Wole Soyinka Vs Datti Ahmed The Making Of A Fascist Out Of A Democrat

BY REV. FR. JOHN ODEY

On April 3, 2023, the Channels Television aired the interview it had with Dr. Yusuf-Datti Baba Ahmed, the Vice Presidential candidate of the Labour Party. While the politicians who hold Nigeria in political bondage seek treasonable charges against Peter Obi, the Presidential Candidate of the Labour Party, in order to cripple his legal tussle to claim his stolen mandate, the Channels Television has been fined the sum of N5 million by the National Broadcasting Commission because during the interview Datti Ahmed said that swearing in Bola Tinubu as the president of Nigeria contrary to the constitution of Nigeria would put an end to Nigeria’s democracy. Mahmood Yakubu told the aggrieved to go to court. The aggrieved have gone to court. But it appears that the aggressor is not finding it easy in the court and so looks for a non-existent crime to act as an escape route. While the political mischief goes on, what has generated anger and bile on the social media is Prof. Wole Soyinka’s description of Datti’s statement as “fascistic language.”

Any Nigerian who claims he believes in Nigeria and loves Nigeria, who thinks he has any contribution to make for peace, unity and progress in Nigeria but decides that it is not yet time to make that contribution is a joker. Nigeria is collapsing and we are seeing it happening. It is collapsing because justice has been dethroned in the land and in its place we have enthroned injustice. It is collapsing because bad politicians have taken cover under the cloak of religion and tribe to divide us so much that even the mightiest of the mighty are beginning to play to their gallery. Nigeria is collapsing because the conscience of many who have what it takes to call stinking politicians to order have been tainted by falsehood and they can no longer face the reality, speak the truth and compel the devil to blush in shame. This is the time that we should do whatever is legitimate and possible to forestall the collapse of Nigeria. All of us have more to gain in a peaceful, united and progressive Nigeria than in a Nigeria that is eventually collapsed into some banana republics. I claim that I believe in Nigeria and love Nigeria.

For this reason I feel it is proper for me to put in writing what I think about the raging issue of fascism as a label on Datti’s statement. To start with, Prof. Wole Soyinka is our pride, the pride of Nigeria and the pride of the entire black race. He is the man whose literary genius won for him and for Nigeria a global acclaim as the first African winner of Nobel Prize for Literature. To the best of my knowledge, his position as the conscience of our nation is not and has never been in doubt until this matter of “fascistic language” popped up. As all of us know, “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny” which is quoted by most of the people who criticize his referring to Datti’s language as being “fascistic” is taken from his book, “The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka.”

The book was written while he was in the prison during the Nigerian civil war because he spoke against the genocide that was being carried out against the Igbo. As a man who believes in truth and justice, a man who has always called a spade a spade and has suffered much for that, in the days of Sani Abacha, the only way he could save his life because he opposed Abacha’s dictatorship was by fleeing into exile. He did. While on exile a charge of treason punishable by death was put on him in absentia. As a young man he defended democracy to the point of bumping into the radio house and pointing a gun at the head a radio announcer to stop him from declaring a winner when an election process was still under heavy dispute. He is 88 years old today. No matter how much he has erred in this particular case, we must take his age and all that he has been doing for a better Nigeria into consideration. It is not an overstatement to say that Prof. Wole Soyinka has paid his dues as far as the struggle for a better Nigeria is concerned

As far as standing for truth and justice in Nigeria is concerned Soyinka is an oracle. Because of this, while everybody is entitled to his or her opinion, I beg to disagree with people who seem to be too hard on him over his use of the phrase “fascistic language.” This does not mean that I am comfortable with his application of that offending phrase, knowing the cause of Datti’s outburst as every honest Nigerian who saw what happened during the so-called 2023 elections will accept he knows. My opinion is that of all the criticisms of him I read on the social media, the one that I like most was written by Chief Malcolm Emokiniovo Omirhobo. For me Chief Malcolm gave a summary of the reasons a good number of Nigerians are not comfortable with tag of fascism. And he did that in a very cultured manner. Among other things Chief Malcolm said:

“I have painstakingly listened to Prof. Wole Soiyinka’s interviews on the Nigerian 2023 elections and I make bold to say that ‘The man dies in him who keeps silent when it matters most.’ I dare say that it is unfair and unholy of Prof. Wole Sonyinka to come out of the blue to apportion blames. Prof. kept silent when INEC deliberately refused to upload the presidential election results electronically. He kept silent when INEC breached the electoral Act and its own rules and regulations in the conduct of elections. He kept silent when Igbos and those suspected to be Igbos were being threatened by their Yoruba host. He was silent when the Oro rite was performed during elections throughout Lagos State to disenfranchise non natives and women. He was silent when Igbos and their look-alikes were being attacked by some Yorubas on election day. He kept silent when xenophobic and inflammatory statements were made on Igbos by Bayo Onanuga, Festus Keyamo, Femi Fani-Kayode and many others. He kept silent when APC was using the Nigerian police and other state operators to suppress Nigerians during elections. He kept silent when elections were massively rigged and democracy made a mess of. In all these if Prof had spoken a word or two it would have made a world of difference because his voice mattered then not his silence.”

I love the way Chief Malcolm has calmly expressed his own anger. I nurture the feeling that if Prof Soyinka reads this in his very quiet moment he will understand that something went wrong somewhere and then become sober. All these questions were asked based on who he is and what he is known for, a man who does not look the other way each time truth and justice are under attack; a man who has always raised his voice against the shenanigans of Nigeria’s political power-drunks; a man who is so principled in his approach to worrisome national issues that his voice is like a law; a man who is the nemesis of Nigeria’s election riggers and bad leaders.

More questions like the above can be raised without repeating what has been asked. Terrible things happened in Nigeria in the name of 2023 political elections. One thing I know for sure is that if the Oro rite which was performed publicly during the elections in Lagos State to disenfranchise non natives and women had taken place in a particular section of this country the Federal Government would have sent hundreds of military pythons to go and dance there and leave the place in carnage and desolation at the end of the dancing spree. Whether President Buhari, Mahmood Yakubu, APC and INEC accept it or not, the 2023 elections will go down in history as a show of shame and a catalogue of national disaster. The elections were bad in the extreme. The men who spearheaded that disaster must have forgotten that they were dealing with human beings.

Prof. Wole Soyinka’s voice would have doused the fire when it was raging because he is one of the outstanding Nigerians we hail as the conscience of the nation. Nigerians admire him with passion. They want to hear his voice each time Nigeria is at the periphery of the defining moment because he is one of the relatively few great men in Nigeria whose voices cannot be ignored. To substantiate this claim, I wish to make a brief review of the inestimable role he has been playing to save us from the political buccaneers who think that Nigeria is their personal property and so have reduced the rest of us to pawns in their political game of chess. Much of what I present in this review is the recollection of his very words. By the end of such a review it is hoped that we shall be in a better position to assess whether his description of Datti Ahmed’s statement as being fascistic is right or that it missed the mark.

To start with, as tyrannical as General Sani Abacha was as Nigeria’s military head of state, Prof. Wole Soyinka did not shy away from telling him some bitter truths. As stated earlier, he was compelled to go on exile in order to live to tell the story of Abacha’s lust for power, greed and ruthlessness. When Abacha died, June 8, 1998, he returned home. In his article, “A Year of Rapid Reverses”, the Nobel Laureate, revisited what we can call “The Last Days of Sani Abacha.”

His perception of the event of June 8, 1998 as he clearly stated in that article was that it was the culmination of a progression in death of the tyrant which started as far back as June 1993, when he ordered his troops to shoot to death hundreds of innocent Nigerians who protested against the criminal annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. From that day on, he said, Sani Abacha lived in the shadow of the infamous script written by dictators all over the world – that the only way to survive is to kill instead of being killed. In this way, every Nigerian who expressed any disagreement with his evil ways was given the bad name of security risk and was made to pay dearly for being branded so. This gave him the opportunity to kill as many people as he liked. But the more he killed was the more he was tormented by the ghost of those he killed so that at a stage he could hardly step out of the Aso Rock Villa which he had turned into a glorified prison yard. In the end, Abacha became a living example of the Shakespearean coward who dies many times before his death.

