Professor Wole Soyinka and the children of hunger and anger

This intervention on the feud between Nigerian Twitter youths and Professor Wole Soyinka is inspired by the following comment on my Facebook wall on December 30, 2017, by the writer Adunni Adelakun:

“By the way, Pa, blaming Soyinka for Buhari is not only old, it shows how emotionally unintelligent those Twitter “youths” are, seriously. At this stage, 14 months to a new presidential election, people should have given up the nonsense of finding who to blame for Buhari and accept some responsibility so they can figure out what next for 2019. Anyone can sit on Twitter and lament how an 80 plus year old man who will probably not win an election in his own LG pushed him/her to vote Buhari. People should take some responsibility, time us running out on all of us. At the rate they are going, they will blame him for their shortcomings till 2023. Soyinka did not force anyone to vote, he made a choice like many others. It was a poor choice people made but there was not option, really. GEJ was not it and blaming Soyinka and his role in that part of our history till eternity is stupid.”

I deeply appreciate Adelakun’s perspective, she has said it, and she has said it well. For those on Twitter, here is the Twitter thread by Stanley Nwabia that initiated the public dragging of Professor Wole Soyinka regarding his silence on the troubling state of the nation. Clearly, there is no love lost between Soyinka and many Nigerian youths who accuse him of being compromised by the government of the day. This is nothing new, Kongi has always had a complicated relationship with young Nigerians on the Internet, going as far back as the mid-nineties. If you want to know about the fractured relationship between young Nigerians and Wole Soyinka on Naijanet, the first social media for Nigerians in the mid 90s, please read this piece of mine.

This intervention is also a response to David Fátúnmbí who had written the following elsewhere on the same issue, along Adelakun’s lines:

“Is it not in bad taste to vilify Mr. Soyinka for making decisions that his age, experience, contributions to nationhood and status give him the prerogative to make?

Is it not bad manners to speak ill of the elderly or paint them negatively simply because they don’t play politics as we prefer or act according to our script?

The haste to blame Mr. Soyinka for real and imagined ills, by young ones who have not done half of what he did when he was their age and by we older ones who should be voices of moderation and good- mannered objectivity say more about the blamers than about any imagined failing on the part of Mr. Soyinka.”

I have a different take on the matter; I would argue that the Nigerian youths dragging Soyinka on social media that Adelakun derides as “emotionally unintelligent” were taught everything they know by their “emotionally intelligent” elders. Instead of rational folks to plumb the depths of this real rage by the young they are being defensive and abusive.

We must ask the question: Why are things the way they are? Soyinka is a public figure with a lot of power, and deservedly so. Soyinka is a literary genius; his plays are inspired commentaries on the Nigerian condition. He has a deserved reputation for dramatic, some would say, quixotic interventions in Nigeria’s political space. Many of these youths looked up to him and took his words seriously. It turns out according to them, that he failed them. And they are royally angry about it. Please refer to his powerful and emotional 2007 essay, The Crimes of Buhari. Hear Soyinka roar:

“The grounds on which General Buhari is being promoted as the alternative choice are not only shaky, but pitifully naive. History matters. Records are not kept simply to assist the weakness of memory, but to operate as guides to the future. Of course, we know that human beings change. What the claims of personality change or transformation impose on us is a rigorous inspection of the evidence, not wishful speculation or behind-the-scenes assurances. Public offence, crimes against a polity, must be answered in the public space, not in caucuses of bargaining. In Buhari, we have been offered no evidence of the sheerest prospect of change. On the contrary, all evident suggests that this is one individual who remains convinced that this is one ex-ruler that the nation cannot call to order.

Buhari — need one remind anyone — was one of the generals who treated a Commission of Enquiry, the Oputa Panel, with unconcealed disdain. Like Babangida and Abdusalami, he refused to put in appearance even though complaints that were tabled against him involved a career of gross abuses of power and blatant assault on the fundamental human rights of the Nigerian citizenry.”

