Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has described
former president, General Olusegun Obasanjo, as an irredeemable
hypocrite and a liar who takes delight in denigrating people.
Soyinka,
in his reply to the attack on him by Obasanjo in his latest
controversial book, My Watch, pillories Obasanjo for invoking God all
the time and wonders whether Obasanjo actually believes in such an
entity, given his recourse to lying compulsively.
“Our
Owu retiree soldier and prolific author is an infliction that those of
us who share the same era and nation space must learn to endure,”
Soyinka writes.
Obasanjo has a “capacity for infantile mischief.”
Soyinka describes him as “master of mendacity,” writer of ‘ignoble fabrication’ and an “indefatigable peddler of lies.”
“I
despise humanity whose stock-in-trade is to concoct lies simply to
score a point, win an argument, puff up his or her own ego, denigrate or
attempt to destroy a fellow being. However, even within such deplorable
species, a special pit of universal opprobrium is reserved for those
who even lack the courage of their own lies, but must foist them on
others.” The high-point of Soyinka’s diatribe is a succinct comparison
of Obasanjo to Olowo-aiye, a character in D.O. Fagunwa’s novel.
Soyinka says he has been brief and mild because of the
interventions of some mutual friends and this traditional season of goodwill.
Here is the full text of Soyinka’s response to Obasanjo
titled: WATCH AND PRAY, WATCH AND PREY! :
“I had fully attuned myself to the fact that our Owu retiree
soldier and prolific author is an infliction that those of us who share the
same era and nation space must learn to endure. However, it does appear that
there is no end to this individual’s capacity for infantile mischief, and for
needless, mind-boggling provocations, such as his recent ‘literary’ intrusion
on my peace.
Perhaps I ought to interrupt myself here with an apology to
some mutual acquaintances – ‘blessed peacemakers’ and all – especially in this
season of ‘peace and goodwill to all men’. Please know that your efforts have
not been entirely in vain. I had a cordial exchange with Obasanjo over the
phone recently – engineered by himself, his ground staff and/or a chance
visitor – when I had cause to visit his
Presidential Laundromat for the first time ever. During that exchange, I complimented him on
making some quite positive use of landed property that was acquired under
morally dubious circumstances, and blatantly developed through a process that I
denounced as ‘executive extortionism’. That obscene proceeding has certainly
set a competitive precedent for impunity in President Jonathan’s recent
fund-raising shindig, editorialized in THE PUNCH (Dec. 23, 2014) as “Impunity Taken too Far”. So much for the
latest from that direction – we mustn’t allow Handing-Over notes between
presidents to distract us for too long.
To return to our main man, and friendly interventionists,
you may like to note that I went so far as to engage him in light banter,
stating that some of his lesser sins would be forgiven him for that creative
conversion of the landscape – a conversation that he shortly afterwards
delightedly shared with at least three mutual acquaintances. I promised a
follow-up visit to view some mysterious rock script whose existence, he
informed me, was uncovered by workers during ground clearing. The exchange was,
in short, as good as ‘malice towards none’ that any polemicist could hope to
contribute to the ongoing season of peace and goodwill. Obviously that visit
will not now take place, any more than the pursuit of vague notions of some
creative collaboration with his Centre that began to play around my mind.
That much I do owe you from my report card. Perhaps you will now accept that there are
individuals who are born incorrigible but, more importantly, that some issues
transcend one’s personal preferences for harmonious human relationships even in
a season of traditional good will. The change in weather conditions sits quite
well with me, however, since we are both
acquainted with the Yoruba proverb that goes:
the child that swears his mother will not sleep must also prepare for a
prolonged, sleepless infancy. So let it
be with Okikiola, the overgrown child of circumstance.
One of the incessant ironies that leapt up at me as I read
Obasanjo’s magnum opus was that we are both victims of a number of distasteful
impositions - such as being compelled
again and again to seek justice against libel in the law courts. I felt genuine
empathy to read that he still has a pending thirty-year case instituted by him
against his alleged libelers! Judgment was delivered in my favour regarding one
of the most nauseating only this year, after surviving technical and other
procrastinations, defendant evasions and other legalistic impediments for
nearly as long as his. That leaves only a veritable Methuselah on the court
list still awaiting re-listing under the resurrection ritual language known as
de novo. Unfortunately, not all acts of
defamation or wilful misrepresentation are actionable, otherwise, my personal
list against this newly revealed fellow-sufferer would have counted for an
independent volume of the Nigerian Law Report since our paths first crossed
during the Civil War. My commitment to
the belief in the fundamental right of all human beings NOT TO BE LIED AGAINST
remains a life obsession, and thus demands, at the very least, an obligation of
non-commission among fellow victims.
