Soyinka, in a statement on
Wednesday, said he had not seen the final presentation of a BBC feature
programme on Health Awareness in which his 2014 experience with cancer
was
featured, but that he had been bombarded by narratives of the most disquieting
nature, distortions through either misreporting or media misconceptions of what
the BBC feature actually conveyed.
Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole
Soyinka has lamented distortions and media misconception of a BBC feature
programme in which his 2014 experience with cancer was featured.
“The first – and most
urgent – correction of course is to re-state that this is an ancient tale that
is firmly situated in the past tense. In other words, I have not been under any
cancer related condition for over five years. Indeed, it was in order to avoid
creating any such anxieties that I refrained from even revealing my own ordeal
until I had fully and successfully concluded treatment.
“I made the original
revelation in 2015, in support of the late Professor Femi Williams’ drive to
set up an Africa Cancer Centre in Nigeria. It did not fail to strike an
instructive chord that I had been a founding participant in that health
initiative, little suspecting at the time that I was already a carrier of the
enemy virus,” he said.
Soyinka said more
worrisome, was that some of the reportage suggested that he criticized
Nigerians for seeking treatment outside the country, which he described as
outright nonsense.
According to him, “those
who are able must seek health from wherever, including the outer planets, as
long as a nation fails to provide even the most rudimentary but effective and
sustainable health facilities for her own citizens. Indeed, I called it a shame
that a nation as resource endowed as Nigeria has failed in that fundamental
aspect, since it privileges just a few as against the totality.
“I lamented a situation
where a nation’s president leaves his station again and again for weeks on end
to seek treatment outside his nation, while the health system over which he
presides steadily collapses around him.
“I repeat: I have yet to
see the programme, but perhaps I should start thinking of my next collaboration
with the BBC or any other public awareness outreach, this time, around the
urgent theme of a different form of cancerous affliction: the cancer of
illiteracy!”
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