Soyinka Slammed For Verbal abuse Against Obasanjo

Prof Wole Soyinka, Femi Falana, a senior lawyer in Nigeria, had reportedly described Obasanjo as one of the country’s major problems. The two prominent Nigerians said Obasanjo was not a saviour as some would believe.

The two top Nigerians attacked Obasanjo at a panel discussion alongside the editorial chairman of The Nation, Sam Omatseye, at a book launch in Lagos.

The Yoruba Consultative Forum (YCF) on Tuesday, August 7, expressed their displeasure towards the Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, for what it referred to as the playwright’s “undisguised campaign of calumny” against the former president, Olusegun Obasanjo.

In a statement by it's president, Professor Tejumade Rhodes, the YCF slammed Soyinka for “revelling in a poisonous vendetta and egregious abuse” against Obasanjo, Punch reports.

Before now, Soyinka had attacked Obasanjo, describing him as part of Nigeria’s major plights, warning Nigerians to be on the alert concerning the third force being inspired by Obasanjo to remove President Muhammadu Buhari in the 2019 presidential poll.

One of such cases where Soyinka blasted Obasanjo was at the 10th memorial lecture of the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi (SAN), in which Soyinka, admitting that the Buhari-led administration had not done enough, especially in the area of security, berated Obasanjo for posing about as the country’s messiah.

He alleged that Obasanjo hijacked some movements formed by some young persons who were disenchanted with the running of the country by the current government and were working to unseat the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) come 2019.

Also, recently at the public presentation of the public presentation of his latest interventions series, Interventions VIII, titled, “Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?: Gani’s Unfinished Business,” Soyinka was said to have vowed that he would not be tired of criticising Obasanjo.

Soyinka said: “He (Obasanjo) frustrated the June 12 and often puts himself forward on any issue… I don’t remember any good he has done. It will be very difficult to find one. I can’t remember any at this moment.”

However, the YCF said that with his persistent attacks on Obasanjo, Soyinka had “definitely crossed the bar of decency and civilised literary grace.”

Describing Obasanjo as a courageous leader who never failed to confront the “errant” powers, the YCF said Obasanjo ought to be nudged on as opposed to the attacks being hauled at him by Soyinka.

The forum stated: “At a time when everyone is nudging Obasanjo forward as the courageous rallying point against the present dislocations in our polity, Soyinka is salivating in some primitive laceration of the old soldier, revelling in a poisonous vendetta and egregious abuse against Obasanjo.

“In Soyinka’s warped cosmology, he insists that Obasanjo is not the fit and proper person to lead the new movement against the warped national polity. This is malicious, undignifying, spurious, a drooling mechanical twaddle bound for literary garbage.

“Of course Obasanjo, like all of us, is not perfect. But he is a courageous man, a superlative patriot who contends with any errant power with thorough sincerity, with masterful resolve to rectify the observable wrongs.

“Soyinka has now eroded his once sterling heights of great crusader and crashed his status to a Lilliputian pamphleteer, angry at the world, pouring venom everywhere without tactical purity.”

The YCF remarked that it had now resolved to take on Soyinka “with balanced intellectual vigour wherever he erupts again in his crude vitriol against Obasanjo. Enough is enough.”