By Khaled Maiwada Abdulsalam.
Professor of ‘twinkle twinkle little star’, Mr. Wole Soyinka has spoken urging Nigerians against voting General Muhammadu Buhari, the APC presidential aspirant, and instead, enjoins Nigerians to vote for President Jonathan Goodluck for opaque reasons that did not even convince him, himself. But that is not what really matters as of now because even a professor ‘shinning shinning rounded moon’ has the inalienable constitutional democratic right to choose and vote for his candidate of choice along with the right to also lobby in favour of anyone although he has only one vote to cast, and so can cast it wherever way he likes to. But the crux of the matter is do we take this man and his campaign against the peoples’ General seriously because he is called a professor and the first black African to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize? In the first place do you know why the Europeans gave him the Nobel Peace Prize?
The man was awarded that Nobel Prize despite the fact that he has record of use of threat of violence for example’’ In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections’’ and also ‘’Following the military coup of January 1966, he secretly and unofficially met with the military governor Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in the Southeastern town of Enugu (August 1967), ostensibly to try’’ to avert civil war’’ but in reality to encourage Ojukwu’s recalcitrance, through the promise that if the East seceded, the West too going to do the same, and that was responsible for giving the rebel leader the confidence to go into war with his father land which resulted in millions of needless deaths, indescribable misery and suffering including destruction of property worth billions of Naira. ‘’As a result, he had to go into hiding. 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’’ as a security risk.
To encourage the above types of violent scenarios leading to brutal and tragic wars and pestilence all over Africa and also to glamorize and encourage the naïve Africans into the pursuit of knowledge in non productive academic careers such as poetry and playwright which are not actually relevant to our quest for development in today’s digital world, the Europeans cleverly decided to award him with the Nobel so-called Peace Prize, because if anything means peace it is not Wole Soyinka. Another reason for that Nobel Prize again is to further fool the poor black Africans in to pursuance of courses in those areas completely irrelevant other than romanticism so as waste our precious time away, reciting such foolish childish archaic irrelevant sentimental songs as ‘twinkle twinkle little star ‘in place of modern Science and Technology which the West and of late the East have adopted as their academic mantra.
The white man’s aim is to perpetually make Africa remains an underdeveloped land and as backward as it is today so that industrialisation will not pollute it. Its people should remain ‘The wretched of the earth’ and what is the best way for the Europeans to do that is by bringing to limelight, mystifying and glamorising unproductive elements like Wole Soyinka, who eat freely from the sweat of the hapless Nigerian and African peasants, who eat more than they contribute. The truth is that Africa has long been designed to remain a virgin land for the future use of the Europeans when they finally achieve their aim of reducing the world’s population to 500 million through creating and promoting these types of elitist/ academic area boyism to facilitate some of the ways of achieving that long term plan.
Mr Wole Soyinka feels that his word can carry some weight but nothing can be further from the truth. I assure you that even the inebriated members of his creation the, the Pyrates confraternity secret society and cult, including their offshoots the Kegites and palm drunkard cults, in their moments of sobriety, and soberliness and serenity be most unlikely to take him seriously, what with his usual demagogy and arts of speaking from both sides of his mouth.
Recall this gentleman ,a connoisseur of European wines, out of many of his demeaning uncharitable descriptions of the Jonathan couple further gave Dame Patience Goodluck Jonathan the unkindest of all monikers ever to be given to any first lady in the world by nicknaming the poor woman ‘HIPPOPOTAMUS’. And today he is about the town running from pillar to post praising his ‘HIPPO’ and promoting the HIPPO’s husband as the best thing that ever happened to political administration in Nigeria and embellishing the Jonathans integrity while working very hard to run down the acceptability based on untainted integrity of the popular General Buhari.
Coming to his constituency, the academic world and even in the literary genre and raw intellectualism, is Mr Soyinka anywhere near such academic giants like professor Claude Ake, Dr. Yusuf Bala Usman, Cyprian Ekwensi ,Elechi Amadi, Jibrin Ibrahim, Mohammed Haruna, Adamu Adamu not to talk of the other greater intellectual colossus like Chinua Achebe, Chike Obi, Ayodele Awojobi and myself here, Comrade-General, Ordinary Khaled Maiwada Abdulsalam?
Let me ask the question, who introduced cultism into the Nigerian universities’ extracurricular activities if not Prof. Wole Soyinka himself? He glorified alcoholism and violence as fashionable behaviour among the innocent, impressionable minds of young university undergraduates with all the resulting attendance negative consequences on peace and learning in the university campuses? How many chaps graduated from this deviance of palm wine drunkard clubbing, pyrates and kegytes to rapists, murderers, armed robbers, kidnappers, violent drug addicts, drop outs and so on? How many parents’ hearts were broken whose wards instead of graduating as sociologists, engineers, doctors, lawyers etc and who are expected to learn useful subjects and contribute in building and developing the society through helping themselves and their families were instead and regrettably turned out to be the scum of the society and Frankenstein monsters?. Yet to fool you poor blacks, this Man was rewarded by the so called Albert Nobel Peace Prize. Peace Prize indeed!
