14th October, 2014
By Nduka Uzuakpundu
The recently concluded National Conference was, indubitably, a well-thought-out political initiative by, President Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan. It was, in the president’s well-considered opinion, a durable strategy aimed at the solidification and consolidation of the Fourth Republic. But, while the National Conference was going on, Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, celebrated his birthday with pomp and ceremony. There were some participants at the National Conference, who said Soyinka’s birthday carnival was uncalled for. Take former senator, Major-General Ike Nwachukwu, for one. He told this writer that the National Conference, which has created a gargantuan hole in the national purse, was convened by the Jonathan administration, to find tidy panaceas to such challenges as crushing corruption, anaemic economic growth, environmental pollution in the Niger Delta, falling standard in education, deepening ethno-religious distrust, rising youth unemployment, insecurity in the air and infrastructural decay etc. facing the country. Nwachukwu, like former Petroleum and Education Minister, Professor Jubril Aminu, felt genuinely displeased with the drunkenness and breach of public peace by university students reading English, Greek, and Theatre Arts, nation-wide, while they were marking Soyinka’s birthday. Nwachukwu and Aminu said that Soyinka might be sued for dereliction of duty, for not warning his apostles in the universities, to act and drink responsibly, while celebrating his historic birthday. A more convincing reason, according to Nwachukwu, was the failure of Soyinka to obtain a police permit to mark the gargantuan waste that was his birthday celebration.
Nwachukwu and Aminu were deafeningly silent when this writer asked: “Would you have taken the authorities of Leeds University and the Mayor of Leeds, in Britain, to court for celebrating Soyinka’s birthday, because, truly, they never obtained a police permit to that effect? Aminu, who’s is an unblinking, educational enemy of Soyinka, cast a long, side, disapproving look at this writer, when he realised that the question was in defence of Soyinka’s birthday celebration – even though, it’s true that in his habituated stubbornness, which turns tauntingly wild, each year he has celebrated his birthday, since Oslo, he never obtained a police permit. The former education minister was undisguisedly sarcastic when he said: “Were Soyinka the president of this country, he would have bribed the National Assembly to legislate to the effect that all political parties, State Houses of Assembly, Local Governments and Departments of English and Thespian Arts, in all the country’s universities, should celebrate his birthday.
Nwachukwu was of the view that: “All that was slurped, to the tune of =N=19.34 million, on that occasion, ought, for very strong moral reasons, to have been donated to some of the orphanages in the country”.
Aminu thought differently: Soyinka, as one of the most eminent beneficiaries of the free education programme of the defunct Western Region, under the Awolowo administration, ought to have known better; every dime that was wasted in the celebration of his birthday ought to have been donated, in the alternative, to a tertiary institution, either in Kaduna or Calabar, solely for the construction of an eighty-metre-long, gargantuan, two-storey, hostel building, having eighty commodious rooms, each of which would accommodate a minimum of eight beds – solely for students reading Theatre Arts, English language and Greek – so as to help the choking crowd of students in the existing ones. In the course of an interview, at the lobby of the Abuja venue of the National Conference, Nwachukwu said: “Had the gargantuan sum of money wasted, in the name of celebrating Soyinka’s birthday, been pumped, wisely, into a bastille project, Soyinka, in his informed stubbornness, would have resisted any harmless attempt to link him with such a magnificent, lavishly furnished penitentiary.
Recall that it was the same Soyinka the Rejector, who, almost sued the Federal Government, some years ago, simply because an attempt was in the offing to name a serene boulevard, in Abuja, after him. It was at this point, at the lobby of the venue of the National Conference, that a cynical Aminu, who had joined this writer and Nwachukwu, thirty minutes earlier, chipped in by saying: “Soyinka rejects everything. There’s nothing the Federal Government does that pleases him! Is that how to be a social critic!?”
But, in the course of the 193.4 minute-long interview, Nwachukwu said that he would have “gladly taken an active part in Soyinka’s expensive birthday carnival, and, as a well-wisher, he would have sent a gold-plated birthday card to him, via courier, but for his insatiable appetite for pork. In addition, one is quite certain that had a certain ex-military governor intruded into the crowded, well-lit venue of Soyinka’s lavish birthday celebration, he would not, for his active distaste for stratocracy, have surfaced for a return match on September 1. And, again, that’s the same Soyinka who seldom smiles, and always cups his nostrils because, he says, he’s disgusted with the political stench that he perceives around him. The Soyinka, whom the military, in a rare act of generosity, offered an exclusive, rich Biafra experience, which, as a distinguished oenophile, he brewed, with a thinly-veiled appeal to Ate, into a palatable wine that tasted very much like Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. And, in his frantic bid to beat the record set by the military, Soyinka, in a rare act of generosity, later presented fifty-four litres of the wine, in a special bottle, imported from Burgundy, in France, with an inscription ‘Akinloye’ on it, to Adisa on his birthday.