Prof. Soyinka continued, Abacha signed his own death warrant the day he signed the orders to hang Ken Saro Wiwa and his eight Ogoni compatriots in defiance of the conscience of the world. He died each time he could not get out of his Aso Rock glorified prison to attend public functions for fear that his life might be snuffed out of him. He died each time the fear for his life led him to fabricate one coup or the other against himself with the view of getting rid of his real and imagined enemies. He died each time he consulted his numerous marabouts in the hope of finding ways and means of perpetuating his life and dictatorship. Abacha’s death was not a sudden event that just came like a flash of light on June 8, 1998. His end was a gradual process which began from the moment when Nigerians finally came to a realization, not only that his morbid ambition to perpetuate himself as the country’s head of state could be stopped, but that he must be stopped. For fear that our children and the future generation might begin to think that the tyrant was able to fool every Nigerian and that he always had his way, Soyinka said:

“We must not teach them to believe that, once upon a time there lived a tyrant who cheated, robbed, tortured and killed his people, but finally, thanks to divine intervention, was whisked away to meet his Maker. No, the true story is that once, there was a tyrant who successfully fooled some of the people some of the time, but never succeeded in fooling all of the people all the time. Yet, even those whom he fooled eventually found out his true nature, and joined others in their revolt against his tyranny. This process of revolt was never smooth, it recorded success, losses, it underwent periods of despondency, even mood of surrender. Some profited by doing his bidding and singing his praises but others, consistently, despite enormous suffering and sacrifices, resisted his power, until finally, bit by bit, they wore him down, and sent him to meet his Maker. That is the historic truth. If there was any divine intervention in this history that is only as it should be, since the wisdom that has been imparted to us from childhood is: Heaven helps only those who help themselves.”

In the first part of my other write-up, “Where Do We Go From Here?” I said that the foundation of what has escalated to a full-fledged war in the name of political elections in the recent times was laid by the 2003 elections. The reader will recall that the terrible things that happened then gave rise to my book “This Madness Called Election 2003.” As at that time, the Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, also said that the so-called 2003 election was the worst in the history of Nigeria. In his very words, the 2003 elections “left the opposition reeling and international observers in awe at the sheer effrontery of it all. In terms of violence, it takes its place among the most bloody since independence. The scale and manner of ballot robbery, as revealed day after day, reveals a tightly centralized operation, not a sporadic series of electoral violations.” He continued: “When the arrogance of power, even where hidden, becomes institutionalized in politics to an extent that it glorifies, or even merely appears to glorify criminality, we recognize immediately the preliminary steps towards the enthronement of fascism.”

A Preamble: After the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had failed to register his party, the National Conscience Party (NCP), for the 2003 elections, the indefatigable Chief Gani Fawehinmi declared that Abel Guobadia who was then the Chairman of INEC, had broken the spinal cord of democracy in Nigeria. He was so shattered that according to Adegbenro Adebanjo and Dayo Aiyetan, the team of Tell magazine journalists that interviewed him, “At a point in the course of the interview, Gani broke down weeping and sobbing uncontrollably, to the embarrassment of the two Tell reporters conducting the interview. As he sobbed, slapping his head in lamentation, tears streamed down his face onto his cute blue shirt. It was for the reporters a unique moment, evoking empathy and confusion.”

The lamentation of the legal colossus and the voice of the voiceless called Gani Fawehinmi had nothing to do with himself as a person. Rather, it had everything to do with the people which the party he wanted the INEC to register represented. He sobbed, wept, lamented and then let tears flow freely from his eyes not because he was a poor man. He was not poor under any description. He had everything he needed to live a comfortable life. Yet, he was worried because people who consistently abused and subverted the constitution of the land in collaboration with their likes had their parties registered by the INEC while he was not allowed to register his own party. Gani cried because there is an unwritten law in Nigeria that is more powerful and more binding than the written law, which says that anybody who is good, who cares for good governance and has what it takes to restore the glory of Nigeria must not be given the chance to rule.

Gani cried because when most privileged Nigerians basked in their ability to use their position to make others suffer without a just cause, he chose to mourn for the misruled Nigerians, for our collective guilt, particularly that of our leaders and for the fate of the country which has been heedlessly heading for a fatal crash. He cried because INEC registered those who had perfected their plans to rig elections and remain in power to control our oil-money as they wish while he thought of the common man’s shattered hopes and dashed expectations. He thought of the unprecedented spate of insecurity of lives and property pervading the land. He thought of the ruthless religious bigotry, insensitive bloodletting, incessant assassinations, kidnappings and robberies that have combined to make life a monotony of misery for millions of Nigerians.

to be continued....

Yoruba/Igbo Spat: I Chose Not To Die (1)

BY MAGNUS ONYIBE

When Nigeria’s first Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, wrote his fa­mous book, The Man Died in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny, I can imagine that the wordsmith never expected that he would be required to contextualize the cen­tral message in the book which is basically that a man dies if he does not speak out against tyranny.

By speaking out against perceived injustice perpetrated by the Federal Government of Nige­ria, FGN, against the Igbos that degenerated into the civil war of 1967-1970, Prof. Soyinka, a Yoruba man, was taken into custody and held in detention by the authorities.

His offence was that he attempted to take over a radio station by holding a gun to the head of a broadcaster with a view to forcibly compelling his victim to allow him speak out against the government.

It was while he was incarcerated that he wrote the book, The Man Died, which is basically a pris­on note by a radical theatre arts lecturer from the premier university in Nigeria, the University of Ibadan, UI.

It is not amazing that over 50 years (1967-2023) after Prof. Soyinka’s showdown with the authori­ties, history appears about to repeat itself as Sen­ator Datti Baba-Ahmed (also a university propri­etor not a lecturer) like Prof. Soyinka has gone to Channels Television (also a broadcast station) to air his grievances about what he deems as an act of tyranny against him and the Labor Party, LP, by demanding that government must not swear in the INEC declared winner on May 29 as mandated by the 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, FGN.

The Baba-Ahmed outburst is in the manner that Soyinka attempted to denounce government in a rather violent way by way of taking hostage a broadcaster in a radio station thereby threatening the corporate existence of Nigeria before he got apprehended and taken into custody.

While it might have been expected that it would be required of Prof. Soyinka to be justify­ing the reasoning behind the theme of his seminal book in media interviews or during book reading sessions, as if in validation of the belief that life is very unpredictable, the renowned poet has found himself in a situation in which he appears to be like a bull whose horns are caught in a thicket formed by a web of complex and complicated branches of trees packed densely together.

To untangle himself, the erudite and revered Prof. is demanding a television debate with Sen­ator Datti Baba-Ahmed, the vice presidential can­didate of the insurgent political platform, Labor Party, who seem to have borrowed a page out of Prof. Soyinka’s very prescient book by forceful­ly demanding that the candidate that has been declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, as president-elect, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, should not be sworn into office as president on May 29 as mandated by law.

It is an action that has been equated with Prof. Soyinka’s speaking out against tyranny in 1967 and which landed him in hot waters, that is prob­ably why the likes of my good friend, Mr. Festus Keyamo, APC Presidential Campaign Council spokesman, has on March 23 written a petition to the Directorate of State Services, DSS, requesting it to apprehend the aggrieved LP vice presidential candidate, Senator Baba-Ahmed.

It may be recalled that the LP vice presidential candidate had spoken up against government via a television interview in the manner that Prof. Soyinka attempted to seize a radio station to de­nounce government for similar case of injustice about a half century ago.

As lawyers always argue, no two (2) cases are the same.

That aphorism is derived from the belief that circumstances and time have roles to play in de­termining the appropriate actions to be taken or already taken in matters which appear to be similar in material, context and content.

It matters that Prof. Soyinka attempted to speak out via broadcast in a radio station during a military regime while Baba-Ahmed actually spoke out in an interview by a television station.

Also it is critical to point out that while Soy­inka never got round to actually speak out via a radio broadcast as he had intended, so we don’t know what he really wanted to say, which means that we do not know whether he wanted to incite a street protest in the manner of a mob action against government or just air his grievances in the manner that Baba-Ahmed, the vice presiden­tial candidate of LP did on Channels Television on March 22 by demanding that the president-elect must not be sworn into office as president on the constitutionally scheduled date of May 29.

