23rd January, 2023
Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka on Monday denounced statement credited to him that Northern Nigeria would continue to control the government no matter who becomes the president.
Soyinka was quoted by Prof. Bola Akinterinwa, in his article published in Thisday to have said “Northern Nigeria will continue to control the government no matter who becomes the president. This is because they created fraudulent constitution in Nigeria, fraudulent population in the Northwest and more states in the North.’ More significantly, the African Nobel Laureate from Ogun State also noted that ‘Northern Nigeria was in charge of the government when Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan were president. Even if you make Igbo president, Northern Nigeria will still control the government. The best solution to Nigeria’s problem is for us to negotiate our existence.”
But the Nobel laureate, said the disclaimer was, however, without prejudice to the main body of the thoughtful article published in THISDAY of Sunday January 22 by Professor Bola Akinterinwa.
“It is simply unfortunate that he has fallen for the operations of Nigeria’s fake attribution industry, which has now attained hideous social dimensions,” he said.
Soyinka stated that the statement attributed to him in his essay was not his, but belonged to the sharp practices of internet trolls with their own agenda, who however lacked the balls to answer their fathers’ names, adding that “there is an appropriate name for them, but we shall avoid using it here.”
He insisted: “I never made such a statement. We have warned again and again. The increasingly bastardised social media will eventually set one country after the other on fire, leading eventually to a global conflagration. And the principal instigators will be those malformed sub-humans who lack the courage of their conviction and must resort to Identity Theft of mounting impudence.
“Even the most elementary, but rational, mind-sustaining discourse has become a minefield of distortions, wholesale fabrications, half-truths, tendentious extrapolations that impose on serious thinkers and debaters superhuman navigation skills. I salute those who persist and attempt to retrieve this valuable medium from the mentally retarded minority.
“In this connection, one brief comment: Professor Akinterinwa missed out on one leadership qualification that the nation desperately needs: a mass psychiatrist or an exorcist. Preferably both rolled in one.”