Soyinka Betrayed: A Tribute
DIALOGUE WITH NIGERIA BY AKIN OSUNTOKUN
First a personal appreciation: During the incumbency of President Olusegun Obasanjo; and exploiting a strong personal relationship with Obasanjo and Professor Wole Soyinka I had imposed on myself the role of interceding between the two. Anytime Soyinka was in Abuja I inevitably spent time with him to rub minds and keep him abreast of the politics of Nigerian governance. And I, of course, do this with the knowledge and consent of my principal, Obasanjo.
As father figures, both bear with my impertinence and impertinent I can get with these big men. Ask them. Not long ago, I got caught up between the two-this time involuntarily and in a most distressing manner. And specifically it was in respect of my earlier liaison role between them. Regardless of who was right or wrong, I was terrified of being publicly called upon to make a clarification. Soyinka had been portrayed in a most embarrassing light and he could have insisted I make a public clarification in reference to what was attributed to me. But he did not and for that I owe him a debt of gratitude.
These days I tend to be apprehensive at the commemoration of his birthday. I do not like being reminded that he is over 80 years and the logical biological inference of his imminent departure. In him we all are vicariously elevated and it is, quite frankly, difficult to grapple with the enormity of his accomplishment for Nigerians and Africans. Deservedly, tons of tributes and testimonies have been repeatedly showered on him but beyond it all the one I appreciate most is his ability to connect with the younger generation, to mentor. At the death of his kindred soul and lifelong buddy, the late Ajibola Ige, I was overwhelmed that he deemed us worthy of being his first port of call in fashioning the best way forward to contain the gap left behind by the abrupt and most painful exit of our hero.
It is always a tough call to publicly take up issues with some Nigerians-who for me can literarily do no wrong, whose contributions to the positive transformation of Nigerian I deem transcendental-Aliko Dangote and Chinua Achebe for instance. And until I was finally able to put his problematic choice of Candidate Mohammadu Buhari in a liberating perspective-sufficiently liberating and illuminating to break my abstinence, the topic of the ascension to power of Buhari in relation to Soyinka-was to me publicly off limits. At any rate I was a conspicuous partisan not a disinterested observer and my objectivity was not beyond reproach. And he had earned the entitlement he invoked on the America green card controversy that “I should not be exiting the United States but Nigeria because the people on behalf of whom one has struggled all one’s life can be so slavish in mentality as to start querying the right of their champion to free speech.”
It is an awkward time to pay tribute to Soyinka-for which I crave the indulgence of readers. And even though I did not deliberately set out to do so, it dawned on me that I have never publicly done so and it is an obligation I owe and have always sought the opportunity to redeem. To begin with-he has been one of my best virtual teachers on the subject of political advocacy and public activism. Emotion got the better part of me the other day when I was reading his memoirs-‘You must set forth at dawn’.
It was at his recall of the brutal exactions of the commencement of the journey from Abeokuta to the other side of the Nigerian border in Coutonu-to embark on yet another involuntary hazardous exile in the service of the existential struggle against the Sani Abacha dictatorship.
Whatever might have been said about the Buhari choice, the crucial extenuation is its nationalistic utility as a sacrificial gesture of goodwill towards the North and perhaps Nigeria nation building by a most persistent ideological opponent. With good reasons, Soyinka had been relentlessly critical and intolerant of the Northern political elite- specifically the dominant conservative wing otherwise christened the ‘Hausa Fulani oligarchy’. And the alienation is well reciprocated.
If you charge Soyinka with the offence of parochial Yoruba supremacist I wouldn’t know how to respond but he is the Nigerian intellectual whom Northern political rapporteurs love to despise. I got the shock of my life when a frontline member of the regional protagonist declared, with the unthinking fervour of a zealot, that ‘He (Soyinka) is not even an intellectual’! Beyond himself in adamant obduracy, the fellow proceeded to attempt a reinvention of the wheel. And ended up providing a Boko Haram plus definition of an intellectual-a definition that reifies backwardness over enlightenment, for whom any education, not just Western education, is haram.