We are all familiar with the genesis of the current spat which is triggered by the claim and counter claim that the 2023 elections (particularly the presidential contest) were rigged in favor of the candidate that has been declared the winner.

Arising from the above, tension has been rising and falling between the Yoruba ethnic group of the ruling APC candidate that has been declared the winner of the presidential contest by INEC and the Igbos, which is the ethnic nationality of the LP flag bearer that was placed in the third (3rd) position in the race to Aso Rock Villa.

The attention that the verbal and written ex­changes between the Nobel laureate, Prof. Soyin­ka, and Senator Datti Baba-Ahmed has received in both virtual and real life space, compels its characterization as Rumble in the Jungle. That is how the epic boxing bout between the legendary pugilists, Mohammed Ali and George Foreman, was branded when the world boxing duel to deter­mine who would be heavy weight champion of the world was staged in Kinshasa, Zaire in Africa back in 1974.

Although, elections are supposed to be another type of war without guns, it is disheartening that politics in Nigeria is more often than not being turned into a blood sport.

Based on experience, most election seasons in Nigeria come with significant peculiar changes in the process.

That is why 2023 election which is supposed to be the crowning glory of our evolving democratic process that is about to hit the milestone of contin­uous or back to back practice for twenty four (24) years without a break, is turning out to a festering sore ethnic and religious conflicts.

It is more disappointing because technology in the form of Bimodal Voters Accreditation System which was relied upon to deliver elections 2023 and was touted as a panacea to the past election malpractices that had dogged our elections failed to live up to the high expectations.


It is on account of the identified malaise of the ongoing conflict between the Igbos and Yorubas that manifested mainly in Lagos State leading to the Igbo/Yoruba spat wherein the Igbos resid­ing in the state were allegedly intimidated by the Yoruba goons that prevented them from voting during the March 18 gubernatorial elections that our country is now on edge.

By the same token, the allusion to religious war allegedly by Mr. Peter Obi in his conversation with Bishop David Oyedepo, General Overseer of Winners Church, during the run up to the pres­idential election of February 25, has also been interpreted as weaponization of religion by Mr. Obi who was presumably caught on tape solic­iting for Christian votes from Bishop Oyedepo.

That incident is now infamously dubbed ‘Yes Daddy Gate’.

Obviously, the leaked or doctored audio tape is tagged ‘Yes Daddy Gate’ after the infamous Watergate scandal that rocked the USA and led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 after some thieves were discovered to have broken into the Democratic Party, DNC data base and the truth was leaked in an audio recording.

In Nigeria, a type of Watergate scandal had also occurred when an alleged diversion of funds estimated to be about $2.1 billion was made against then National Security Adviser, NSA, Col. Ahmed Dasuki and the scandal was tagged ‘Da­suki Gate’.

There are two (2) significant fallouts from elec­tions 2023.

These are the rift between the Yorubas that have been hosting the Igbos without conflicts over the years until politics reared its ugly head in 2019 and the current election 2023 season.

The second is the role that religion now plays in our politics which was hitherto mainly defined by ethic nationalism.

With ethnic nationalism becoming a signifi­cant factor in politics in Lagos and religious dif­ferences taking on a life of its own nationwide, our beloved country maybe descending towards an uncharted territory.

Two caustic articles written by Prof. Soyinka and Mr. Femi Kusa published in the mass media recently reveal how deep the ongoing Yoruba/Igbo spat really is.

The first is the piece titled, ‘Fascism On Course’, which is in defense of himself against the onslaught from Obidients following his con­demnation of Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed’s televi­sion comment that is considered as incendiary by LP supporters.

Expectedly, the Nobel laureate practically took no prisoners: “The refusal to entertain corrective criticism, even differing perspectives of the same position has become a badge of honour and certif­icate of commitment. What is at stake, ultimately is – Truth, and at a most elementary level of social regulation: when you are party to a conflict, you do not attempt to intimidate the arbiter, attempt to dictate the outcome, or impugn, without credible cause, his or her neutrality even before hearing has commenced. That is a ground rule of just proceeding. Short of this, truth remains perma­nently elusive.”

Prof. Soyinka was unapologetic. Instead he seemed sorely vexed.

On his part, Mr. Femi Kuta, who is a found­ing member of the Guardian newspaper and its first editor also took umbrage against the Igbos who the Yorubas, especially in Lagos, believe are nursing territorial ambition of taking over Lagos State.

Here is how he expressed outrage: ‘LAGOS QUESTION’. Two questions grossly unrelated to good or bad governance were the dominant questions in the presidential and governorship elections in Lagos.

He argued, “These questions were, who owns Lagos? And is Lagos a no man’s land? Both ques­tions are related.

“The Yorubas of South Western Nigeria say Lagos is their political capital and that Lagos is not a no man’s land. Ibos say Lagos is no man’s land.”

He forcefully made his case by making the fore­going inference: “This means everyone can come to Lagos and do whatever he or she likes with La­gos. They cite the cases of Nigerians becoming Mayors in the United States. But they forget to remind us that the U.S. is no man’s land because Europeans who fled their continent when life be­came unbearable for them there forcibly took the land from American Indians. In Nigeria, save for the Funlani conquest of the Hausa states, no other nationality conquered another and colonized it”.

At the end of his narrative, he was kind of conciliatory and sensitive to the interests of the Igbo settlers.

Both media interventions in my assessment are quite pungent and unfortunate because they are avoidable crisis that should not beset a metro­politan city like Lagos and Nigeria that needs to be united to enjoy the benefits of its large size made possible by the multiplicity of ethnic nationalities that make up the country.

By and large, the trigger for the fiasco in Lagos is the parentage of the LP candidate, Mr. Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, whose mother is an Igbo woman, who married a dye-in-the-wool Lagos indigene, Mr. Rhodes Vivour.

The purity of ethnicity of a potential gover­nor of Lagos was weaponized in 2023 because it was the most vulnerable underbelly which the ruling party could explore to win over the hearts and minds of Lagosians, more so because the LP candidate also has as a wife who is an Igbo lady. To the ignorant voters only indigenes can rule over them, as such none indigenes should not be voted for.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

No Going Back On Amotekun- Soyinka

Wole Soyinka

Professor Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate, has added his own words to the acrimonious debates going on about Amoteku which South West Governors launched on 9 January amd which was waved off as illegal by Abubakar Malami, Attorney General of the Federation. Soyinka declared that there is no going back on Amotekun. In other words, according to him, “Amotekun has come to stay.”

Soyinka said this at a press conference in Lagos on Wednesday, on 15 January at Freedom Park, Lagos.

“Our responsibility as a citizen is to take actions against events, phenomenon which militate against our existence, security, productivity and dignity as human beings,” he said.

“This has been a result of collective consciousness by people of this region. These governors met and they came up with this solution, Amotekun. Now, some people who have been sleeping all this time, taking belated actions in many directions, who watched the citizens of this nation decimated, villages wiped out, farmers chased off their land. They are now coming out to tell us that this initiative is illegal, unconstitutional. I think they should go back to sleep.

“I prefer to believe that the government itself has not spoken. I refuse to believe that any serious government will raise any objection to this kind of initiative. Amotekun has come to stay.

“Amotekun is only a part of the story. It should not be the only solution to insecurity. We should move from Amotekun to Awosikun. In other words, we should start thinking in terms of how to feed our own people.”

-----------THE NEWS

June 12, Ndigbo And Soyinka’s Red Herring

Wole Soyinka speaks during an interview at his home. Date: April 03, 2009. Image: Ann Johansson/Corbis/Getty

BY IDOWU BANKOLE

JUNE 20, 2019

I decided not to write on this year’s June 12 Democracy Day having written two articles, back to back, on it last year. On June 13, 2018, I lauded President Muhammadu Buhari in this column for taking the bold initiative of “honouring Abiola with Grand Commander of the Federal Republic, GCFR, Nigeria’s highest award, and declaring June 12 Democracy Day. Some have queried the president’s motive. My answer is simple. Whatever informed the decision, it was the right thing to do. And if in doing what is right, he is reaping some political capital, so be it,” I concluded the article, titled, “June 12: I still remember”.

