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!”
Source:PM News
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