The Yoruba Question II: Ole Soyinka

By Daily Sun, Tribune | Published 4 Feb 2009

According to Alfred Adler, to understand yourself or another person, close your ears to what is said and watch ONLY what is done or not done because what a person does or refuses to do is his real understanding and intention. In other words, watch the actions and not the tongue, because people’s words are often inconsistent with their actions.

This Yoruba Ole Soyinka of a man has his ways with words. We must give him some credit for this ability, especially since the rest of the literary world did recognize the man’s ability to command the words of the Queen of England.

But we must also note that this same Yoruba buffoon has been chopping grammar and churning out Queen’s words before most of the 60 million unemployed Nigerian youths were born.  Therefore if Queen’s words and syntax could employ the Nigerian youths, no single Nigerian youth would be out of work today since they are blessed with the presence of Ole Soyinka.

Unfortunately, (and this is where Adler and I agree with Obasanjo), words without works mean nothing when words have nothing to do with actions and intentions and results. If words alone could fight corruption or provide healthcare or electricity or peace and justice for the suffering masses in his Yoruba Kingdom of Animals, Ole Soyinka would be right in his fighting words because he started spewing the same fighting words before I was born. But the more he spews his words, the worse things degenerate into the Stone Age in his Ekiti and Ogun and Oyo.

When Terrorist Nuhu Ribadu was removed from the EFCC, the same Ole Doctor spewed his fighting words and called for Ribadu’s reinstatement. Gani, Abati, and all the Yoruba Gods and Governors joined him in calling against the perceived injustice done to Ribadu. Every Yoruba Internet warrior in UK and USA also joined the Yoruba Ole Doctor in crying out loud for Ribadu.

If their intention was clean and pure, if their actions matched their fighting words, if they were not fighting for the protection of their sage in Olusegun Obasanjo, how then does one explain why the ancient injustice done to Nigeria in June 12, 1993 is more important than the recent but horrendous injustices done to Oyo or Ekiti or to the families of Dr. Daramola, Bola Ige, Funso Williams, and Tunji Omojola? The injustice done by Babaginda in 1993 must have caused these other most recent Yoruba crimes on Yoruba families. Or shall we say that these other recent unspeakable injustices in Yoruba Land by Yoruba people are excluded from injustice anywhere.

The Yoruba animal is not “interested in hindsight”, but he must keep reminding the rest of   the world about the event of June 12, 1993 as if the Yoruba parasites did no have their chance to prove their leadership worth after 1993. He is not a prophet either, but he knows well that the future of me and you was not short-changed by Yoruba anarchy from 1999 to 2007.

You see, Babangida was evil, but the evils done by Adedibu and Obasanjo were less evil and do not count because they happened with his support and words and intentions and actions. As suggested by Abati, if Babangida apologizes, and if Obasanjo also apologizes, we can then change our chameleon colors and murderous ways and become a happy family in the form of a nation state as defined and envisioned by these Yoruba animals.

The problem with people like Ole Soyinka is the same problem I see with Peter Fayose and Warlords Olusegun Obasanjo and Oluwole Rotimi and every other Yoruba infant. They desire one Nigeria because they are too dependent on public funds, on the blood of the children of the Niger Delta which they suck like helpless parasites.

Therefore when you hear these people speak their Queen’s words, ignore them and focus on their history of lies and deceptions and bloods. Until others learn to suck their blood as they suck it to others, nothing will change because the hosts of the parasites got more to lose in this parasitic relationship.

Until they end their conscious and calculated attempts to shield and defend Obasanjo, Adedibu, Fayose, Gbenga Daniel, Akala, Ajibola, and other numerous Yoruba geriatric devils and murderers, ignore their words and watch their actions. Until then, the Yoruba people are only interested in the innocent bloods of their hosts.

~~ The Editor

---

How IBB robbed Nigeria of nationhood –Soyinka
By Daily Sun
March 4, 2009

Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka has painted a vivid scenario of how the former President Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida robbed Nigeria the golden opportunity to attain nationhood through the annulment of the presidential election of June 12, 1993 won by the late M. K. O. Abiola.

Soyinka, who was delivering a lecture, entitled, “Between Nationhood and Nation Space,” as part of the late Obafemi Awolowo Centenary activities at the Nigeria Institute of International Affairs, Kofo Abayomi, Lagos on Tuesday regretted that one of the ways a country could attain the much-needed nationhood was allowed to slip away.

His words: “Sometimes there are events, even of a fortuitous nature, such as a concerted resistance to external aggression and domination, that can forge such organic bonds of common identity, survival and internal consolidation, that the nation space becomes, virtually overnight, a nation.

“An election, in very special circumstance, can prove such a catalyzing agent. On June 12, 1993, this nation space did have a chance to claim the beginnings of nation-being. Would we have emerged effectively as a nation? I am no prophet and have no interest in hindsight.  I insist, however, that the nation claim did stand a chance of embarking on the route to affirmation.

“A democratic election, let me repeat again and again,  is only one of the several means – as witnessed in the very special case of post-apartheid South Africa. Most nations we know of on this continent cannot even boast of one defining moment, a moment when the possibility of nation actualization was handed to them. Our chance came to us on June 12 1993, and we blew it,” Soyinka lamented.

While exonerating other Nigerians from the sad episode that has caused the country undeserved setback, the concerned Nobel Laureate put the blame squarely on the door steps of Babangida and some of his co-travellers, saying he did not believe in undeserved guilt.