I must, therefore, reserve a full, frontal dissection of
Obasanjo’s My Watch for later, most
especially since the work itself is currently under legal restraint and is not
readily accessible to a general readership. So, for now, let me single out just
one of the most glaring instances of this man’s compulsive career of lying, one
sample that the media can readily check upon and use as a touchstone – if they
do need one – in assessing our author’s multifaceted claims and commentaries on
people and events. I refer here to the grotesque and personally insulting
statement that he has attributed to me for some inscrutable but obviously
diversionary reasons. In the process, this past Master of Mendacity brazenly
implicates an innocent young man, Akin Osuntokun, who once served him as a
Special Adviser. Instead of conferring dignity on a direct rebuttal of an
ignoble fabrication, I shall simply make a personal, all-embracing attestation:
I despise that species of humanity whose stock-in-trade is
to concoct lies simply to score a point, win an argument, puff up his or her
own ego, denigrate or attempt to destroy a fellow being. However, even within
such deplorable species, a special pit of universal opprobrium is surely
reserved for those who even lack the courage of their own lies, but must foist
them on others. When an old man stuffs a lie into the throat of an age-mate of
his own children – omo inu e! – we can only pity an irredeemable egomaniac
whose dotage is headed for twilight disgrace.
D.O. Fagunwa, the pioneer Yoruba novelist, was a compulsive
moralist. I suspect that he may have exerted some influence on our garrulous
general, resulting in his pupil’s tedious, misapplied and self-serving deluge
of moralizing. It seems quite likely indeed that the ghostly, moralistic hand
of Fagunwa reached out from the Great Beyond, sat his would-be competitor
forcefully before a mirror and bade him write what he saw in that image. I
invoke Fagunwa because, at his commemorative colloquium in Akure in August last
year, I drew my audience’s attention to a remarkable passage in Fagunwa’s Igbo
Olodumare. The passage had struck me during translation and stuck to my mind. I
found it uncanny that the original creative moralist, Fagunwa, had captured the
psychological profile of a being whom I have been compelled by circumstances to
study as an eerie creation, yet this was a character Fagunwa was unlikely to
have encountered in real life at the time that he produced that work.
The section comes from an account of a visit to the abode of
Iku, Death, the terrifying host to Olowo-aiye, the narrative voice of the
adventure. Iku, the host, had been
admonishing his guests through the histories of seven creatures who were not
permitted a straightforward passage to Heaven or Hell, but were subjected to admonitory
punishment at the halfway house to the abode of the dead. The most horrendous
tortures were reserved, it would seem, for the last of the seven such
‘detainees’, and I invited my audience to ponder if they could identify any
prominent individual, a public figure whose life conduct seamlessly fitted into
Fagunwa’s portrayal, which went thus:
“The seventh…. is not among those who set out to improve the
world but rather to cause distress to its inhabitants. It was through
manipulations that he attained a high position. Having achieved this, however,
he constantly blocked the progress of those behind him, this being a most
deplorable act in the eyes of God, and rank behaviour in the judgment of the
dwellers of heaven – that anyone who has enjoyed upliftment in life should seek
to be an obstacle for those who follow him. This man forgot the beings of
earth, forgot the beings of heaven, in turn, he forgot the presence of God. The
worst kind of behaviour agitated his hands – greed occupied the centre of his
heart, and he was a creature that walked in darkness. This man wallowed in
bribery, he was chairman of the circle of scheming, head of the gang of
double-dealing, field-marshal of those who crept about in the dark of night.
With his mouth, he ruined the work of others, while he used a big potsherd to
cover the good works of some, that others might not see their attainments. He
nosed around for secrets that would entrap his companions, and blew them up
into monumental crimes in the eyes of the world. He who turns the world upside
down, places the deceitful on the throne, casts the truthful down – because
such is a being of base earth, he will never stand as equal among the
uplifted.”
My co-occupants of the High Table, in side remarks, and
those who came up from the audience afterwards to volunteer their answer to the
riddle, without exception named one individual and one individual only, even as
I remained non-committal. Indeed, one or two tried to put up a defence of that
nominee, and I had to remind them that I had named no one! Fagunwa wrote
largely of the world of mongrelized creatures but, as I remarked, his fiction
remains a prescient and cautionary mirror of the society we inhabit, where
beasts of the forest appear to have a greater moral integrity than those who
claim to be leading lights of society.
In this season of goodwill, we owe a duty to our immediate
and distant neighbours: CAVEAT EMPTOR!
Let all beware, who try to buy a Rolex from this indefatigable watch
peddler. His own hand-crafted, uniquely personalized timepiece has been
temporarily confiscated by NDLEA and other guardians of public health but,
there is no cause for despair. Such has been the fate of the misunderstood and
the envied, avatars descended from the heavens before their time, the seers,
and all who crave recognition. Our author invokes God tirelessly, without
provocation, without necessity and without justification, perhaps preemptively,
but does he really believe in such an entity? Does our home-bred Double-O-Seven
believe in anything outside his own Omnipotency? Could he possibly have
mistaken the Christian exhortation – ‘Watch and Pray’ for his private
inclination to “Watch and Prey? This is a seasoned predator on others’
achievements – he preys on their names, their characters, their motivations,
their true lives, preys on gossip and preys on facts, preys on contributions to
collective undertakings…..even preys on their identities, substituting his own
where possible. Well, hopefully he may actually believe in the inevitable End
to all vanities? So, let our Great Immortal, the Unparalleled Achiever,
Divinely appointed Watchman even on the world that is yet to come remember
Fagunwa’s Iku, the ultimate predator
whose visitation comes to us all, sooner or later.
Chei! There is Death o!”
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