Opinion
By Nwankwo T. Nwaezeigwe
“PASSING six no bi passing sense.” So goes a common saying among Edo-Delta people.
The danger with Prof. Wole Soyinka is that he belongs to the genre of Nigerian intellectual class that thinks that expertise in literary wordiness equates moral and sagacious political judgments. There is no doubting the fact that Wole Soyinka excelled mountenously in fictional literary creativity; but this cannot be same in the fields of political calculus and historical judgment.
In his graphic depiction of the horrific Operation Weti that resulted from the rigged 1965 Western Regional election and which consequently led to the much celebrated but sabotaged January 15, 1966 coup d’etat, the renowned poet J. P. Clark penned down the following poetic verse titled: the “Seasons of Omens”:
“When CALABASHES HELD petrol and men turned faggots in the streets: Then came the five hunters; When mansions and limousines made bonfires in sunset cities: Then came the five hunters; When clans were discovered that were not in the book and cattle counted for heads of men: Then came the five hunters; When hoodlums took possession of police barracks in defiance of bullets: Then came the five hunters; When ministers legislated from bed and made high office the prize for failure: Then came the five hunters; When wads of notes were kept in infant skulls with full blessing of prelates: Then came the five hunters; When women grew heavy with ballot papers delivering the house entire to adulterers: Then came the five hunters….”
George Santayana tells us that “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The question to the Nobel laureate Prof Wole Soyinka is has he so quickly forgotten the past in which he was an active participant, as relayed in the foregoing poetic verse by his contemporary?
It is a truism that Prof Wole’s prodigious political prognostications have often come with fatal cacophony of self-indicting moral miscalculation that places him on the saddle of intellectual mercenary. He sees Nigerian citizens with the same fictional sense of vision he applied in constructing his “Kongi’s Harvest”—an avalanche of imperious mental subjectivity.
Just check out his political antecedents. Prof Wole Soyinka is a man of moral unpredictability, superfluous political judgment and, morbid sense of history. Today he will see white and call it white. Tomorrow he will see the same white and call it black. This has led some people to ponder what could have happened in-between the two episodes. Was it that he was compromised somewhere at some points, as Nigerians appear to suspect that his recent avalanche of attacks on Obidients might be linked to a sumptuous cash rain from Bola Ahmed Tinubu; or he is imperceptive in his sense of historical judgments? Let’s take a melancholy historical promenade into Prof Soyinka’s agnostic thoroughfares of fatalistic political prognostications for posterity to judge him.
Yes! Obidients both in name and actions might seem repulsive to Prof Wole Soyinka, but none of the Obidients has so far invaded a Radio or Television Station with a pistol to announce their credible election results or, declared wanted by security agencies for acts considered to be treasonable felony as in his case during the 1965 Western Regional election. Is it not therefore absurd that the same Prof Wole Soyinka should be preaching what in his opinion is fascist or should be considered democratic in their chosen approach to retrieve their stolen mandate?
The historian Prof Will Durant tells us that “Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce—except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.” Could it therefore be said that Prof Wole Soyinka has joined the class of those who are today judged according to their ability to destroy the Nigerian nation rather than produce, particularly judging from the fact that he was privy to the election of Muhammadu Buhari and automatically qualifies to be mentioned among those whose relevance in Nigerian politics today are predicated on their ability to destroy the rights of the citizens and their mandates?
Recall that in 2007 Prof Wole Soyinka in one of his finest predictable analyses of the current political developments in Nigeria titled: “The Nigerian Nation against General Buhari” on January 14, 2007 issue of Sahara Reporters, stated at length in his opposition to Muhammadu Buhari’s Presidential ambition:
“Until then, let us bury this particular proposition and move on to a far graver, looming danger, personified in the history of General Buhari. The grounds on which General Buhari is being promoted as the alternative choice are not only shaky, but pitifully naive. History matters. Records are not kept simply to assist the weakness of memory, but to operate as guides to the future. 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. Buhari – need one remind anyone—was one of the Generals who treated a Commission of Enquiry, the Oputa Panel, with unconcealed disdain. Like Babangida and Abdusalami, he refused to put in appearance even though complaints that were tabled against him involved a career of gross abuses of power and blatant assault on the fundamental human rights of the Nigerian citizenry.
But as unpredictable as he was, the same Prof Wole Soyinka in 2015 become Muhammadu Buhari’s Presidential iconic campaign propagandist. In an article titled Wole Soyinka, “THE CHALLENGE OF CHANGE—A Burden of Choice”, published by the Guardian issue of February 7, 2017, Prof Wole Soyinka wrote his provocative support for Muhammadu Buhari in the following words:
“I have 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. And my findings? A plausible transformation that comes close to that of another ex-military dictator, Mathew Kerekou of the Benin Republic.”
What could be worse for the renowned scholar than the fact that, like his failed prediction against a Donald Trump winning the United States of America Presidential election, his support for the election of a President Buhari against a President Goodluck Jonathan became the point of demystification of his much valued intellectual impregnability?
In his self- demystification carried forward, Prof Wole Soyinka turned against the same Muhammadu Buhari he had so much studied to be a changed man. In an assault-like article against President Muhammadu Buhari titled “Debate on Second Term for Buhari Disgusting” and published on the Punch issue of September 12, 2017, Prof Soyinka stated at length:
“Why are we talking about second term for heaven’s sake? I don’t understand this. I refuse to be part of that discussion. I absolutely refuse to be part of the discussion….Take simple security for instance. The average citizen feels less secure now than he did a few years ago; that is evident. When people talk about state police, there are reasons for it. When they talk about bringing policing right down to the community level, they know what they are talking about. This is also part and parcel of reconstruction or reconfiguration. The economy, there is a big question about it right now. Fortunately, everybody admits that we went through a very bad patch. Right now, it is a question of have we come out of it or not or there is no question at all. The past few years have been years of real internal economic disaster for the average citizen.”
There is no doubt that Prof Soyinka’s failed prediction on President Buhari’s born-again democratic transparency stands him out as one of the architects of Nigeria’s present state of political precipice. How can the same man again raise his face to instruct Nigerians on the best way to remove the same political incubus he conspired to impose on them? As Nobel laureate and renowned academician with a strong sense of reflective historicism, Nigerians expect Prof Wole Soyinka to hide his face and quietly brood over his catastrophic unpredictability as a man of letters in a state of Catholic sacramental penance.
***Nwankwo T. Nwaezeigwe, PhD, DD
Odogwu of Ibusa Clan & Combatant Political Historian
Research Fellow@Exile, Institute of African Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka
Email: nwaezeigwe.genocideafrica@gmail.com
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Tags: Bola Ahmed Tinubu George Santayana J. P. Clark Nwankwo T. Nwaezeigwe Prof. Wole Soyinka
