VANGUARD
Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has described the word ‘reconciliation’ in some media reports of Peter Obi’s visit to him on Sunday, as a “most inappropriate and diversionary invocation”.
Soyinka stressed that there was basically no issue to reconcile between him and Obi, who was the Labour Party, LP’s presidential candidate in the February 25 elections.
Recall that Obi’s supporters, popularly called “Obidients”, had verbally attacked the Nobel laureate for describing Datti Baba-Ahmed’s comment on Channels TV as fascist.
Obi had, on Sunday, paid a courtesy visit to Soyinka at his Ogun State residence.
However, the Nobel laureate, in a statement on Monday titled, “A visitation, and the allure of Reconciliation,” in response to some media reports on the visit, stressed that there was simply no issue to reconcile between him and Obi.
The statement read: “Before it gains traction and embarks on a life of its own, I wish to state clearly that the word ‘Reconciliation’, inserted into some reports of Peter Obi’s visit to me yesterday, Sunday, May 7, is a most inappropriate, and diversionary invocation.
“Let me clarify: I know the entity known as Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party. I can relate to him. I know and can relate to the Labour Party on whose platform he contested elections.
“There are simply no issues to reconcile between those two entities and myself.
“However, I do not know, and am unable to relate to something known as the “Obidient” or “Obidient Family”.
“Thus, albeit in a different vein, any notion of reconciliation, or even relations – positive, negative or indifferent – with such a spectral emanation is simply grasping at empty air.
“During that meeting, attended by two other individuals only, the word “Reconciliation” was never bruited, neither in itself nor in any other form. It simply did not arise.
“By contrast, there were expressions of ‘burden of leadership’, ‘responsibility’, ‘apology’, ‘pleading’, ‘formal dissociation from the untenable’, all the way to the ‘tragic ascendancy of ethnic cleavage’, especially under such ironic, untenable circumstances. Discussions were frank, and creative.
“The notion of Reconciliation was clearly N/A – Non Applicable. It was never raised.
“The following should be understood, but never underestimated. What remains ineradicable from that weekend of orgiastic rave in the social media was the opening up of the dark, putrid recesses in the national psyche that we like to pretend do not exist.
“It invited – into minds seeking a grasp on reality – gruesome variations on images from Dante’s Purgatorio.
