Lasun Alagbe
Decades after the Nobel laureate, Prof. Wore Soyinka, described his generation as a wasted one, he has, again, said the generation is a failure.
In an interview with the BBC on Tuesday, he also described the last election in Nigeria as the most depressing.
When he was asked by the anchor, Zeinab Badawi, “Has your generation of older Nigerians failed the people?”, the Nobel laureate said:
“Yes, I believe so. I compare today with dreams and aspirations we had when we all rushed home after studies abroad. We considered ourselves the renaissance people that were going to lift the continent to world standards, competitors anywhere. It hasn’t happened.
“The 2019 election is one of the most depressing elections we’ve been through. Talking for myself, it wasn’t possible for me to make a choice for the simple reason that both candidates (President Muhammadu Buhari and Atiku Abubakar) had histories – one immediate, one past – which made one look for alternatives.”
Although Soyinka eventually gave Buhari a nod in 2015, he did so only after not been able to find a better alternative between him and Goodluck Jonathan.
He has since been criticizing Buhari over some actions and inactions of his government, including the handling of the violence perpetuated by herdsmen.
He is, however, not new to such political activism.
Soyinka has been a strong critic of successive Nigerian governments, especially the country’s many military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe.
Much of his writing has been concerned with “the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it”
During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria on a motorcycle via the “NADECO Route.” Abacha later proclaimed a death sentence against him “in absentia.” With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation.
As his intimidating profile reveals, he took an active role in Nigeria’s political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain.
In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years.
