Izuchukwu E.N
Prof. Wole Soyinka, a Nobel Prize-winning playwright from Nigeria, has clarified a comment attributed to him that suggested the North had a say in earlier administrations.
According to The Site News, Prof. Bola Akinterinwa’s article in the ThisDay newspaper reported Soyinka as saying that the Northern elites would continue to rule the nation regardless of who wins the upcoming 2023 presidential election.
In the article, the novelist was quoted to have alleged that the North had decades ago, created fraudulent constitutions in the country that favours them.
It further alleged that Northern Nigeria was in charge of the government when Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan were sitting presidents.
“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,” Akinterinwa quoted Soyinka in his piece.
However, Soyinka has distanced himself from the publication, saying that the disclaimer was without prejudice to the main body of the thoughtful article published on THISDAY of Sunday, January 22.
“It is simply unfortunate that he has fallen for the operations of Nigeria’s fake attribution industry, which has now attained hideous social dimensions,” Soyinka said.
He stressed 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.
“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,” Prof Soyinka said, adding that 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.
The noble Laurette added: “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.”