This is an era of community-based, F.M. radio stations in the country’s universities and, so, Nwachukwu felt that: “Soyinka ought to have invested the gargantuan sum of money wasted in the name of marking his birthday in setting up one of the best radio stations in the country. It’s my guess that Soyinka would have instructed the authorities of the benefitting university to root well-armed soldiers at the entrance of the radio station so that no miscreant takes it to ransom”.
Nwachukwu, who averred, solemnly, that he had never participated in or profited from any coup, since the demise of the First Republic, dilated upon the Soyinka coup as would a latter-day Clausewitz, said he suspects that “because of the political stubbornness for which Soyinka is famous, there might be a rider: Soyinka may be told that he must refrain from his dirty habit of quaffing non-alcoholic wine or eating white guava, like the ones standing guard at the entrance to his Abeokuta residence, lest he be sent back to prison – where he’ll be held in isolation, indefinitely. But, while it’s an indubitable fact that Soyinka is constitutionally qualified to contest the 2015 presidential poll, my honest advice, as a former military governor and a pioneering senator in the Fourth Republic, is that the President of the Senate, Mr. David Mark, should evoke the Doctrine of Necessity to ensure that Soyinka is not only banned from contesting the 2015 presidential marathon, but, as well, barred from getting too close to any radio station. Soyinka has to be so firmly shackled, so that he does not prevent Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) from announcing false election results; a practice without which no election in Nigeria can be ruled as free, fair and transparent.”
“But, if it becomes compelling, he should be held in communicado, in that, a free-Soyinka, roaming about, unshackled, like a hungry lion, would block such dividends of democracy as blood-letting, wetie, arrest of opposition party chieftains, the presence of hooded security agents, snatching of ballot boxes, vote-rigging, distribution of free rice, beans, cooking oil and sugar, gargantuan bundles of crisp naira notes not stolen from the national chest, bags of salt, loaves of bread, T-shirts, onions, tinned tomato, yams, plantains, bales of ankara, exercise books, biros, rulers, face-caps, plastic buckets and plates, hand-bands, etc. to gullible voters by selfish politicians. One is making these comments – as, indeed, some well-founded warnings – because, for Soyinka’s sake, the cloud that one sees, as a visionary, as the 2015 presidential poll draws near, is frighteningly ominous. Put differently, Soyinka must be put away, for as long as the 2015 elections lasts. Besides, the Department of State Security (DSS), SSS, the police and army, Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), should watch every real and imagined member of the Confraternity of Sea-Dogs, very closely. By 2015, it would have been about five decades since Soyinka staged the first coup. He still nurses the unquenchable ambition to be the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He wants, no matter what it takes, to transmit his stubborn ambition to fruition. Nevertheless, Soyinka should realise that Nigeria is not the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – not even its satellites, in the former Eastern Europe – where gerontocracy was practiced. Soyinka should slough his pathological obsession with wanting to plagiarise Mandela: the oldest, democratically-elected President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
“Truth is that if, by default, the security agents allow Soyinka to hold a radio station to ransom, again, that would be the end of the country’s longest and most-promising democratic dispensation. It would be history repeating, as it were, itself. The Fourth Republic would sink. In that event, Soyinka would have sent a tacit invitation to some unsmiling rifles, armoured tanks and shiny, rugged boots – a majority of whom, it would be revealed later – in the coming to pass of one of the prophecies of Brother Jero – are card-carrying members of the Confraternity of Sea-Dogs – to take over the affairs of this great country, and the consequences would be quite catastrophic and gargantuan. Nigeria would, then, be turned into a play-house of tragedies never imagined or written about by Soyinka.
“As the Nigerian educational system bounces back to global fame from Siberia, the costly brains that had been drained, as one of the gravest consequences of Soyinka’s coup, would fly, gladly, back to this great nation. Beyond that, there’s a very strong likelihood that brains from such countries as Ghana, South Africa, Egypt, Canada, the almighty United States of America (USA), Great Britain etc., would troop, in their thousands, into this great nation – to the extent that all the polytechnics, colleges of education and universities would be overwhelmed by the attendant brain glut. It might just be possible – in one of the oldest prophecies made by one of Soyinka’s brightest characters – Brother Jero – coming to pass – that at least eighty percent of all the over one hundred and fifty three tertiary institutions in the country would have revenant Nigerians or foreigners as
Pro-Chancellors, members of Council of Governors, and Vice-Chancellors, who’d be more fluent in Yoruba – Egba, to be precise – than Soyinka! The Nobel laureate speaks a remarkably, opaque sub-tongue of the Egba dialect. It’s a sub-tongue that is proudly associated with an unconstitutionality: holding a radio station to ransom. Soyinka says that the Egba that he speaks has a vocabulary enriched with a copious quantum of jaw-breaking words, stubbornly borrowed – without police permit – from Greek, Xhosa and Zulu languages.”.
•Uzuakpundu is a Lagos-based journalist.