SUN NEWS
CHRIS UWADOKA FROM THE SUN NEWS
I just read a public letter from Wole Soyinka. Yes, the one wherein he challenged Datti to a public debate. And I am disappointed.
I think Wole Soyinka is, as they say, hiding behind a finger.
Writing in parables, spewing insults too low for his supposed attainment of Nobel laureate status. And I dare ask, has he read other laureates from other parts of the world? Or is the Nigerian standard ordinarily lower? Does learning justifiably and thoroughly trump character in this business of loud voice?
How does a man like WS, at a time like this, neglect to call for national reconciliation? How does he at the same time state, in equivocal terms, that he neither believes in the Nigeria project nor would he call for a revolution – Neither fish nor bird, at this age?
I am coming to the painful conclusion that WS is too petty for the position and respect accorded him by past history. Future history may be unable to reverse the position, but it’s doubtful that it will retain the respect. That is now history, methinks.
How the mind works is revealed in what the pen says. His pen struggled too much to assert his international buzy-ness as an excuse for his missing voice at critical junctures in this nation’s local scenario.
Truth is, for whatever it’s worth, WS has travelled too far in the direction of losing the badge of a conscience of the nation. He failed to lead and show the light for a time considerably long enough for younger seekers of light to be established in his ways. So he lost them to their own formations and they coagulated under EndSARS with neither his leadership nor support. Now he cries that the “‘rookie activists’ did not seek out the school of survivors” like him. He is bemused that younger activists are not following the script of an absentee father. Isn’t it a shame that the grandpa activist went on holiday?
Nature abhors a vacuum. So, WS has become a relic furniture from a long-gone past. An untended flower bed that hosts weeds and an occasional confused flower.
Okay. We have read his reaction. The staccato of machine gun fire from a man that claimed to be too busy with international engagements to offer a reasonable voice on local burning issues when it mattered most. He claims he has been busy LEARNING BEFORE MOUNTHING. It’s alright? It’s trite. Left. Right.
Under the heat of shame from his grandchildren, his international works have suddenly left him space to address a local issue and even space to challenge Datti to a debate on Channels.
Ah, where has he suddenly found the time and the conscience: An open wound!
WS, it’s time to tell the world what you are standing on. Come clear, let’s see your feet. What’s propping you up? Is there some ventriloquism going on here? Is it confusing? Is the voice of Jacob supporting some hand of Esau? And, this time, it’s not drama – though melodramatic?
You are free to speak for others, sir, as long as you say so. It’s not you alone, sir, in that dark corner. It’s easy to tell. Better you tell the world, of which citizen you are, by your Nobel prize, that you are speaking for a party. It’s faux and roguish to claim to be speaking from a loftier perspective of principles only to find that the voice of Jacob never stopped being wired to the hands of Esau. I have nothing against both, by the way. It’s the intellectual dishonesty hidden under obfuscating grammar that gets one.
In THE MAN DIED, I think, you put this comment in the mouth of one of your characters into whose cup of drink, drops of rain water leaked from the roof in a bar: I think it was, “Ask God to stop urinating into my beer,” or something like that. I have a right to forget the details. I read it only once, 45 years ago.
Well, somebody, please ask Wole Soyinka to stop urinating on our intellect.
Like him, I close my kind-of paraphrasing Charly boy: Oga, your own Mumu never do?