A week later, worried by the ethnic tint of the celebrations, I wondered whether Buhari’s action had gravitated from its essence – the symbolism of righting a historic wrong – to a celebration of Yoruba triumphalism. Besides, in the one year since Buhari’s declaration, we have had a general election which outcome eviscerated the very idea of democracy, thus violating the spirit of June 12 – a repudiation of the country’s primordial fault-lines of ethnicity, religion and prebendalism.

June 12 was about the free and fair election. It was about the right of the people to choose their leaders without let or hindrance. It was about inclusiveness. It was against bigotry, prejudice and ethnic profiling. It was about merit. Moshood Abiola’s Social Democratic Party, SDP, had a Muslim-Muslim ticket, with Babagana Kingibe on the ballot. Yet, it didn’t matter. Abiola defeated his opponent, Bashir Tofa, of the National Republican Convention, NRC, in his home state of Kano.

It didn’t matter to Ndigbo that their illustrious son, Sylvester Ugo, a Christian and former governor of the defunct Central Bank of Biafra, was on the NRC ticket, majority of them voted for Abiola. So, any election to be used in celebrating this electoral feat must encapsulate its spirit, otherwise, it will lend credence to Olu Fasan’s assertion in his Vanguard column last week that: “Due to the empty symbolism of the president’s decision and its crass politicisation, June 12 only gives Nigerians another public holiday. Beyond that, it signifies nothing meaningful.”

The 2019 general elections were unarguably the worst since 1999, the very antithesis of whatever June 12 represents. The joint Nigeria International Election Observation Mission of the National Democratic Institute, NDI, and the International Republican Institute, IRI, on June 18 gave a damning verdict of the polls in Abuja. “The 2019 general elections fell significantly short of standards set in 2015. Citizens’ confidence in elections was shaken,” said Daniel Twining, IRI President.

“Election stakeholders should take concrete steps to address the concerns of citizens with regards to the polls in order to rekindle their faith in the power and possibility of credible elections,” said the two United States-based organisations that have been involved in Nigerian elections since 1999. There was nothing, therefore, to write about the June 12 debauchery in the name of celebrating democracy; or so I thought until I read Wole Soyinka’s article, “A democracy day primer.”

Inimitably, he lamented, just like everybody else, that “this year’s recall of an uplifting day in the year 1993 comes up against a background of its most shameful disavowal: the 2019 elections – still under judicial contestation – an event that would be more accurately described as an exercise in body count rather than ballot count,” because the poll epitomised Nigeria’s “final descent into the abyss of human degradation,” and “reflected a pattern of savagery and abandonment of human sensibilities that have eaten away the sheerest sense of community in the nation.”

But his potshot at Ndigbo in the same article is both objectionable and beyond the pale. It was unwarranted. Soyinka lured himself into a conspiracy theory, insinuating that some people took the Democracy Day celebrations as an opportunity to jeer at and vilify the Yoruba. He found that unconscionable and lamented that some are trying to reduce the June 12 struggle to that of an ethnic project, calling such an inclination “a depressing travesty of the realities, a denial of the existence of a nation’s collective sense of justice and its tenacity in pursuit of that objective.”

But Soyinka should take a look at the mirror and the face(s) of those who cynically appropriated the struggle to the exclusion of every other people will gawp at him. They will be familiar faces because they are his kinsmen. Pretending otherwise is a disservice to his age-long reputation as a fervent purveyor of truth. Conscience, to borrow an axiom, is an open wound which only truth can heal. Ethnic cavilling is a non-starter. Soyinka should know better than anyone else.

So, I find it difficult to understand the point he was trying to make when he wrote: “After the annulment, I recall that, when we tried to mobilise opposition to that sadistic impostor, fanatic voices of ethnic irredentism informed us bluntly, verbally and in print, that the Yoruba should go and solve their problems themselves, since we had let them down in the lead-up to the Biafran War of Secession, and should seek no collaboration from that side of the Niger.”

Can’t Soyinka and his ilk for once leave Ndigbo out of Nigeria’s self-inflicted lesions? That claim is nauseating, ridiculous and very unfortunate coming from him. Just as it is condescending when he wrote that: “It is gratifying, therefore – and here we come to some cheering news! – that this tendency has become a source of concern to many of the leaders of that former secessionist state.” Assuming, without conceding, that Soyinka tried, as he claimed, to mobilise opposition against Babangida’s monkeyshines and was rebuffed by the Igbo, who would blame them after their experience in the 1960s?

The crisis that heralded the “Wild-wild West and “operation wetie” phenomena and precipitated the genocide against them was a battle for political supremacy between the North and the West. It had nothing to do with Ndigbo. Yet, when the chips were down, they were used as cannon fodders, brutally massacred in their millions, using starvation as “legitimate weapon of war”.

To ensure a complete decimation – physically and economically – those who survived the genocide were stripped of their hard-earned wealth by giving them a paltry 20 pounds each. Yet, Ndigbo were at the forefront of the battle to revalidate the annulled June 12 election. Soyinka knows that. So, why this malevolent narrative?

Ibrahim Babangida didn’t hand over to an Igbo. Soyinka’s kinsman headed the Interim National Government, ING. The annulment had the backing of Yoruba monarchs even when Igbo royals rebuffed Babangida’s attempt to inveigle them into accepting the malady. Rather than sheltering under sophistry, Soyinka should take a cue from Abiola’s son, Kola, and reveal the identities of these Igbo irredentists.

Penultimate week, Kola told Nigerians his own June 12 story in an interview with the Sun newspaper. Most of the major actors who betrayed the cause, including those masquerading today as pro-democracy aficionados but only became converts and joined the National Democratic Coalition, NADECO, when Sani Abacha refused giving them political positions in his government, are Yoruba, not Igbo. And Kola said that much. He named the two-faced political jobbers.

Soyinka knows that Igbo patriots like Ndubuisi Kanu, Ebitu Ukiwe, Ralph Obioha, et al, were NADECO’s driving force. Perhaps, he is referring to the role played by Arthur Nzeribe of the Association for Better Nigeria, ABN, infamy. But how about Abimbola Davies?

It will be selective amnesia for him to claim not to know that for every Alani Akinrinade, there was a Ndubuisi Kanu who co-founded NADECO; for every Beko Ransome-Kuti, there were Olisa Agbakoba, Chima Ubani, Chidi Odinkalu, et al.; for every Kunle Ajibade who was imprisoned on trumped up charges, there was Chris Anyanwu, who nearly went blind in prison and Ben Charles Obi, who didn’t quite survive his prison ordeal.

Is Soyinka claiming to be unaware of Ralph Obioha, a man born into wealth but who gave everything up for the sake of June 12? Obioha’s African Trust Bank, Safari Brewery, vegetable oil company, cement company were destroyed by the military. Unlike some of his Yoruba compatriots who used the public till to rehabilitate themselves, Obioha is yet to recover. He may never recover. Who remembers him today?

If Soyinka was not on a mischievous voyage for whatever reason, he would be appealing to his friend, Buhari, to honour Humphrey Nwosu, the man who delivered the freest and fairest election in the annals of Nigeria’s electoral politics, as he honoured Abiola, Kingibe and Gani Fawehinmi. Soyinka knows those who betrayed June 12. If he follows the evidence, it will lead him inexorably to his own neck of the woods and not to the South East.

To pretend otherwise is sheer red herring.

SOURCE: VANGUARD

Kingsley Moghalu Endorsed By Soyinka Via Citizen Forum

Kingsley Moghalu

Text Of Wole Soyinka's Endorsement:

NEW DIRECTIONS IN A TIME OF DECISION

The nation has been brought to her knees. Internally, the blaring media testimony needs no augmentation. Beyond her borders, Nigeria is the tale of citizens designated pariahs of the global community for whom special dossiers are opened, and units of security agencies are specifically assigned.

Online transactions are programmed to reject basic usage once the word ‘Nigeria’ is inserted in the Data profile. There are few nation left, within or outside the continental borders where – no matter the codeword – a Nigerian ‘room’ has not been designated.


Her humanity litters the sand trails of the Sahara, it lines the Mediterranean sea-bed with the bones of a desperate generation, seeking ‘green pastures’. Lines from my poems have been appropriated and embossed as epitaphs on the tombstones of Nigerians washed up the isle of Catania and accorded dignified burials by total strangers, certainly paid more respect than Nigerians themselves consider due to their own humanity.