Hear him: “No. I do not believe in undeserved guilt. The insincerity, indeed hypocritical, double-talk and matching conduct of a handful of individuals, their abuse of the trust of the people, scattered the hopes of that moment of nation-becoming!”

Going down the memory lane, Soyinka recalled how a winner emerged after an election that was universally adjudged the freest in the annal of Nigeria and how somebody annulled it under a flimsy and unacceptable excuse.

“A candidate – may I please remind you? – won a mandate across the national landscape, unambiguously defeating his opponent. That contest was universally adjudged to be impeccably fair.

“The aspirant to the mantle of state subdued his opponent even in that opponent’s most intimate constituency – his local ward. Now let anyone tell me that this did not resound like the starting-pistol of a nation race, a marathon of course, not a sprint, but a leap forward from the starting-block after so many false starts, several of them deliberately planned and cynically executed.

“The overseer of that debacle, General Ibrahim Babangida, then embodiment of the state, has finally opened up and conceded the undeniable – that election was true, and a victor emerged. History has taken note of his confessions and History sits in judgment, no matter what excuses are invoked by him. (But)  None is acceptable, least of all the totally incongruous plea that, as the then Head of State, he feared that, that nation enterprise would be aborted by a military coup. I find that plea an afterthought, and unconscionable.

His loss of nerve - if that is what it was indeed – constituted a gross act of governance dereliction at a crucial moment. There were consequences. There were casualties. Homes and businesses were destroyed. (And) Nigerians perished.”

To Soyinka, other leaders, who came after Babangida also did not help matters just as he also blamed religion for making attainment of nationhood a mirage.

He spoke further: “Given recent events,  I cannot end without mentioning, albeit briefly, the increasing reactionary role of the religious factor. Religion is one enemy of anyone who aspires to dictatorship in secular matters, we can call ourselves a nation.  A theocratic order is anathema to nation-being, since it implicates exclusion, not inclusion.

“Only the secular order embraces all.  To Religion all its deserving – spaces of privacy, protection, and cultural identity. Any religious following can evoke parallel but opposing sets of protocols, citing the authority of some unseen and unknowable god in realms that have no perceptible contact with the actual.

“Religion must therefore submit to community, to nation, otherwise co-existence becomes impossible and the human entity reverts to a state of brutishness.”

The Nobel Laureate, therefore concluded thus: “And thus, finally, the question: is Nigeria a nation today? My answer is - Not yet.  Is Nigeria aspiring to be a nation? The answer - Unsure. Can it?  Possibly.  Should it?  My answer to that is absolutely non-sentimental, purely technical and subjective. 

“I prefer not to have to apply for yet another visa when I need to travel to Enugu or Borno.

If it is any consolation – let us simply remember – we are not alone in this predicament. So, for now, we may continue to sleep, dream, open our eyes at dawn on the recurring vision of nationhood on the horizon, hopefully not receding, indeed, almost close to touch, requiring only the complete surrender of hegemonic dreams, the ethos of inclusivity, the recognition of religious privacy, community primacy, and the manifested will of the authentic landowners of – a designated nation space.”

========================================================

Your Knowledge Is Useless, OBJ Tells Ekiti Elite
By Adeolu Adeyemo, Ado-Ekiti
11 November 2006
Nigerian Tribune

President Olusegun Obasanjo, yesterday, hit hard at the indigenes of Ekiti State, saying there was poverty in the state largely because they could not use their knowledge acquired through education, to develop the state.

The president said he was dissappointed that the people reffered to themselves as the “Fountain of Knowledge” when they have refused to employ that knowledge for their advancement.

Obasanjo argued that “knowledge that cannot be used to get what you want and to reject what you don’t want is useless” and he charge them to rise up and utilise their knowledge for the development of their state.

”You should do self re-examination and stop blaming your poverty on anybody and what is expected of you now is to look inwards and see where you can generate income for yourselves.

”Not until when the people of the state and Nigerians in general can think on what they can do to sell to other nations that would generate income for them, the issue of development would remain a mirage,”  the president said.

The president who attributed the poverty and backwardness of African countries and, indeed Nigeria, to the inability of the people to do the right thing at the right time, pointed out all these in his reaction to the address of the state administrator, Brig. Gen. Tunji Olurin on the poverty in the state.

Earlier, Olurin had told Obasanjo that there “is palpable poverty in Ekiti State and the prognosis is not particularly exciting because of the lack of policy and practical initiatives for empo-werment and poverty eradication.”

He noted that in the whole of the state there is no single industry except the UAC Spring Watter Bottling Company at Ikogosi, adding that “farming for which the people are known has not developed above the primitive stage”.

The administrator pointed out that the youths who were largely unemployed had seen farming as synonymous with poverty and for that reason abandoned the farm whereas agriculture remained the most sustainable means of job creation and poverty eradication.

But, Obasanjo insisted that the people should look around their environment and exploit it for their own benefit. He further cited South Korea as an example of a country which was at par with Nigeria at independence but is now a generation ahead of us pointing out that the secret of their success was the ability to do the right thing at the right time.

Speaking on the moribund Ado-Ekiti Textile Mills, the president affirmed that it died because it was wrongly established, saying if the company had been established in an area close to its raw material, the company would have continued to be in operation.

He, however, said that any African country that got its bearing right and was doing the right thing in the best interest of its people, though initially might have to contend with opposition from the advanced countries, would eventually scale through the difficulties if it succeeded in what it had done.

The president appealed to Olurin to do a follow-up on the ongoing 132kva power station sited in the state if he wanted the power supply to be completed during his short tenure and charged people to cooperate with the administrator to achieve success during his tenure in the state.