“If you’re betrayed, release disappointment at once. By that way, the bitterness has no time to take root.” ― Toba Beta.
The author of Master of Stupidity, Toba Beta, has timely advice for all Nigerians on what to do when we are bitter at betrayal. Not a few men of conscience feel that way in this country today. We are all concerned and disappointed that even our revered literary icon, and rights crusader, Prof Wole Soyinka could find himself entangled in the dirty side of our politics.
Anybody who has been privileged to have aged parents or other relatives around should understand why the Obidient and indeed the rest of Nigerians should take it easy with Prof Soyinka who avoidably dragged himself into the murky waters of Nigerian politics. As a result, he found himself at the bashing end of the Obidient Movement and has understandably remained cranky since the electoral fraud of February 25 in which candidate Peter Obi was heading for victory but got thwarted by the devious actions of Prof Mahmoud Yakubu and his [not-so] Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
The wrong time to challenge somebody is when he feels justified to behave unrulily having been piqued sufficiently. One can test this by beating a child unjustifiably and preventing him or her from crying. What you get is more howling and doleful crying.
We understand the Nobel laureate’s effort at trying to help a friend who is going down because of dubious electoral refereeing and needed a laudable and decent character to help. Many discerning minds will say that the laureate should have known when not to associate with a dented character, no matter who is involved. Not with an aging man who will be 89 years this July.
However, there are a few exceptions. Pa Ayo Adebanjo, the Afenifere leader who at 95 continues to retain his youthful zest of the Zikist era.
At 31 years, this man Soyinka took a maximum risk in the Western region, daring the military junta by going to a radio station to halt the announcement of rigged election results. This pigheaded act was not in defense of his tribe and religion. It was a fight against injustice, and unfairness being perpetrated against the people.
Later during the civil war, he sided with then-Biafra, crusading against injustice, and had to suffer incarceration as a result. That crusade birthed The Man Died, a compilation of his prison notes.
When Soyinka was rampaging, providing courage and sagacity to the youths of his time, the Labour Party flag bearer, Peter Obi, was toddling in diapers, and his running mate, Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, yet unborn, was still a prayer point.
If the naked rape of February 25 had occurred during Soyinka’s heydays, he would have been more militant now than then. Today, he is deriding the Obidients for bellyaching. If the nation can witness the worst abuse of the people’s will and the great Kongi is chewing words, dancing about, leaving the issue, labeling agitators fascists, his years more than anything else have taken their toll on him. So Soyinka can keep mum at the senseless ethnic profiling and violence in Lagos, and watch his colleagues in academia bastardize the democratic institution by facilitating electoral fraud instead of challenging them and engaging Prof Mahmoud Yakubu in a public debate to explain his atrocious role in the February 25 assault on the nation’s democracy. He is instead challenging a victim of the dubious process.
Isn’t it the same Soyinka who is on marble as saying in his The Man Died, “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny?” So, why then take on the Obidients for refusing to keep quiet and acting decently in the face of Prof Yakubu’s tyranny of declaring a result he did not generate from the ballot box? Why challenge Baba-Ahmed to an open debate over an issue, Soyinka would have reacted even more violently if he was younger.
That notwithstanding, we would all be unkind to the great Nobel laureate if we failed to appreciate the gulf created by age in his agility and his diminishing sagacity and perspicuousness.
Most great men who crash in life do so while trying to accommodate the idiocy and the ludicrousness of some of their not-so-clean friends or relatives who sneak into their lives for leverage.
Rather than raise the hammer as high as the embarrassing offense on Prof Soyinka, the anger should be directed at those who cooked rubbish as a dish and wanted him to come and glorify it, using the dignity and veneration accorded his age and stature.
The most likely scenario is that upon discovering that they were drowning in their electoral theft, somebody must have decided to scamper for good heads to give it credibility. The first assignment was a fatal error to send the most dubious political spokesman Lai Mohammad to the United States to seek to drum up support for February 25.
In the US, the Nigerian government spokesman could not respond to questions about why Nigerians are in such melancholy even after fresh elections and looking forward to a new government and why the post-election peace is seeming more like that of a graveyard. Notorious for his lies, Lai had no answer to important questions and could not achieve much in his image laundering mission even with his unfounded treason allegation against the LP standard bearer, hence the resort to the Nobel laureate’s international clout.
Unfortunately, Nigeria’s only Nobel prize winner at 88 is too old to be able to escape from the pressure of an unpleasantly overpowering and suffocating friend, a possible subsidizer. Rather than achieve anything in the drycleaning mission they desired, the old man is put on the spot to tackle the contradictions in his newfound life.
How can the literary giant explain to his boys in the Seadogs confraternity that after their song ‘Emi lokan, Baba wey no well’, their founder and mentor is entangled in needless defense of the same ‘emi lokan’?
In literature, Prof Soyinka is an undisputed icon but we know that he got the Nobel ahead of finer writers because of his visible and judicious use of his writings to gain emancipation for the people. This is the gain his later-day political friends are working assiduously to destroy by dragging the 88-year-old who paid all the dues fighting for justice into the turbid political scene.
If your father is known for mastery of words in your village and you accompany him to the village square where one of his friends has a bad case and had to drag him out to give credibility to his bad case using his influence, once you discover he is chewing words and unlike himself, the reasonable thing to do is to take him away. “Daddy, let’s go home.” His friend would not like it but you must insist to keep your Dad’s credibility intact. That was what many discerning minds expected Prof Soyinka’s children and friends to do instead of watching him impugn his hard-earned reputation.
Thank God, LP’s Baba-Ahmed who, over time shown his political acuity, has a good upbringing that enables him to respect age, declined the debate. His words, in declining to engage the old man, put him high as a man of good African heritage where age is recognized as a blessing and grace from God and should be given due regard.
Here is his deferential response to the debate challenge: “We state therefore that [the] vice-presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Dr. Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, cannot take up Prof. Soyinka’s offer of a public debate, not out of cowardice, but for cultural and political reasons.
“Culturally, it’s just not decent, their age and accomplishment gaps taken into account, for Datti to sit opposite the 88-year-old global icon and point out his folly to his face, even if the old man called for it. And politically there is no basis for such a challenge in that Prof is not on any of the opposite ballots.”
The point of this conversation is that at 88, and for a nation whose average life expectancy is 55, Prof Soyinka should be forgiven no matter the provocation. His positive contributions to the socio-political and educational development of this country should act as a palliative. The literature giant may have somersaulted unjustifiably but Nigerians in their disappointments and frustrations should be lenient in reviewing his saddening gaffes.
But our castigating, our berating, and reproving should rather be raised on the perpetrators of the crime that is threatening our democracy and our oneness as a nation, like, Prof Yakubu and his INEC bunch of fraudsters and the Bola Tinubu and his gang of desperadoes. The old man should be forgiven and understood to be in an age of not-so-sound judgment.
We must also not be oblivious of the real motive of dragging Soyinka out which is to distract and remove the people’s focus from asking about the whereabouts of the “president-elect” whose incapacitation cannot be ignored but for how long can a lady hide pregnancy if she doesn’t suffer a miscarriage? God, help us.