Other would-be migrants have been slaughtered by religious fundamentalists on the shores of Tripoli, while waiting for their precarious crossing on suicidal boats. Yet others end up as commodities in the slave markets of Libya and Mauritania, hundreds recently rescued and airlifted – credit where credit is due! – repatriated by government.

It was not always thus. Numerous Nigerians believe that it need not remain so. There is always a choice to be made outside any presumptuous orders – in reality associations guaranteed to perpetuate social disorders and the politics of inequality. This is not the thinking of any one individual but of a large section of this populace. If it were not, there would not have been a record number of nearly a hundred political groups aspiring to take over the reins of governance.

We do not need any instruction however to estimate that several of the aspiring groups are mere plants, raised to sow confusion. It redounds to the credit of a few individuals, including some of the candidates themselves, who embarked on efforts to winnow down their own ranks, then seek a consensus candidate as standard bearer for the battle against the two political behemoths.

They did not succeed, but that is no cause for despair. They still deserve the gratitude of Nigerians for their uniquely principled efforts. The CITIZEN FORUM – last heard of during the time of the dictator, Sani Abacha – was pulled out of retirement to join in their effort to arrive at peer consensus. The Forum worked peripherally with them. It made no attempt – I stress this – no attempt whatsoever to impose its own preferences, but utilized material from the deliberations of at least four such selection groups. It remained on the fringe, except on invitation. Our mission today is simply to present the result of that effort by Citizen Forum which, I am especially gratified to reveal, coincides with my own personal preference. The CF conclusion is obviously not binding on other groups or individuals involved in the exercise. May I take this opportunity to advise the public that neither Citizen Forum nor myself, belongs to any Third Force or other Consensus seeking councils by any other name. Please ignore any such attributions.

Over the past few months, we studied the careers, experiences and track records of most of the presidential aspirants, and most intensely those actually short-listed by the opposition parties themselves. Like millions of Nigerians, we watched the debates. I physically interacted with some of the acknowledged top contenders, in some cases several times. We participated in HANDSHAKE ACROSS NIGERIA, where some candidates presented their briefs. Among others, I delivered a keynote address. We watched television interviews. We have exchanged notes with highly respected international Civil Servants. The drive towards Consensus among these dedicated groups sometimes took the form of test questionnaires to the aspirants, including items such as: ‘Who among the contestants would you choose, if you did not emerge as the ultimate preference?’

There was nothing complicated about assessment parameters: mental preparedness, analytical aptitude, response to the nation’s security challenges, economic grounding, grasp of socio-political actualities, including a remedial concern with the Nigerian image in foreign perception etc. etc. not forgetting a convincing commitment to governance and resource decentralization – commonly referred to as Restructuring. The Forum rejected retrograde propositions of a political merry-go-round, which urge the electorate to choose this or that candidate in order to ensure “our turn” at the next power incumbency. Overall, the exercise was exacting but also – therapeutic. It proved yet again that there is over-abundant leadership quality locked up in the nation, and that it is a collective shortcoming that the political space has not been sufficiently opened up to let soar such potential. Well, to cite the Chinese proverb: a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.

Let me reiterate: there is over-abundant, but stifled leadership material, and there can be no excuse, now that that potential of high quality is being manifested, for constricting the political space in a population that is nudging two hundred million. And that statement is of course specially addressed to those who took part in this exercise, those who deliberated opted out of it, some of whom were assessed anyway. Such potential compelled us to exercise utmost rigour in what proved to be a most daunting exercise. The final determination however is – the flag-bearer of the Young Progressive Party – KINGSLEY MOGHALU.

I shall conclude with a somewhat interesting aside. I met Moghalu again on Monday morning, February 4th, and informed him of the Forum’s decision. During our discussion, I happened to ask him – what is the meaning of Moghalu. I was curious, because it had taken quite some time along the way for me to know to which ethnic group the name belonged. He replied, it means – “Evil Spirit, Leave me Be!” Then I asked him for his other names and he spelt them out: “Actually my full names are Kingsley Chiedu Ayodele Moghalu”. Eyebrows raised, I asked, How come, Ayodele? A piquant revelation resulted: “Oh, that came from Mrs. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. She was friends with my father. Mrs. Kuti was my godmother, and she gave me the name Ayodele”.

I was learning this for the first time. Moghalu’s CV is however in the public domain – his publications, record, and vision. The above is just a side-note that contains its own mild, thought provoking instruction, for those who care to examine the distractions of ethnic equivocations, and the rigid mind-sets and stereotypes imposed on products of circumstance.

That immediate task being now completed, Citizen Forum will now join forces with those who pray, “Evil Spirit, leave us be!” – at least those who subscribe to the belief that political elections are not a Do-or-Die Affair!

Wole SOYINKA

Convener, CITIZEN FORUM 2019

Herdsmen Have Declared War On Nigeria, Says Wole Soyinka

ABUJA, NIGERIA (PUNCH) -- Nigerian Nobel Prize winner, Professor Wole Soyinka has described the incessant attacks and killings by the killer herdsmen in many parts of Nigeria as a declaration of war on the country.

Soyinka made the position known in a statement released on Wednesday.

He also warned President Muhammadu Buhari against treating the case of the herdsmen lightly, saying he should avoid falling into the same trap former president Goodluck Jonathan fell into with the Boko Haram sect.

Soyinka wrote, “We have been here before – now, ‘before’ is back with a vengeance.

“President Goodluck Jonathan refused to accept that marauders had carried off the nation’s daughters; President Muhammed Buhari and his government – including his Inspector-General of Police – in near identical denial, appear to believe that killer herdsmen who strike again and again at will from one corner of the nation to the other, are merely hot-tempered citizens whose scraps occasionally degenerate into “communal clashes” – I believe I have summarized him accurately.

“The Marauders are naughty children who can be admonished, paternalistically, into good neighbourly conduct. Sometimes of course, the killers were also said be non-Nigerians after all. The contradictions are mind-boggling.”

The Nobel Laureate recalled that there have been steps taken to quell the attacks but none of the efforts have yielded results.

Soyinka said, “I applaud the plans of your ministry, I am in a position to know that much thought – and practical steps – have gone into long-term plans for bringing about the creation of ‘ranches’, ‘colonies’ – whatever the name – including the special cultivation of fodder for animal feed and so on and on. However, the present national outrage is overimpunity. It rejects the right of any set of people, for whatever reason, to take arms against their fellow men and women, to acknowledge their exploits in boastful and justifying accents and, in effect, promise more of the same as long as their terms and demands are not met. In plain language, they have declared war against the nation, and their weapon is undiluted terror. Why have they been permitted to become a menace to the rest of us? That is the issue!

“Permit me to remind you that, early in 2016, an even more hideous massacre was perpetrated by this same Murder Incorporated – that is, a numerical climax to what had been a series across a number of Middle Beltand neighbouringstates, with Benue taking the brunt of the butchery. A peace meeting was called, attended by the state government and security agencies of the nation, including the Inspector General of Police. This group attended – according to reports- with AK47s and other weapons of mass intimidation visible under their garments. They were neither disarmed nor turned back.”

WAR IN NIGERIA: VICTORY REMAINS ELUSIVE, 50 YEARS ON

BY WOLE SOYINKA

NEWSWEEK, JULY 07, 2017

Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka attends the national inter-denominational funeral rites for Biafran secessionist leader Odumegwu Ojukwu in Enugu, Nigeria, on March 1, 2012. Image: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty

On July 6, 1967, civil war broke out in Nigeria between the country’s military and the forces of Biafra, an independent republic proclaimed by ex-Nigerian military officer Odumegwu Ojukwu on May 30 of that year. The war killed more than 1 million people, many of whom died from starvation. It ended in January 1970 with the reintegration of Biafra into Nigeria.
Malnutrition, Red Cross, kwashiorkor, relief flights, genocide, the Uli airstrip used by Biafran planes to elude the Nigerian blockade, mercenaries, the Aburi accord that broke down and led to war—these are some of the memory triggers of the Nigerian civil war of secession that we would like to re-assign.

