Olaopa Celebrates Soyinka at 90, Lauds Nobel Laureate’s Patriotic Battles

Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, Prof. Tunji Olaopa, on Saturday joined other Nigerians to celebrate Nobel laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka on his 90th birthday.

Olaopa spoke during the ” 2024 Wole Soyinka Centre Media Lecture Series” in honour of Soyinka at 90 in Lagos.

Speaking on the theme of the symposium ” The Death of Truth? Realism, Literature and Journalism in an age of Disinformation ” , Prof. Olaopa lauded what he identified as Soyinka’s” many patriotic battles and the unending war between truth and falsehood with the destructive and domineering post-truth Donald Trump’s type alacrity to deny fact, and the banality of Gen Z social media space”.

In an earlier tribute this week to Soyinka entitled “Wole Soyinka At 90: Truth, Literature And Nation Building”, Olaopa recalled the many battles Soyinka has fought in order to ensure that Nigeria becomes a country where justice reigns.

Olaopa said: “Wole Soyinka is the very definition of a patriot, the type that Nigeria needs; the type that has the courage to be a dissident — to love one’s nation sufficiently to disagree with her. And in novels, after plays after essays, WS reveals that he would keep being vigilant on the rampart of nation building. Let me attempt to recreate a mapping of Soyinka’s patriotic trajectory to make a larger point. In 1967, Wole Soyinka took a dare to head to Enugu to meet with Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, the then military governor of the Eastern region. It was a most dangerous mission, more dangerous than holding up the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, Ibadan to replace the speech of Chief Ladoke Akintola who was already expecting his victory in the 1965 election. On this national scale, the stakes were much higher than what the western region could throw at him. He was so adamant in his belief that Nigeria should not go to war that he thought meeting with the military governor could still serve as a last-ditch act. He was not afraid of being branded a felon for the love of country. This, in any context, translates into the willingness to die for one’s country through a path that challenges that country to do better. Soyinka’s entire literary credentials have been dedicated to the task of salvaging the Nigerian state and its proclivity for failures and destructiveness.”

Olaopa added: “When WS penned that most famous of his quotes, “justice is the first condition of humanity,” he was generating a philosophical space that complements his literary brilliance. Only few writers combine sublime literariness and philosophical brilliance. And that is to be expected because, as Quentin Tarantino, the American filmmaker once said, ‘A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth.’ But then, while writers might nudge us towards the truth, philosophers insist on unraveling its depth. We remember the conversation between Pontius Pilate and Jesus before he was crucified. When Pilate asked if Jesus was a king, he responded, among other things, that he came into the world to bear witness to the truth. Pontius Pilate then threw that philosophical question at him: What is truth? But he was too impatient to wait for an answer. The answer is however still floating and amorphous either in the philosophers’ rarefied epistemological discourses or even worse within the dissident space of social media. Indeed, rather than wrapping up the discourses on what truth means, we have become burdened again with a further conceptual complexity: post-truth! With post-truth, signaled by Donald Trump’s alacrity in denying facts, we now arrive at the diminution of objective facts in favor of sentimentalism and emotion. And writers and activists like Wole Soyinka are now found therefore in the maelstrom of social media antagonism, especially around issues of truth, nation-building, patriotism and disinformation.

“WS has noted his aversion for social media and the deep ignorance that it wears like a garland. That chaotic Gen Z space is strange to most people of my age, and should be horrific for a nonagenarian who grew up on the value of ọmọlúwàbì and respectful human relations. But what is even more abject is the level of disinformation, vitriol and banality that contend for virality. In fact, one can say that the desperation for a viral message far surpasses the desire for cogency, objectivity and even patriotism. For a writer that values truth and justice, this should indeed be a tragedy of a huge proportion especially for a state that needs the energy of its youth population for development purposes.”