While debating which of numerous Nigerian languages was to be to used as a lingua franca, this same old fellow vehemently suggested Nigeria should go as far as East Africa, into the Masai game reserve, to adopt Swahili in place of any of the Nigerian native languages having sensed that his own mother tongue was most unlikely to be chosen as one. The most likely language to use is from an area and spoken by people he hold in eternal contempt. He vehemently resisted the choice of any Nigerian language despite our being blessed with over 350 native tongues in the country. So what he cannot get then let no one get it, in the manner of the dog in the manger.
This old grand demagogue after excessive attacks and condemnations of General Ibrahim Babangida’s regime in the mid 1980s and having suffered great penury and lack of cash to purchase his usually expensive European wines, leaving his disciples to gobbled the corrosive palm wine, for which he is famous as an expert connoisseur, as a result of SAP and other austerity measures introduced by that regime, he finally got settled, by the great Maradonna of Nigerian military politics. General Ibrahim Babangida, who believed and rightly so, that all these so called radicals and vocal pseudo obscurantist left wing intellectuals are but cheap opportunists.
Therefore the canny General realised that each of them has his own price and so he wisely settled for paying them the price. Even the wine consuming connoisseur Soyinka of the famous ‘’the Man died’’ book that is more famous for its hysteria than contents has his own price and indeed he came very cheap. So instead of adopting time wasting and unpopular repressive measures against for his opposition to his regime, General Babangida decided to settle each and every one of these professors with his own price and that is with government posts ‘’to chop’’ or was it to ‘’shop’’ and so our dear radical Soyinka was rewarded or settled with the task of establishing and heading the new Federal Road Safety Corps to help reduce road traffic accidents by the corps members who usually line the pot holed unmaintained damaged roads waving their hands up and to indicate that the bemused drivers slow down on their speed. The corps officers later graduated to checking particulars and seat belt. In Nigeria everyone knows the meaning of ‘’show me your particulars’’
So when the ‘radical’ Mr. Soyinka got the appointment, he without even exhibiting some little ‘’shakara’’ in form of the expected feign reluctance, rather rushed and accepted to serve the military dictator that he was earlier very furious in condemning. To the surprised of the masses and his anti dictatorship followers and democrats, he quickly jumped at the cheap offer and accepted it with gratitude. Body no be wood woooh, so they say. He therefore chose to dine with the devil, yes the self acclaimed evil genius. He even ate without caution of using a long spoon but with his bare fingers . Many of us from the intellectual world and those a little to the left were shocked but of course not surprised. We saw first that 95% of the corps staff members he recruited were all from his own village kinsmen as mark of his being a true nationalist and a patriot who believes in national unity.
Why should a whole potential Nobel Laureate then and a professor even be assigned road safety work which VIOs, traffic wardens aka YELLOW FEVER and Police MTDs could handle effectively? Why not any other post that could be more productive especially at the time when the country was melting economically from which it has never recovered till date except getting worst by the day? Look at devaluation of the national currency, the Naira, look at the closure of industries, followed destruction of all the good and functioning infrastructures and service sectors that the General inherited from his predecessors, including critical infrastructures such as NEPA, RAILWAYS, NITEL, AIRWAYS,SHIPPING LINE, AJAOKUTA AND OTHER STEEL ROLLING MILLS, TEXTILES AND GARMENTS INDUSTRIES, HOSPITALS, UNIVERSITIES, POLYTECHNICS AND RESEARCH INSTITUTES,AGRICULTURE, RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND RIVER BASINS,THE ARMED FORCES,POLICE, NIPOST ,PRISON SERVICES AND ALL OTHER INDICES OF CIVILIZATION including our old cherished religious, social and moral values. We all expected our noble professor to look into the decline and device means of stopping that rot and decline especially in view of our exploding population that was and is increasing geometrically while the diminishing resources of the nation are either being destroyed or stolen geometrically square or raised to two. With all these gone what is going to happen to our children daily graduating from different universities with degrees in various disciplines including degrees in ‘’twinkle twinkle little star’’?
Where are they going to get employment to contribute their quota in national development and get self actualisation and fulfilment? What will happen to those families whose bread winners are earning their living from as employees in these sectors that were gradually being eroded through sham privatisation by the undertaker BPE? I live at Liverpool road Apapa, I recall a neighbour and an old professor who daily had to drive his old dilapidated 504 station wagon Peugeot car from Burma road to Seme Town, just after Badagry ferrying petty cross border traders as passengers to Cotonou Benin republic so that from the fare he generates he used to buy bread for his family’s breakfast before heading to the university where he taught. That was the time each family has eating time table from 011,to101 ,to 100 for breakfast lunch and dinner respectively.