Over a million lives perished—a shameful proportion of them children—mostly through starvation and aerial bombardment. The Nigerian federal government, committed to the doctrine of oneness, had boasted that the conflict would last no longer than three weeks of “police action.” We had learnt much from the politics of other nations, but apparently not from history; the war lasted more than two years.

Tormented by the image of a herd of human lemmings rushing to their doom, as a young writer, I made the “treasonable” statement warning that the secessionist state, Biafra, could never be defeated. The simplistic rendition of that conviction in most minds—certainly in the minds of the then-ruling military and its elite support—was that this applied merely to the physical field of combat. Thus it was regarded as a psychological offensive against the federal side, an attempt to demoralize its soldiers while boosting the war spirit of the enemy. That “enemy” had also boasted that no force in black Africa could defeat them.

My visit to the Biafran enclave in October 1966 resulted in arrest and detention. During interrogation, I insisted that my statement was meant as a counter to the surge of emotive nationalism and a slavish sanctification of colonial boundaries. Biafra was therefore an expression of that rejection and its replacement with a people's self-constitutive rights. This specific challenge owed its genesis to memory at its rawest, the memory of ethnic cleansing, whose remedy could not be sought rationally in a campaign of subjugation against an already traumatized community.

One question, rhetorical in tone, stuck in my mind for long afterwards. It went thus: “Why should you take it on yourself to make such a statement? Is it because you're a writer? Who are you to take a contrary stance to the government?” I replied to myself that I had learned to listen. The young man countered that he was on the side of history, and Biafra would be crushed. Not quite, as it turned out. The Biafrans were indeed defeated on the battlefield, but crushed?

Today, most Nigerians know better. Biafra has not been defeated. If anyone was left in any doubt about this, the last work of my late colleague, Chinua Achebe's There Was A Country, has left us re-thinking. New generation writers, born long after that brutal war, have inherited and continue to propagate the Biafran doctrine, an article of faith among the Igbo populace, even among those who pay lip-service to a united nation. Millions remain sworn to uphold it. Many have died at the hands of the police and the military as succeeding guardians of that legacy troop out to reclaim it in defiant manifestations. Amnesty International estimated that at least 150 pro-Biafra activists have been killedsince August 2015. Some of their leaders, including the director of their official mouthpiece, Radio Biafra, remain on trial for alleged subversion and treason. Others have gone underground.

The war is not over, only the tactics have changed. One could claim that a project of internal secession is unfolding, one that skirts the peripheries of Nigerian laws, testing what they permit, and daring what they do not. As for the victorious side, analysts continue to cite the lingering consequences of the war of secession among the main causes of the nation's instability, alongside contemporary factors such as mismanagement of petroleum resources, corruption, visionless leadership, etc.

Today, secession simmers openly, and is moving steadily beyond rhetoric. It has already taken on a dangerous complement—ejection. A number of combative youth organizations in the northern part of Nigeria recently called for the expulsion of the Igbo from their lands for daring once again to talk about secession. Mainstream leaders have disowned them, but some support has been voiced by individuals within the same adult cadre, including its intelligentsia. Debate is intense, often acrimonious. Sadly however, one is left with a feeling that most participants in this discourse shy away from a fundamental component of nation being, one that transcends the Biafran will to corporate existence. That principle virtually gasps for air under the wishfully terminal mantra that goes: “The unity of Nigeria is non-negotiable.”

I have never understood how this is supposed to differ from the dogma of certain religious strains that declare conversion from faith to be an act of apostasy, punishable by death. Nationality, like religion, is only another construct into which one is either born, or acquires by accident or indoctrination. Those who insist on the divine right of nation over a people's choice seem unaware that they box themselves into the same doctrinaire mould of mere habit, just like religion. In the Nigerian instance, however, the matter is even more troubling.

Since the absolutists of nation indivisibility are not ignorant of the histories of other nations and are immersed daily under evidence of the assertive factor of negotiation—be it in the language of arms and violence or the conference table—since they know full well that this process straddles pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial histories, such speakers unconsciously imply that Africans are sub-citizens of the real world and are not entitled to make their own choices, even in this modern age. This smacks of an inferiority complex, if not of a slavish indoctrination, when we additionally consider how today's Africa came to be, a land mass of constitutive units that were largely determined by alien interests, and thus, hold possibilities of fatal flaws.

Also requiring contestation is the implicit equation of supreme sacrifice with supreme entitlement: Those who say, “We have shed our blood for Nigerian unity, and will not stand by and watch it dismantled.”

My observation is that in civil warfare—indeed in most kinds of warfare—civilians pay the higher price in lives, possessions and dignity. We need therefore to eliminate the distracting lament of professionals of violence and confront, in its own right, the issue of the collective volition of any human grouping. This leaves us with the other line of approach, the line of frankly subjective or reasoned, pragmatic preferences. It is a positioning that admits, quite simply, I am a creature of habit and prefer things as they are. Or: I like to be a big frog in a small pond, and allied determinants.

Such individual and collective preferences for nation validation offer sincere basis for negotiation and resolution. Once conceded, we proceed to invoke the positives of cohabitation that render fragmentation mostly adventurist and potentially destructive. Habit is a great motivator, but it should not be permitted to transform itself into categorical controls that make any existing condition “non-negotiable.”

Independence surely means more the severance of ties with an imperial order. It need not go so far as to dictate the dismantling of its bequests but certainly leaves open the option of placing it in question. Propagators of the inflexible “nationalist” line unabashedly attempt to shut down this questioning. They distort even the stance of those whose preference is that the nation remain one, but base their pleading strictly on a pragmatic platform, not as the manifestation of a divine will. The unity of any nation is not only historically subject to negotiation; nation is itself an offspring of negotiation. So what is so exceptional about those who inhabit the Nigerian nation space? Nothing. Except we wish to situate them outside history.

Should Biafra stay in, or opt out of Nigeria? That is the latent question. Even after years of turbulent co-tenancy, it seems unreal to conceive of a Nigeria without Biafra. My preference for “in” goes beyond objective assessment of economic, cultural and social advantages for Biafra and the rest of us.

Today's global realities make multi-textured nations far more compelling, not only for outside investors—tourists included—but equally inspiring to the occupants of any nation space. The West African region is marked by an intersection of horizontally and vertically-formed groupings and identities, the result of colonial intervention in the race for territory. The result has proved often dispiriting but just as often stimulating. It has gone on for long, with developmental structures whose dismantling strikes one as being potentially perilous even for the most resilient and endowed of the resultant pieces.

Among many analogies, I have heard and read Nigeria described as a ticking time-bomb. Ironically, I see in this very fear a strong argument for remaining intact. An explosion in closed space is deadlier than in a wider arena which stands a chance of diffusing the impact and enabling survival. My preference for remaining one is thus reinforced by that very doomsday prediction, not by any presumptive law of human association.

Among the lessons learnt today is that changing the content of geography texts does not obliterate the fundamental attachment to an idea. The Bight of Biafra was renamed during the civil war—to expunge the secessionist consciousness—but that ruse has clearly failed. Orders from a section of Igbo leadership for restoration of the original name is a warning that the Biafran narrative has not ended. When added to the widely spread observance earlier this year of sit-at-home protests to mark Biafra Day on May 30, it would be wise to respond with a fresh understanding to the pulsation of the new Biafran generation.

Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright and poet who was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature

Why I'm "At War With First Lady," By Soyinka

• Explains link with Amaechi

By Tunde Oyodeyin, London

The Guardian Nigeria, Sunday, July 21, 2013

AT 79, Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature, Prof. Wole Soyinka, seems not to have lost his zeal for standing up against those he perceives to use their public office to oppress others in Nigeria. 

  And though the afternoon open-door lecture series was supposed to be a commemoration of his birthday, he quickly swapped the garment of a celebrant with that of a political activist as it became necessary.   Referring to the First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan’s alleged meddling in the affairs of Rivers State and abuse of power, Soyinka asked, “What’s the problem with Madam Shepopotamus?”  

  Fielding questions from a member of the audience at the African Centre in Covent Garden, venue of Saturday’s “WS79 – Memoirs of Our Future: An Audience with Prof. Wole Soyinka,” he said he was not afraid to stand up and call the First Lady to order and also educate her if she cannot take a cue from how other first ladies behave. 

