By Promise Adiele
Nigeria’s god of literature, Wole Soyinka, needs no elaborate introduction. His evident literary flourishes underscore a deep mastery of the English language which he eminently utilises to address socio-political conditions in his native Nigeria and across the world. He has, several times, confronted misrule, urging the economic weary, downtrodden masses to stand up against bad governance and reject the entrenchment of power monsters in the polity. In his globally acclaimed civil war memoir, The Man Died, Soyinka magisterially submits that “the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.”
By that epoch submission, the Nobel laureate encourages victims of feral exercise of power to speak up and not shut up because death is the comeuppance of timid acceptance of political and economic terrorism. Soyinka’s advice to the populace to speak up contradicts Bola Tinubu’s admonition that Nigerians demanding a new beginning from the present All Progressives Congress disaster should ‘shut up.’ Tinubu, the APC presidential standard bearer, was unmistakably direct when he recently encouraged his audience to tell those demanding a change of government in Nigeria to ‘shut up.’
