By Jideofor Adibe
In recent weeks Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, multiple award winning writer, Chimamanda Adichie, and supporters of Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the February 25, 2023 presidential election (otherwise known as Obidients), have been trending. The backgrounds were an interview granted by Datti Baba Ahmed in which he was quoted as saying that whoever “swears in Mr. Tinubu has ended democracy in Nigeria”. Elsewhere, Dr. Datti Baba- Ahmed was also quoted as saying that Nigeria does not have a President-elect.
*Chimamanda and SoyinkaThe conversation took a different turn when Soyinka criticised the comments by Dr. Datti Baba-Ahmed, saying: “I have never heard anyone threaten the judiciary on television the way Datti did I heard the kind of menacing, blackmailing language that we were treated to by Datti. That kind of do-or-die attitude and provocation is not what I think we have all been struggling for.”
Soyinka also challenged Datti to a television
debate which the latter rightly declined. Responding to the critical responses
that followed his Channels interview, Professor Soyinka issued a statement
titled: ‘Fascism on course’ in which he criticised the Obidients and argued
that the “seeds of incipient fascism in the political arena have evidently
matured”. He also called Obidients ”the Republic of Liars.” Earlier, Chimamanda
had on April 6, 2023,published an open letter to Joe Biden in the US
paper, The Atlantic, in which she urged the US President not to congratulate
Bola Ahmed Tinubu as doing so would amount to legitimising an election she
thought was rigged.
There are several issues raised by the interventions of both Soyinka and Chimamanda in the contestations between the supporters of Obi and Tinubu: One, though the outcome of the presidential and governorship elections is being challenged in court, the contending political parties rightly recognise that there is also the court of public opinion to which they are competing to sell their perspectives.
In this sense the two global literary icons taking obvious sides
in the contest for public opinion (which the contending parties obviously hope
will also sway the judges at the tribunal) was perceived by each side as an
attempt to use the echo of their big literary voices to skew the contest to
their disadvantage.
Two, activists like Soyinka who have spent most of their lives as system
critics are often boxed in a manner that they are not permitted to have
feelings or cherish relationships that will seem to contradict their public
persona. This was perhaps what Camilo Cela, the 1989 Spanish Nobel Prize winner
in literature had in mind when he said that a writer should be a denunciation
of the time in which he/she lives.
Though Soyinka does not come out to openly admit this, one senses a
tension between certain unrealistic expectations of him as a system critic and
his appreciation of his friends in the APC government who have shown him love
and affection. Did Karl Marx not probably face the same tension when his best
known collaborator Friedrich Engels not only had contradictory roles of being a
successful business man, an activist and a journalist but also had a father who
was an owner of large textile factories – the same class of capitalists that
Marx inveighed against?
Like most people system critics also tend to become more nativist as they
get older. Three, Soyinka, the wordsmith, has always taken liberty with the
English language; so when he described the Obidients as a ‘Republic of liars”
or Baba-Ahmed’s position on the inauguration of Tinubu as “do-or-die attitude
and provocation”, we can surmise that Soyinka is once again taking poetic
licence with language.
If you add to this the fact that his literary oeuvre seems to be a fusion
of anger, obstinacy and celebration of facility with the English language, it
becomes easier to understand his mode of engaging both the Obidients and
Datti-Ahmed. For regular folks, however, apart from the incorrect assertion by
Dr. Baba-Ahmed that Nigeria does not have a President-elect, there was nothing
“do or die” in his position on the judiciary which others do not express
regularly.
Four, Soyinka also miswrote when he assumed that the Obidients are a homogenous, centrally-organised group rather than a loosely aggregated movement with different tendencies which are united only by their support for the aspirations of Peter Obi. In this movement could be found sub groups like neo EndSARists, educated urbane dwellers, higher-end intellectuals, different ethnic factions of young people with their own agenda and of course irreverent keyboard warriors who seem to spoil for a fight on a whim.
In politics, once you throw your hat into the ring, people will trample
on it – irrespective of the splendour around the hat. Five, it is
unfortunate but understandable given how far our social distance has
widened that those critiquing Soyinka’s and Chimamanda’s intervention are
introducing ethnic elements into it all. But being proud of your ethnic
ancestry, supporting a candidate of the same ethnic group or having friends and
benefactors of the same ethnic origin does not make one an ethnic supremacist.
For one to be an ethnic bigot, one has to be guilty of promoting the
conflictual elements in the ethnic ‘we-versus them’ dichotomy. Besides,
Nigeria’s literary landscape, especially of old, was driven by a triumvirate –
Achebe was the master novelist; Soyinka the genius playwright while JP Clarke
was the admirable bard/ poet. People trying to compare Soyinka with Achebe are,
therefore, comparing apples with oranges.
Six, what I find unfortunate is that in the quest by the contending
parties to control the narrative, expressions of opinions, the bedrock of the
marketplace of ideas that sustains democracy, are being criminalised. To put
this in context, in the landmark case of New York Times v Sullivan (1964), it
was established that opinions honestly held, even if the facts on which such
opinions were formed were wrong, could be valid defences in defamation
proceedings. This came to be known as the ‘actual malice standard’ or the
‘Sullivan rule’.
Seven, did Chimamanda’s open letter to Joe Biden amount to colonial mentality? Perhaps it did. But then Nigerian politicians and others are all guilty of it. In the run-up to the 2023 presidential election, did our politicians not troop to Chatham House in the United Kingdom for a validation? And when Tinubu was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, did Tinubu’s supporters not celebrate that?
Whether winning an
election in Nigeria is enough to make one among the 100 most influential people
in the world is, however, left for Time magazine to answer, especially given
that past winners of presidential elections in the country or even most of the
winners in bigger democracies have not been so honoured.
*Adibe is a professor of political science
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