  “People said I call her a domestic appendage, what’s the problem with that? What’s the problem with Madam Shepopotamus?”  

  Pressed to comment on the lingering political crisis in Rivers State, Soyinka revealed: “What happened in Rivers began long ago, before five decided that five was greater than 27. If we don’t move in support of the truth at certain mathematics, we shouldn’t be surprised if the next mathematics anomaly takes place at our doorstep.” 

  He added: “We move when there’s interference, when all roads are closed – for hours - because she’s going to her hairdresser.”

  He argued that if members of the civil society do nothing when such abuse is taking place in Rivers, Ibadan and Lagos, then Nigerians should not be surprised when a curfew is imposed the next time she is visiting their state. 

  He called on Dame Jonathan to take a cue from President Barack Obama’s wife, stating: “We ask unelected people to look around and see how the Mrs. Michelle Obamas of the world are conducting themselves,” adding, however, that if the Dames of this world do not learn, “we must educate them.”  

  Asked if he was a friend of the embattled Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi, Soyinka replied: “That Amaechi is my friend is not an allegation,” because he would be friends with anyone who has been given the mandate of the people through the electoral process. 

  According to him, he is not afraid to be associated with such if they are fulfilling their obligations and responsibilities of governance. He added: “To say the Governor of Rivers is my close friend is like saying Kayode Fayemi or Dr. Babangida Aliyu or Governor Ibikunle Amosun or even the Second Republic Governor, Mohammed Shugaba, in Shagari’s administration, is my friend.” 

  However, Soyinka said ‘it’s not a matter of friendship,” but defence of democracy and truth, stressing that he would not be afraid to switch loyalty if the people he once praised change and start oppressing the very people who elected them.    

  Meanwhile, he commended Governor Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State who he said has provided educational opportunities for all in the state.

War, Biafra Genocide and the Missing Facts in that Soyinka Interview

By Nkem Ekeopara

nkem360@googlemail.com

1968 NAF Napalm air raid on Aba General Hospital

On May 18, 2013, the US-based online media outfit Sahara Reporters granted an interview to the Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka. The interview was done a few days to the burial date of the late legendary writer, Professor Chinua Achebe, who passed on on March 21, 2013 in the US. Apparently, it was scheduled to provide Professor Soyinka an opportunity to offer his thoughts on the stature of Professor Achebe, recently reckoned by the US President Barack Obama as somebody who “shattered the conventions of literature”. Aside from Soyinka speaking on Achebe’s place in his calling, Soyinka also made statements on the late Biafran leader Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu and the Nigeria-Biafra War and, of course, the genocide visited on the Igbo people before and during that war under Yakubu Gowon’s watch.

Reaching a decision on the appropriate time to write this piece delayed the article from being written until now. One did not want one’s thoughts to divert attention from the literary duels which Professor Soyinka’s controversial interview provoked between some of the ‘successor writers’ on the social media. Having read views on the interview such as one adduced by Mr. Ikhide R. Ikheola, someone I have come to regard as a master of witticism, I did not feel any pressure in getting it out there, which would have necessitated at least a passing comment on Soyinka’s perception of who Achebe is. Besides, my hands were full at that time. So, why waste time on such words likened to what Igbo elders would say is water poured on a spherical grindstone when it comes to Professor Soyinka’s perception and the global perception of the departed Achebe and Achebe’s art?

Therefore, statements like, “Yes, there was only one word for it- genocide” and “The Igbo must remember, however, that they were not militarily prepared for that war. I told Ojukwu this...” came with words that deserve one’s attention. These statements deserve one’s attention because there are so many young people in the contraption called Nigeria who were not born before the Nigeria-Biafra War. Some of these young people have not taken time in the past to read books written by unbiased Nigerians and foreign authors about the war. However, with the internet and its social media component, these young people are now interested in reading about the war. Many of them are still not reading books about the war but rely on snippets they get on it through the social media to form their impression about the war. Therefore, it is incumbent on opinion moulders with the stature of Professor Wole Soyinka to inject the critical facts into their thoughts when they talk about the war.

To begin with, the decision to declare the former Eastern Region a sovereign state to be known and called the Republic of Biafra was not single-handedly made by Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. The weighty decision to pick up arms to defend the declared republic, the only secure space Easterners had at the time, after being hounded out of other parts of Nigeria and still being hunted down across Nigeria, was not single-handedly made by Dim Ojukwu. Dim Odumegwu-Ojukwu did not make the decision for the uncritical-minded Yakubu Gowon to repudiate the landmark Aburi Accord and engage in other untoward acts that led to the war, including the unilateral creation of states and declaration of war against the young republic. Our young people need to know about the Aburi Accord. They need to know that at Aburi an all-embracing agreement was reached and signed by representatives of all the components of the crisis-ridden Nigeria to restore normalcy in the country, after Gowon failed to keep his word as Ojukwu bowed to persuasion and asked Easterners to go back to their former stations only to be cut down in a second wave of killings, all in a bid to stave off war. Yakubu Gowon quite dishonourably abandoned the all important Aburi agreement on the advice of his foreign masters and some ‘super’ permanent secretaries in Nigeria. The greatest burden Dim Ojukwu bore till his death was caving in to that persuasion and allowing his people who miraculously escaped the first wave of massacre to return to their stations only to be so gruesomely killed.

There are five possible reasons why this sort of reductionist mindset of blaming Dim Ojukwu for the war persists, in spite of the facts that abound. These are ignorance; deliberate attempts to malign the leaders of Eastern Nigeria made up of some of the best brains of their time; convenient amnesia; living in denial, and deliberate attempt to hide the real issues from our young people.

On ignorance, anyone with the basic knowledge of who the Easterners are, especially the Igbo people, knows that they are neither feudal nor monarchical and therefore not servile to the extent of one individual enjoying a central authority. Perhaps, nothing captures the essence of who they are than what the Igbo elders say: Otu onye adighi a bu nna mu oha/An individual can never be everyone. According to Professor Aluko, whom Soyinka also cites, Ojukwu had been asked by his Igbo people to choose between leading them or bowing out. It is well recorded how a student of University of Nigeria, Nsukka set himself ablaze over Ojukwu’s reluctance to secede. Ojukwu admitted that one of his greatest mistakes was delay in declaring Biafra. Everything paints a picture of what played out in the case of the declaration of Biafra and implicitly the decision to defend Biafran territorial integrity after Yakubu Gowon ordered his military to proceed to the next phase of the genocide through the attack at Gakem on July 6, 1967.

The fact remains that there were bodies, the Eastern Region Consultative Assembly and the Advisory Committee of Chiefs and Elders, representing all the peoples of Eastern Nigeria that mandated the then young military governor of Eastern Nigeria, Lt. Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, to declare Eastern Nigeria a sovereign state, the Republic of Biafra. Our young people need to know this. They should be informed that the Ijaws, according to Chief Melford Okilo, would have sided with Biafra, if Ojukwu had requested for a referendum. But would Gowon let that kind of process take place when he had already repudiated the Aburi Accord and unilaterally restructured Nigeria into 12 states? The youth need to know that a 67-year-old Dr. Alvan Ikoku whose wisdom and erudition was widely known, was the chairman of the Eastern Nigeria Consultative Assembly.

If it is not ignorance that is responsible for the sort of mindset that fuels this ‘blame Ojukwu for the war,’ then, it is a clear case of deliberate attempt to malign the leaders of Eastern Nigeria, consisting of dogged nationalists who were in the forefront of the struggle to free Nigeria from British colonialism. There were world-class academics cum astute university administrators, prudent and meticulous civil servants, brilliant unionists and notable chiefs. People must understand that when they engage in ‘blame Ojukwu for the war’ reductionist approach to the genocidal war, they are maligning outstanding individuals like Dr. Alvan Ikoku, Dr. M. I. Okpara, Dr. Akanu Ibian, Chief M. T. Mbu, Chief Eyo Bassey Ndem, Chief Jereton Mariere, Dr. K. O. Dike, Professor Eni Njoku, Mr. N. U. Akpan, I. S. Kogbara etc. for a thoughtful decision they reached, having weighed the options - extermination or slavery.

