Professor Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate, has described
President Muhammadu Buhari as a different man from the
man he knew while the retired general was in the military
uniform on the Nigerian political landscape.
Soyinka said in his interview with Zero Tolerance, a periodic
publication by the Economic and Financial Crimes
Commission (EFCC), Buhari is the one who is ready to make
amends for his past mistakes.
The 1986 Nobel prize winner noted that the new president
has already paid some debts to the Nigerian society. He
further described the president as a lucky man.
He noted that although Buhari has not come out openly to
apologise for his wrong deeds in the past, he has
nonetheless accepted the fact that he had made some
mistakes.
“He (Buhari) has not pleaded for forgiveness for his past, if
he had done that, I might have been less ambiguous about
him. But I think from my findings about him, he is a born
again phenomenon. If I am wrong, well, too bad. Though I
don’t believe in ‘born-againism’ but I think this may be an
exception,” Soyinka said.
Meanwhile, the laureate also came down heavily on the
former president Goodluck Jonathan for trying to
differentiate between stealing and corruption, saying
Nigerians should have challenged him on that.
Soyinka, who is fondly called Kongi, also noted that it was
wrong for Jonathan to have taken such a position on the
serious issue like corruption, thereby playing down its
negative impact on the nation and its people.
He said: “The media should have challenged President
Jonathan to define what stealing is, when he said that
stealing is not corruption. How can a public figure, an
intelligent person like that, come out to tell the public that
corruption is not stealing? Then you should have asked him,
what then is corruption? The media should have challenged
him.”
The pioneer Federal Road Safety Commission chairman,
who is believed to have co-founded the Pyrates
Confraternity in Nigeria, said it was wrong to lump cultism
with confraternity, arguing that the two were not the same.
According to him, belonging to confraternities is a normal
culture in colleges and not an evil cult, as wrongly portrayed
by ignorant persons in Nigeria.
He said: “Everybody knows that fraternities are a normal
culture in all colleges. It exists in all colleges. President
Clinton was a member of a fraternity. In fact, anybody who
goes to college in the United States is a member of a college
fraternity. There is absolutely nothing evil or occultic about
fraternity.
“But here, the media is largely responsible for fuelling the
ignorance of society of the words ‘cultism’ and ‘fraternity’.
This is a disservice and I have said it again and again. There
are evil cults, whose members must prove themselves by
going to rape. There are others whose entry is to slash or
eat somebody or rob; it has nothing to do with college
fraternity.
“The media owes the responsibility to constantly tell the
public the truth. But they go on and children grow up,
believing that college fraternity is Satanic, demonic and this
is wrong.”
Meanwhile, Otunba Gbenga Daniel, a former governor of
Ogun state, has replied to allegations made by Professor
Wole Soyinka that as the governor, the former used the
police to illegally close down the state House of Assembly.
Gbenga Daniel was appointed by Goodluck Jonathan to be
his campaign manager and the Nobel laureate made
reference to it in the interview he granted Zero Tolerance
magazine, a publication of the Economic and Financial
Crime Commission. Soyinka castigated the former president
for appointing Daniel as his campaign manager, claiming
that Daniel used the mobile police to lock the state house of
assembly for a year.
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