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| *Wole Soyinka and Lai Mohammed |
By
Chuks Iloegbunam
The first time Wole Soyinka misdirected himself, it had to do with
his “cautious endorsement” of Muhammadu Buhari’s presidential candidacy. He
offered a platter of reasons for the stunning faux pas, of course. But, post-election, his out of sync reading of
Nigerian politics has been patently exposed.
To recap, it happened that in the run-up to the presidential ballot,
Professor Soyinka, long time combatant on the side of the oppressed, announced
that the best thing that could happen to Nigeria
“It is pointlessly, and
dangerously provocative to present General Buhari as something that he
probably was not. It is however just as purblind to insist that he has not
demonstrably striven to become what he most glaringly was not, to insist that
he has not been chastened by intervening experience and – most critically – by
a vastly transformed environment – both the localized and the global.”
Aware that his about-face would set teeth on edge, Soyinka took the
pains to further explain his Road-to-Damascus conversion. He had become a
Buhari flag-waver, having “studied him
from a distance, questioned those who have closely interacted with him,
including his former running-mate, Pastor Bakare, and dissected his key
utterances past and current.” He underpinned his implausible argument with
his location in Buhari of “a plausible
transformation that comes close to that of another ex-military dictator,
Mathieu Kerekou of the Benin
Republic