We are dealing with those struck with convenient amnesia, remembering only what they choose to remember, a choice, which is quite prevalent in Nigeria. Of course, there are those living in denial, and others making deliberate attempts to hide the real issues from our young people. Anyone who is willing to talk about advising Dim Ojukwu against the war, and willing to talk about the genocide should have known the importance of bringing the Aburi Accord into that mix as well as mentioning the indifference of Yakubu Gowon’s government to the first and second phases of the genocide, especially in Northern Nigeria that left 50,000 Easterners mainly Igbo people dead. Bringing the Aburi Accord into that mix has become quite important particularly now there seems to be intensification of the calls for a Sovereign National Conference, for obvious reasons.

Perhaps, it is this reductionist approach that made Professor Soyinka to believe that the elimination of Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu and Yakubu Gowon by the so-called Third Force scheme was the best way of solving the Nigerian crisis at the time rather than mobilizing for the implementation of the Aburi Accord. In a 4-part article written by Dr. M. O. Ene titled, ‘Who is the brain behind January 15?’ that was published on www.kwenu.com on January 15, 2007, Dr. Ene tried to probe and locate the proverbial route through which water entered the pipe of the pumpkin-leaf. Dr. Ene states thus, “From his own words and writings, on [one] can deduce that Soyinka was in the midst of pro-Awolowo and anti-Akintola forces in the ‘wild, wild West’ era and he was in Banjo-Ifeajuna Third Force scheme that tried to eliminate both Odumegwu-Ojukwu and Gowon.”

We should not forget that Pepper Clark, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Segun Awolowo, Victor Banjo and Emmanuel Ifeajuana were part of an Ibadan circle of young hot heads who were aggrieved by what was happening in Ibadan. This led Soyinka to occupy the Western Broadcasting Corporation in 1965, to prevent the airing of a speech by Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa. In effect, Soyinka’s action and the January 15, 1966 coup plot and the killing of Balewa weren’t unconnected.

In the same vein, Pepper Clark’s name comes up in discussions on the coup, as Clark it was who smuggled a helpless Ifeajuna out of Nigeria when the Lagos operation of the January 15, 1966 coup failed. To blame Ojukwu on whose laps this misconduct was thrown, and who was more cautious than the Soyinkas, who were playing ideological games, is quite puzzling.

Reading through Dr. Ene’s interrogatory piece one is left with the impression that there might have been a force or forces outside the military that consciously or unconsciously provided the poetic and militant spark that lit up the night of January 15, 1966. Young people need to explore this side of the war narration too to understand fully the events that led to the Biafra genocide.

Professor Soyinka in the past did acknowledge the inevitability of the war and did underscore the fact that what was going on was the implementation of, as he puts it on pages 21 to 22 of his book The Man Died “the doctrine of justifiable genocide”. In the same book, he expresses the fear that the situation may degenerate into “downright genocidal epidemic”. 

Now, if someone, due to his human instinct could be moved to write the above haunting expressions, pray, why should the leaders of the former Eastern Region and later Biafra, fold their arms and wait for their people to be murdered en mass without making any attempt to defend themselves in their own homeland?

In relating the story of one Ibo [Igbo] photographer, Emmanuel Ogbona [Ogbonna], who was brutally murdered and thrown into the bush around September 1966, after being abducted from his studio at Odo Ona, Ibadan, with his known killers not being brought to book, and contrasting this with the sentencing to death of one man and giving various terms of imprisonment to eight others in Sokoto for mistakenly murdering Ojibo Uche asleep, a little brother of Mr. Joseph Uche, an Igala, thinking he was Igbo, after raiding his home and not finding him, Professor Soyinka had no problem in reaching the right conclusion and stating that:

The juxtaposition of these two sample events, even without the reminder of its large-scale horror context, the most comprehensive, undiscriminating savaging of a people within memory on the black continent, destroys the hypocritical disclaimers of the regime. It states one simple truth: that at the very least the machinery of justice existed all through and after the Northern massacres and that lack of the prevention of their exercise was a deliberate, selective decision of Yakubu Gowon’s government (The Man Died , 24).

The questions that should agitate the mind of anyone reading this at this point is, why do people always find it convenient not to blame Yakubu Gowon for the war, seeing this kind of fact and Gowon’s disavowal of the Aburi Accord? Why are people in the habit of exonerating the thief by blaming the victim for not securing his door properly when it comes to the Nigeria-Biafra War, as Olayinka Sule would ask? As our Igbo elders say, it is only a tree that will be told that it is going to be cut down and it will remain where it is.

It is worth quoting Professor Soyinka’s The Man Died elaborately here to present the deepness of the scar Easterners, especially the Igbo people, bore and still bear, which made them to feel secure only in the East and believe in Aburi, the only instrument that could keep them in their region at least for a period of time. I am quoting Soyinka elaborately so that people, especially young people, can appreciate why our parents needn’t have to have loads of arsenal before deciding to defend their right and those of their offspring to exist. Professor Soyinka writes:

The following fact is therefore stated merely as a matter of record: in September/October 1966, another ATROCITIES did take place all over Nigeria including Lagos, the seat of Yakubu’s government. But where it really manifested in grand style was in the North. The ATROCITIES were so public even in the South (Lagos) that delegates to a Constitutional Conference which had been launched by Yakubu Gowon were physically man-handled by Gowon’s Army right in view of the House of Assembly buildings where these constitutional talks did take place. Man-hunts publicized by machine-gun stutters, took place around Ikoyi where Gowon lived, and the executions and torture games that went on in his official residence, Dodan Barracks, on civilians who were simply arrested on the public road- Ikorodu checkpoint was the favourite kidnap point- were common daylight occurrences known to Yakubu Gowon. As for the events in the North- let us simply sum it up and say that ATROCITIES did take place on a scale so vast and so thorough, and so well-organized that it was variously referred to as the Major Massacres (as distinct from the May rehearsals), genocide and sometimes only as disturbances and this gem is by Ukpabi Asika- a state of anomy! Yakubu Gowon himself went far enough to put it under the broad sphere of ATROCITIES in his appeal. The word itself, appeal, is significant. It tells much about Mr. Gowon (119-120).

The appeal Professor Soyinka is referring to here was a short unserious speech Gowon made to fellow Northerners in which Gowon never failed to mention that ‘God in his power has entrusted the responsibility of this great country of ours, Nigeria, to the hands of another Northerner...’             

In the interview referred to earlier, Professor Soyinka agreed that genocide was committed against the Igbo before the war. He said that genocide was committed on both sides during the war; he also said that the scale was more on the Nigerian side. I know that during the war, the Nigerian Air Force strafed markets in full session, sometimes killing up to 500 people in just one raid. I know that the Nigerian Air Force and their Egyptian collaborators strafed churches and schools that became refugee centres in Biafra. I know they flew so low and targeted homes; they bombed hungry refugees clogging main roads and moving wearily to the next town, which was yet to fall into the hands of the Nigerian forces. I know that the Nigerian Army summoned all males in Asaba and adjoining towns, and massacred them in cold blood.

I know that the Nigerian government used starvation as a weapon of war to send millions of children, women and the aged to a slow and pitiable death. I know that the Nigerian military shot down Red Cross and other relief airplanes bringing food and medicines to Biafran babies. And all these were directed at an ethnic group, the Igbo people.

Also, I know that the Biafran Air Force did successfully bomb power stations, petroleum product storage tanks and several Nigerian Air Force bases and took out some evil birds supplied by the then USSR, thus degrading their air capability for a while. I never knew the Biafran Air Force targeted any concentration of civilian populations. I never knew that the Biafran Army summoned all males in any town or group of towns and massacred them in cold blood.

According to the Encarta Dictionary, “genocide is the systematic killing of all the people from a national, ethnic, or religious group, or an attempt to do this.” Professor Soyinka records several incidents of genocide in his book, The Man Died, which took place under Yakubu Gowon’s watch. On page 23 of the book, Soyinka is of the opinion that those responsible for the genocide “must be named, denounced and forced to stand trial some day”.  

More than four decades after these acts of genocide were committed no one has been brought to book. I think it is about time Professor Wole Soyinka capped his life of activism by calling on the international community to try Yakubu Gowon and his cohorts for genocide. Certainly, bringing the long awaited justice to the victims of Biafra genocide would be more like it for a Nobel laureate than defending and celebrating a mass murderer.