No one comes away from the pages of ‘The Man Died’ with a noble impression of the Northern political establishment for whom the rest of Nigeria was appropriately encouraged to develop a persecution complex. We were inducted into the Nigeria intelligentsia with the angry and defiant dictum ‘the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny’! The backdrop to this prescribed anti-establishment text was the Nigerian civil war and the incarceration of Soyinka in (of all locations!) the Kaduna prisons-the political melting pot of his jailers. And we still wonder at the smouldering rage of ‘the man died’?. The book certainly ranks amongst the most influential ideological orientation manuals for matriculating Nigerian University undergraduates of the 1970-80 decade. It was the standard password for admission into the inner sanctum of student union activism and only God knows how many student protests had been ignited and sustained by its spell.
The circumstances of the Presidential election of 2015 provided the opportunity for a mind reset on the political division of Nigeria into the hegemonic North versus the rest of us-even in the face of scant evidence supporting political revisionism. The extenuating circumstances were: a compelling case against the suitability of incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan for the effective governance of Nigeria; the hysteria and a successfully contrived demonization of Jonathan over the politically opaque Boko Haram insurgency; a persisting international community (Western) perception that the political stability of Nigeria is best guaranteed by an indulgent accommodation of Northern Nigeria; power opportunism of the dominant faction of the Yoruba political establishment; the mythical anti-corruption bubble reputation of Buhari; and the regional wide animus over the premature termination of the Umaru Yaradua-Northern tenure of the Nigerian Presidency.
Soyinka laid down the terms as follows ‘This persistent candidate seeks return, but let him understand that it can only be as a debtor to the past, and that the future cannot wait to collect. If this collective leap of faith is derided, repudiated or betrayed under a RENEWED immersion in the ambiance of power or retrogressive championing, of a resumption of clearly repudiated social directions, we have no choice but to revoke an unspoken pact and resume our march to that yet elusive space of freedom, however often interrupted, and by whatever means we can humanly muster. And if in the process, the consequence is national hara-kiri, no one can say that there had been no deluge of warnings’.
Against these terms and on this scale, how has Buhari measured? On present evidence there is no better way to capture the stewardship of Buhari as Nigerian President than a betrayal of all who have bent over backwards to give him benefit of the doubt. I provide corroboration in the collective wisdom of two respected Nigerian publications-one of which expressly endorsed the Buhari candidacy
One year into his incumbency the Punch newspaper adjudged: ‘Buhari’s sectionalism is not only unprecedented, it could not have come at a worse time. The reality today is that Nigerians are deeply divided. Seventeen years of dashed hopes of progress under a democratic dispensation have reopened the deep fissures in the polity and polarised the populace into mutually suspicious camps.
Sectarianism and ethnicity have been rearing their poisonous heads. It is in this combustible mix that Buhari stubbornly presses ahead with appointments that weigh heavily in favour of his northern regional base. He struck again last month when he removed Ibe Kachikwu as head of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation to put a Northerner; named another, Hadiza Bala-Usman, as managing director of the Nigerian Ports Authority along with three executive directors, two of whom are also Northerners. Before then, he had ring-fenced himself with appointees from his northern constituency at the Presidency, thereby deepening the long-held fears of many Southerners that he has not overcome his well-known insularity’.
‘In spite of public opinion, he replaced the immediate past Inspector-General of Police, a Southerner, with a Northerner, an assistant inspector-general whose ascension induced the retirement, in one fell swoop, of 21 DIGs and AIGs who were senior to him. This is beyond absurdity.
We declare emphatically that this is corruption. It is wrong to view stealing of government funds as the only form of corruption. A former member of the House of Representatives, Junaid Muhammed, alleges that not only is Buhari sectional in his appointments, several appointees are actually his relatives. Buhari should be told that sectionalism and nepotism are also acts of corruption’
Six months later the Guardian lamented ‘The Southern Kaduna killings are only a chip of the entire narrative of a sinister threat to the lives of many Nigerians. As a matter of fact, the entire Middle Belt, Southern Kaduna and parts of Southern Nigeria have been at the receiving end of chilling killings by herdsmen which many government spokesmen often claimed are aliens.
These deliberately systematic killings demand the awakening of Nigerians across the country with a view to saving the nation from a seemingly sinister plot. The current killings and dynamics have a parallel in the Darfur crisis in Sudan where government’s complicity with migrant Arabs displaced indigenous people and consequently led to an armed rebellion for self-determination by such groups as the Sudan Liberation Army/ Movement (SLA/M) and the Justice and Equity Movement (JEM). The impunity with which the so-called herdsmen wield automatic weapons and the magnitude of their violent activities without much intervention from any arm of the nation’s security forces legitimately opens the state and federal governments up to accusations of official complicity’.