These are powerful words. History matters. Words matter. Given his antecedents, Soyinka’s tacit support for Buhari given his past views was stunning. It was also inappropriate, in my view. It is unfortunate that Soyinka fell prey to ethnic considerations and Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s silly and greedy machinations. It has cost him a lot. The youths have every reason to be angry. Power comes with a lot of responsibility. These youths did not just pick on anyone but they have been relentless in hounding Soyinka. Why? If we don’t ask the why, we will never resolve this issue.

There is a problem and Nigerian intellectuals are card-carrying members of the problem. Let me break it down for you: Since 1999, beginning with Olusegun Obasanjo, governance in Nigeria has been state-sanctioned looting. The glue that has kept all these despicable regimes together has been rank corruption and the acquiescence of greedy intellectuals and writers. Graft has been the common currency. Of $600 billion in oil revenue since oil was discovered in Oloibiri in 1958, it is estimated that $400 billion has been looted outright. Again, we have endured incompetence and buffoonery from all of them. “Democracy” in Nigeria is an unsustainable farce. Buhari is just an exaggerated version of the buffoons before him. So, excuse me if I am not impressed by what has befallen us since Abacha died.

One thing I have learned from Nigeria’s political fiasco is how incompetent and unprepared for governance our intellectual and political elite are. From Soyinka on down, the common glue blinding and binding them is rhetoric, words, mere words. Many of these folks are literary giants, yes, but they would not qualify to say more than a few words in a public hearing in the West where they reside. Because that’s all they are honestly qualified for. But in Nigeria, they are attempting to right a falling ship. Nigeria is too complex for these folks. You see it in their commentary, it’s mostly bullshit. They have little or no knowledge of governance, budget, economics, structures, etc. They are steeped in the post-colonial culture of protest as governance. Why would someone whose only experience is writing fine essays now be in charge of the media campaign of a powerful nation like Nigeria? Why would someone whose supervisory experience is limited to babysitting a harried graduate assistant or two suddenly be an expert on Nigerian governance? At some point, words become bullshit.

If you know anything about governance and structures, you will understand the colossal mistake Nigerians made in moving from the clueless (Jonathan) to the doubly clueless and inept (Buhari). You do not move from the frying pan to the fire. Indeed, the real tragedy of the abdication of responsibility by Nigerian thinkers is in creating. and obsessing about a binary between the PDP and the APC. ‪Nigerian intellectuals must reflect on the value of a political system that has since 1999, thrown up such spectacular levels of incompetence and buffoonery. The difference among the administrations has been in degrees of buffoonery and incompetence. Buhari is mere proxy for our huge problem. Is this “democracy” serving us? I would say, no. What are our options? The thinkers and doers that fought hard for the actualization of democracy and amended power in 1999 have basically loitered around the corridors of power enriching themselves and doing little else. We have had almost two decades to figure this thing out. Instead our star thinkers and writers have become a conservative bastion of rent-seekers, telling tall tales for profit.

In that respect, I think these young people, most of them poorly educated and served by my generation and older see Soyinka as a convenient proxy for all of us who say the right things but do all the wrong things, they see us as the leaders of Animal Farm; we have raised all our kids and loved ones abroad in good schools and family friendly environment s with loot that really belongs to the ones we now berate as uneducated and emotionally intelligent.

This we know: There is a rank failure of leadership all around. It is quite possible that the elections of 2015 were not decided by the stirring prose of intellectuals that hectored people into dumping Goodluck Jonathan in favor of Muhammadu Buhari. But we must interrogate the mindset, the hypocrisy, and yes, the corruption that made them abdicate their once sacred role as the voices of the voiceless.

By the way, Soyinka has since responded to the situation in Nigeria with this piece. Happy New Year to all of you. This is really an essay in progress. I will hawk it to the New York Times. You know you are not an African thinker until you have written for one of these oyinbo rags. That is my only goal for the new year. What is yours?