Our Soyinka has gone wrong again
THE first time Wole Soyinka misdirected himself, it had to do with
his “cautious endorsement” of Muhammadu Buhari’s presidential candidacy.
He offered a platter of reasons for the stunning faux pas, of course.
But, post-election, his out of sync reading of Nigerian politics has
been patently exposed.
To recap, it happened that in the run-up to the presidential ballot,
Professor Soyinka, long time combatant on the side of the oppressed,
announced that the best thing that could happen to Nigeria was a
President Buhari. His rationalisation: “It is pointlessly, and
dangerously provocative to present General Buhari as something that he
probably was not. It is however just as purblind to insist that he has
not demonstrably striven to become what he most glaringly was not, to
insist that he has not been chastened by intervening experience and –
most critically – by a vastly transformed environment – both the
localised and the global.”
Aware that his about-face would set teeth on edge, Soyinka took the
pains to further explain his Road-to-Damascus conversion. He had become a
Buhari flag-waver, having “studied him from a distance, questioned
those who have closely interacted with him, including his former
running-mate, Pastor Bakare, and dissected his key utterances past and
current.” He underpinned his implausible argument with his location in
Buhari of “A plausible transformation that comes close to that of
another ex-military dictator, Mathieu Kerekou of the Benin Republic.”
Some of those unconvinced at the time went public with their
disagreement. How vindicated they now are! President Kerekou had
apologised in front of his people for the wantonness of his military
dictatorship before they granted him a shot at democratic leadership.
But, Buhari would have absolutely nothing to do with remorse and
apologies, not even for heading a junta that executed its citizens on
the strength of a retroactive decree, and not for other wild excesses of
his despotic rule, for which Soyinka, in better days, had been
indignant: “Of course, we know that human beings change. What the claims
of personality change or transformation impose on us is a rigorous
inspection of the evidence, not wishful speculation or behind-the-scenes
assurances. Public offence, crimes against a polity, must be answered
in the public space, not in caucuses of bargaining. In Buhari, we have
been offered no evidence of the sheerest prospect of change. On the
contrary, all evidence suggests that this is one individual who remains
convinced that this is one ex-ruler that the nation cannot call to
order.”
Well, Buhari’s presidency is not even a year old and already the
chickens have come home to roost. During the 1970s, Soyinka criticised
Uganda’s Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada for converting his country’s
universities into toys. Only recently, Buhari, with a mere press
statement by one of his subordinates, fired the Vice Chancellors of 14
Federal universities, an irrational move unsupported by any known
Nigerian statute. Is Soyinka unaware of this?
In his Introduction to The movement of transition: a study of the
plays of Wole Soyinka [Ibadan University Press, 1975], Professor Oyin
Ogunba told the fascinating story of how, during an Ife Varsity
conference, Soyinka had dramatically borrowed a piece of paper from
someone, to pen an instant letter of resignation because a high official
of the institution had mouthed a new and arbitrary administrative
policy he could not live down. How time wounds all heels.
While, in-between global junketing, Buhari has been busy on a firing
spree, his field commanders have been firing at and killing peaceful
pro-Biafra demonstrators. In fact, they seem minded to match, if not
surpass, the unenviable record of massacres set by Olusegun Obasanjo in
Odi and Zaki Biam, when they massacred nearly a thousand Shias in Zaria.
Pray, in what way does this contemporary preying on human lives begin
to equate the transformation that our Soyinka discovered in Kerekou?
While an undergraduate at Ife during the 1970s, and working on freelance basis for The Punch group
of newspapers, I recall approaching Soyinka to issue a damning
statement over the 20 or so suspects that suffocated inside a Police
Black Maria, and he obliged! This kind of memory jerks the consciousness
into conceiving of our man at the barricades with placard-bearing
demonstrators insisting that an immediate stoppage must be put to
President Buhari’s human rites.
Rather, our Soyinka of the “Justice is the first condition of
humanity” fame, decided on appropriating a turf better left to the
devices of by people with the éclat and élan for economics and public
finance. Soyinka wants an ‘emergency conference” to fix the country’s
“dire” economy! As was the case with his “cautious endorsement,” he is
fluent with reasons. “Recovery is going to take quite a while…the
President should call an emergency economic conference, with experts to
be invited. Consumers, producers, labour unions, university experts,
professors, etc. I think we really need an emergency economic
conference, a rescue operation bringing as many heads as possible
together to plot the way forward.”
Soyinka’s difficulty in this new adventure is three-pronged. To start
with, it is preposterous, unless our man will claim that between the
superstructure and the substructure, he would place primacy on the
latter? In which case the onus would be on him to list the numerous ways
in which the inhabitants of graves benefit from buoyant economies. Of
course, the problem is also to do national amnesia. There was a national
conference held recently in this country. Its report is presumably on
the presidential shelf, gathering dust. It quite possibly has been
binned. Now, if the report of a properly constituted national conference
is unworthy of attention, where is the assurance that the outcome of
Soyinka’s emergency conference will attract other than skeptical
presidential smiles or guffaws?
Another fundamental disability of his recommendation is that the man
in charge of the economy believes that it is soaring. As Soyinka was
somewhere wailing about an economy going under, Buhari was elsewhere
insisting that “Today, our country has the fastest growing economy in
Africa and one of the fastest in the world.” So, who really requires a
talk shop on an economy that is firing on all cylinders?
Soyinka’s third handicap is the most dangerous – to him! Through the
past year, Buhari and all the newcomers have been hammering it into
every thick skull that the country’s problem was and still is the PDP.
Therefore, doesn’t it occur to the Nobel Laureate that his emergency
conference is tied into the uncanny prospect of proffering the problem
as solution? How could we have “consumers, producers, labour unions,
university experts, professors, etc.,” in whose ranks are PDP cadres,
looters, stalwarts and foot soldiers, salvaging the economy? Doesn’t
Soyinka realise that his idea, liable to contaminate the antiseptic
purity of Buhari’s APC with tainted victims of change, could get him
wrapped up on a treasonous charge?
As an ardent and long-standing fan of Soyinka’s, I have advice for
the “grey-haired lion”. Please leave President Buhari well alone. The
man has experts in quantum, including those who would host a dinner for
N82 million and others who would upgrade a personal website at N78
million, to confer with. Together, this amalgam can, in great speed,
navigate the Nigerian economy to ether.