Monday
July 19, 2010 |
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Last Tuesday was the 76th birthday of
Wole Soyinka, extraordinary dramatist, poet, professor of literature,
renaissance man, and one of the world’s greatest humanists. I had
intended to mark the occasion with a column celebrating Soyinka’s record
of unstinting commitment to a Nigeria founded on justice and humane
values. Sadly, I was unable to write last week.
Still, given my debt to the man, I thought it would be meet to say a few
words, even if belatedly, both about an aspect of his meaning as well as
the cruel paradox that Nigeria, in its current state, poses to Soyinka’s
longstanding work.
Let me explain the tone of contrition in this column’s title. A few
years ago, in the midst of yet another political crisis – it might have
been Olusegun Obasanjo’s third term gambit, but I won’t swear on it – a
friend of mine rang me up to vent. Midway through our discussion, he
asked me a question along the (paraphrased) lines of: “Don’t you find it
curious that Professor Wole Soyinka has not said anything? Why is he
keeping silent?”
Irate, I barked my response to this interlocutor. “Why must you demand
that Soyinka speak on every issue that crops up in Nigeria? Why don’t
you speak on every political matter as you expect him to? You’re in your
mid-forties, my friend. By his early thirties, Soyinka had held up a
radio station to confront a corrupt federal government and its regional
stooge. What exactly have we done? He was in his mid-thirties when he
undertook the risky task of traversing several capital cities to voice
the genocide in Nigeria, and to persuade western powers not to sell
weapons to either side in the Nigerian conflict. Have you and I done
anything to rival that in consequence and risk? For his troubles, the
Yakubu Gowon regime threw him into solitary confinement. He came close
to losing his life. What price have we paid?”
My friend was stunned into silence, but I was not done. “Soyinka,” I
continued, “took on the bestial machinery of the Sani Abacha regime. The
regime wanted him dead – by any means necessary. Did you as much as
mutter a word of criticism against Abacha when the goggled general was
on the throne? Soyinka has confronted all the governments in Nigeria on
their corruption and human rights abuses. How about you? Have you even
mustered the courage to call out your local government councilor on his
corruption? Soyinka has famously called his generation wasted. Our
generation, yours and mine, is the wasting generation, but have you had
the insight to recognize it or the intrepidity to state it?”
When he didn’t retort, I finished off by reminding him that, rather than
censure Soyinka for failing to speak on some issue or other, we should
be humbled by the scope and significance of the man’s personal
investments in the idea of a Nigeria that matches its citizens’ loftiest
dreams. We had not earned the right, I told my friend, to question
Soyinka’s prerogative to choose not to weigh in on every subject under
the Nigerian sun. Given the unrelenting cascade of crises in Nigeria,
it’s practically impossible for any one person to maintain an unbroken
record of commentary on every issue. “Above all, you and I owe the
Soyinkas of Nigeria an apology. If we had followed their example,
Nigeria would not have fallen into the callused hands of charlatans who
daily ruin a country that has every reason to be great.”
Soyinka’s example is, first and foremost, a deeply moral one. His effort
to combat the reactionary forces that sought to subjugate the Western
region in the mid-1960s is as instructive today as it was then. His act
of derring-do in sabotaging a radio broadcast resonates with Nigeria’s
persisting political malaise. If anything, Nigeria is in a far worse
political condition today than it did in the 1960s.
Therein, I propose, lies a painful paradox. If a youthful Soyinka was
moved in the 1960s to resort to extraordinary means of political
resistance, how much more radical might our tools be today when, by most
criteria, Nigeria is nothing short of a failed state? If Soyinka was
riled then by the ruling party’s stuffing of ballot boxes, how about
today when more “votes” are cast than there are registered voters, or
when candidates with dubious mandates declare, with a straight face,
that God gave them power?
Nigerian politics defies and debunks the evolutionary model. In the
1960s, men of towering intellectual or ethical capital – notably, Nnamdi
Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Aminu Kano – dominated the Nigerian
political scene. Today, men who were dismissed from the police force,
convicted for petty theft in Nigeria and abroad, or flaunt questionable
academic credentials, routinely smuggle themselves into high political
offices.
In the 1960s, the political parties still understood the meaning of
party manifestoes and programs. On the stump, candidates for political
offices could be expected to speak not about their programs but also to
articulate the nature of ideological differences between themselves and
their opponents. Today, any ignoramus can run for office. Manifesto is a
word now used exclusively by mugus who don’t understand that the import
of political office is to cart away millions in security votes,
fraudulent contracts, constituency allowances, and sundry bribes.
Nigeria’s political rhetoric has been distilled – dumbed down – to two
or three facile phrases, easily digested by even the most ignorant
candidates. The standard, pat answer to the question, “Why are you
running for office?” is: “To move the nation (or state, or local
government) forward,” or “To deliver the dividends of democracy,” or “My
people asked me to run.”
After Obasanjo and Maurice Iwu collaborated to shock and awe Nigerians
with one of the biggest scams ever organized in the hallowed name of
elections, I made a decision never to address Umaru Yar’Adua, the chief
product of that scandal, as president. It was, I felt, my citizen’s
moral protest – the least I could do to register outrage.
For if, nearly fifty years after Nigeria’s independence, forty years
after an indignant Soyinka stormed a radio station, ten years after
Abacha’s death, Nigerians are still denied the right to vote and have
their vote count, then I was not about to dignify the chief beneficiary
of that hollow, fraudulent exercise with the title he had usurped.
I stand by that policy. It is my modest way of expressing my deep debt
to Soyinka, a man who has given so much to the possibility of Nigeria,
but has been betrayed at every turn.
