Newscenter Media News As Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka’s 90th birthday arrives, the entire creatives’ firmament is alight with well-wishes for a man who has truly been humanistic while nursing a dozen justifications to grow cynical and lose interest in the fumbling of his Nigerian society. While his Nobel was in Literature, he could as well have notched up another if one existed for consistency in social activism across the decades. But it is also this latter aspect that has been responsible for a lot of the flak he has received over the years initially from abusers of state power and now it appears, from the abused too. As Prof approaches another epoch, I cannot put it beyond the impertinence of netizen denizens to crawl out of their key pads for another season of muckraking. While the online mob cannot be trusted with reasoned polemics shorn of ad hominem, a sliver of hope remains that their more civilised sub-set may just be patient enough to ask themselves the simple question: What has Soyinka done to you?
One cannot pretend to hold fort for Soyinka who is known to defend himself in such robust ways that you literally flinch from the direct hit achieved on targets. At 90 years, age has not mellowed him or the deadliness of his verbal missiles with the accuracy of heat-seeking cruise missiles. The world would not forget in a hurry his “gbajue” characterisation of Labour Party’s post-electoral shenanigans. On a purely metaphorical scale, it ranks with his “surgery with blunt scalpel”, riposte to General Gowon’s ‘swift surgical operation quip’ in 1967. This effort is therefore that of a bystander in what was supposed to be a civilised debate but sunken into a virtual rofo-rofo.
For caveats, I must signpost that I am an Obidient and one of the earliest at that. Way back when Mr Peter Obi was Governor of Anambra State, I had listened to him at a function at Abuja’s Yar’Adua Centre and that night, my sleep was disturbed. Though he was a high performing governor of my state, and his strides were visible on ground, he didn’t play the media. So except you were in Anambra State, you’d go with the cynics. But even as an outside resident you had to be blind and deaf not to notice the sudden resurgence of Anambra students acing JAMB and WASC results nationally. That night after listening to him narrate how he was in touch with school senior prefects and headgirls getting updates on their feeding and school work, I made copious posts on my Facebook status wondering why we as a people couldn’t progress with the likes of Peter Obi around. He thereafter left government and with a few public appearances, netizens caught the fire of Obi-mania. The rest, as they say is history.
It was not until Peter Obi became presidential candidate of Labour Party that his disparate admirers coalesced into a national movement with a name, Obidients. The sheer bellicose energy of that new baby sent many of its older siblings into our shells. You couldn’t reason with Obidients online or offline. Like fans of a popular EPL club, they were raucous hecklers. Using social media fandom as yardstick, this far-left demographic had hoped Obi would win the presidential election. I was cautious. Nigeria’s voting blocks are steeped in primordial loyalties and not even APC’s Muslim-Muslim ticket was sufficient to turn the tables on these loyalties instead it reinforced them.
After the elections when I said Obi couldn’t have won based on the self-evident logic of the results, far-left Obidients nearly ate me raw. But none of them could gainsay my posers: Where have you ever seen an elected Nigerian president without the obverse complement of his party’s legislators and governors? For a ballot cast concurrently with candidates for the legislature, how comes there was no spillover effects of Peter Obi’s alleged votes on his party’s legislative candidates? If Obi was rigged out on the presidential ballot, you would have seen a slew of elected LP legislators as the elephants in the room. You could rig out a presidential candidate in locations that are not culturally sympathetic to him but what about the indigenous candidates of his party from the same area? If Obi could be rigged out, wouldn’t it be in Lagos State, the home of his strongest opponent? So what would make INEC recognise his win in Lagos of all places? It’s the same in the strategic FCT constituency with the added evidence of an LP senator to validate LP’s presidential victory. But whoever saw a reasoning mob?
Far-left Obidients had to look for any straw to hang on to as life jacket and they hoped against hope on the Supreme Court while working themselves up to a frenzy. When the inevitable unfavourable verdict came, it hit them hard but somebody had to be the fall guy for their dashed expectations and in comes Prof Wole Soyinka.
The crux of Soyinka’s offence as far as these Obidients are concerned is his failure to criticise President Bola Tinubu. How an entitlement to Soyinka’s social activism could morph to a debt owed by the critic beats all rationalisation. Is social critic a paid position or an elective one whereby you could sustain a charge for breach of contract on a non-performing critic? And why would fully composmentis citizens suddenly invest a singular critic with the power to bring down an elected president? Did the critic single-handedly foist the administration in the first place? And if those lazy youth so much valued Soyinka’s intervention as capable of working magic, couldn’t they at least have been more civil in making their over-entitled request?
The records which are glossed over by Obidients show that Soyinka even dared to ask Tinubu not to run for the presidency. As Nigerian primordial loyalties go, that’s the equivalent of betrayal of one’s community.
Ekunno freelances as a book editor and is author of Soul Lounge, a short story collection.
But Obidients would not countenance that instead they would suddenly invest Soyinka with the powers of Alpha and Omega, guardian, diktat and guru to Tinubu who is supposed to have no will of his own. How moral agency can leave an adult actor and suddenly rest on his friend with at best a tenuous hold on the actor beats all logic.
Obidients like to claim theirs is (was) a national movement and Igbo youths shouldn’t bear the brunt of any perceived malfeasance by the group. Maybe. But in their rofo-rofo with Soyinka, the victim has pin-pointed who his assailants are and their ethnic configuration with his book, Baiting Igbophobia, The Sunny Igboanugo Thesis. In that book, one is pained to see Soyinka’s love for the Igbo waxing cold “by many deeds of shame.” He acknowledges his “indebtedness to Biafra” but rues that now “it dissipates, its pace accelerated by that notorious syndrome: the victim turned violator.” In simple terms Soyinka is regretting that the people who were once at the receiving end in 1966 have turned around to dispense shege to innocent people. And it just happens that their victim is the same person who stuck out his neck for them in their travail. This is all shades of tragic. The only caveat I would enter to Soyinka’s right to feel pissed is that the entire Igbo race is not with this far-left Obidients. Edmund Burke, the English philosopher put it succinctly: “I do not know the means for drawing up the indictment of an entire nation.” Soyinka had been unjustly traduced before with Chief Abiola Ogundokun’s own being among the more egregious. Ogundokun doesn’t sound like Igbo.
Soyinka should rest assured that even Peter Obi, the apparent father of Obidients, is hewn from another tree of a totally different temperament. A meek and civil human who would as governor leave the highway for siren-blaring Anambra billionaires, Obi must be in a bind about how to rein-in the impertinent Obidients. This would channel Azikiwe’s disenchantment with the Zikists, which led him to deny them when the colonial administration arraigned them to take the rap for their alleged rascality.
So, as our beloved Nobel Laureate clocks 90, we pray for more years of rofo-rofo engagements for him to the greater benefit of mankind. Ninety resounding Cheers to Kongi!
Ekunno freelances as a book editor and is author of Soul Lounge, a short story collection.
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