one-dimensional beneficiary of a 'transaction.'
For instance, there's a lot of revenue from the port in Lagos. But everyone knows who imports most of those containers in the Nigerian port. So paper statistics showing "revenue from Lagos" means nothing to those who know the truth.
The biggest employer of labour in the South West currently is political patronage. This is a place where it's a norm to see folks in their 50's dobaale-ing to their political suitors, for their daily bread. It's beyond a pandemic, it's now normalized, such that questioning it becomes an act of rebellion and labels such as "Yoruba buts" are given to those who dare.
Your leaders have failed you. Most of your claimed land isn't actually yours. And you have never seen war like the East and North have.
So, instead of thumping your chest online and screenshotting paper stats that have no bearing on reality, why not humble yourselves, be more productive, leave political thuggery on and offline, and be made free.