While many lecturers were devising creative means of survival and majority car owners were driving their last cars in their lifetimes, our venerable professor was busy nursing beautiful spotless wine glasses and appearing on the pages of all manner of newspapers, magazines and TV screens at one ceremonial function or the other instead of handling chalk and being in the classroom with his students. He was busy dining with the devil while his colleagues like Prof Wilmot were illegally being deported for undue radicalism and teaching what they are not paid to teach. The Festus Iyayis, the Dr. Bala Usmans and many journalists whose conscience prevented them from being ‘settled’ where being dealt with in a manner akin to Genghis khan’s destruction of central Asian and Middle Eastern intellectual corps and all edifice of civilization.
All indices of civilisation were getting deleted by our puppet despotic leaders on the instruction of their foreign masters, the American CIA, BRITISH MI6 and MOSSAD, sometimes through the implementation of inhuman policies designed by foreign monopoly capital and third world mortuary undertakers , such as represented by the voodo wizards of the World Bank, Paris Club, Breton Woods institutions and other overseas economic magicians whose principal objectives and agenda as earlier mentioned was to retain and preserve Africa pure as their future unpolluted reservation fallow land area they hope to inherit after we might have died as a result of the present day degrading poverty, hunger, pestilence and mass massacres taking place all over the Sub-Saharan Africa. With all these catastrophe why should a giant ‘intellectual’ be assigned a traffic warden job? And why should he so eagerly accept this humiliating and humbling crumbs from the master’s table leaving out some more important areas of challenge that are more critical towards developing the nation?.
So let me quickly add that where true intellectuals gather Mr. Soyinka cannot dare go there, for no longer is his ACE, the meandering colonial era English regarded as fashionable in this internet age. The days of bamboozling and holding the people spellbound with comically entertaining words such as timber, calibre caterpillar ,penkelemesi, juggernaut, tisionsismcality are over please. in today’s dynamic intellectual world even academic bulldozers of the calibre of Claude Ake, Christopher Okigbo, Dr Yusuf Bala Usman, with due respect to the souls of the departed ones among them, and the dynamic changes the academic world is rapidly undergoing they can at best be good in the historical perspective but presently considered as analogue.
This our professor is better known on the pages of glitterati magazines’ colourful pages and patronising upper crust party where he is more at home with wine glass in his hand than a biro and paper, he is happier in front press cameras than in drama studios and language laboratory parroting out long archaic English words he memorised, in the ancient 1950s, from ‘Larcombes’ and ‘students’ companion’ books. Do you want to know why he does not like General Muhammadu Buhari, easily the most popular, trusted, patriotic, kind, gentle, brave, intelligent, loyal, tenacious and most respected living African, North and south of the Sahara and South and North of the Zambezi? The simple reason is only one. The same reason he did not commend any of the Nigerian native languages as he found all Nigerian languages not competent enough, not worthy enough to be our lingua franca: Resentment. Unreasonable resentment for that matter in which he which cannot accommodate anything or anyone from the wrong sides of the Niger and Benue.
This same professor Wole Soyinka who saw Swahili, an Afro Asiatic hybrid language as his preferred lingua franca for Nigeria but would rather in twist of irony and talking from both sides of the mouth castigate at every available opportunity, the late eminent African classroom scholar, professor Ali Mazrui, who is among the top world’s 100 intellectual, a scholar who not only taught at the University of Jos but had also gone round the whole of the town on foot and had made friends with many of the masses in the town irrespective of their social class or economic position. Is it not surprising that Mr. Soyinka through some racist undertones he despised the late professor as a hybrid Africa simply because the late professor is an East African from Mombasa Kenya a region that since the creation of Adam served as the meeting point and melting pot between peoples, cultures, languages and civilisations of Africa, Middle East and Asia?
Professor Wole Soyinka loves Swahili language more than any Nigerian language and likes Swahili to be adopted as Nigerian National language but hates the native Swahili people. He loves eating eggs but hates the chicken that lays the eggs. Can you make any sense out of this ambivalence? You see the colonialist have really set us up. They make us believe that the ability to speak the English language very fluently indicates high level of intelligence. It is a lie. All the emerging economies of East, South, South East Asia and Latin America that are fast developing do not care for the English language. They speak, study and learn in their native tongues and yet they are fast developing. They however study passing English as optional for the purpose of international trade or studies only and yet these countries have suffered longer and more devastating and plundering brutal colonialism for centuries and by not just only one imperial power but by many.
So put English language aside because speaking it excellently well is sign of retardation and diversion because even a parrot can memorize words and speak them out yet that is not sign of its high intellect. Intelligence should be seen more from the perspective of a people who are creative, proactive and introspective in all their affairs and that was what my parents and none English speaking community taught me in my traditional society as a child and in Hausa language these three expression closely resemble what we were taught then as KAN GADO,LISSAFI KAN ABIN DA ZAI JE, YADAWO and SANIN YAKAMATA. So I hope it is on these bases that our electorates should select either Buhari or Jonathan and not on the basis of someone else’s ambivalent eccentric orientations, verbosity or opportunistic tendencies deeply rooted in bigoted ethnocentrism.
