Soyinka backs Obama in Ghana, scolds Nigeria, Kenya
By Bayo Ohu
NOBEL Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has justified the United States President Barack Obama's decision to choose Ghana as his first touch-down on Black African soil, saying that the American leader did well to shun visiting Kenya, his father's country of birth and Nigeria, a self-acclaimed giant of the continent, since both nations have distinguished themselves in everything that has to do with corruption and bad governance.
Soyinka, in an article titled "Obama's choice", said the U.S. leader's astuteness, one that dictated the strategy of a political campaign that catapulted him to victory from the underdog position, should have informed the 'patriotic' cheerleaders of Africa's mis-governance that they can expect no preferential consideration from the 44th American president.
He said although a decade ago, Accra would also have been a non-contender for Obama's maiden visit to Africa, "but the continent has witnessed, and remains envious of, the transformation that has taken place in Ghana, an internal process of self-recovery that nearly matches that of the United States in her transition from George Bush to Barack Obama."
Soyinka, in whose honour a birthday lecture is being held in Lagos today, stated that although blood may be thicker than water, Obama's gesture was intended to inform nations like Kenya and Nigeria that neither blood nor oil is thicker than equity.
He said: "How else it is possible for Nigerian politicians to conceive that a leader like Barack Obama, who has ascended to power through a respect for the manifested will of a people, would actually lend his presence to dignify any state that demonstrably rejects, indeed actively ridicules, the very means that brought him to power?"
Defending his refusal to visit Nairobi, the Nobel Laureate noted that Obama's election took place after one of the most devastating riots ever witnessed in Kenya that lasted weeks in which entire townships and hundreds of lives were destroyed. All this, he added, was as a result of the denial of a people's right to choose their own leader through the ballot box.
"Kenya nonetheless made a claim on Obama as the logical spot for his first presidential touch-down on Black African soil and it should have been an occasion to be celebrated in festive accents as the return of the native son. And if sentiment indeed weighed more on the scale of entitlements than humanity itself, the Kenyan claim would be universally unassailable," he said.
Soyinka remarked although Nigeria has not witnessed an uprising on a scale like Kenya's in the past few decades, yet "Nigeria cannot be ranked, needless to say, any higher on the democratic scale than Kenya, even though electoral robbery did not result in such mayhem, any more than it has led to a protracted Civil War that devastated the Ivory Coast in recent times."
He went on: "Nonetheless it is important to remind ourselves that the Biafran War of Secession that began in 1966 did not lack for flammable tributaries from accumulated electoral injustices. Memories of that war, and the fear of an even more nation-destabilizing repeat have contributed to the seeming accommodativeness of the Nigerian people towards a now deeply entrenched project of national disenfranchisement.
"Only the complacent however dare eliminate possibilities of an eventual explosion from the suppressed rage that stems from civic dispossession, and the air of impunity that surrounds the incorrigible perpetrators. Indeed, this inevitability is seen by many - both insiders and outside observers - as only a matter of time. Since the debilitation of civil society through decades of military rule, Nigerians freely use the expression 'internal colonialism' as the readiest expression of the continuing suppression of popular will, an orchestrated democratic denial that operates in relay, and is sustained by a select hegemony resolved to remain in perpetual control of the nation".
The unproductive cabal, he regretted, has become increasingly arrogant and contemptuous in its dismissal of even a pragmatic semblance of a gesture towards fair dealing that sometimes salves the pride and dignity of a people.
Soyinka expressed sadness at the lack of objective self-assessment within the ruling circles of Nigeria and Kenya, saying: "It evokes pity for the continent as a whole, that such political leadership exists today which, sooner than retire into their gilded holes to reflect, have actually gone to battle on behalf over some mystic entitlement, since such is not sustained by any credentials in democratic and responsible governance."
On politicians who have expressed resentment and indignation at Obama's symbolic boycott of Nigeria, Soyinka said such leaders were lost to the irony of laying claim to recognition by a product of electoral equity, an African-American who came to power in a once openly racist nation through the ballot box.
"Such complainants are not stupid however, they are merely actors in a script of diabolical cynicism," he affirmed.
He wrote further: "Of the two, the case of our own nation, Nigeria, is obviously the more pathetic. A plague of incontinent rulers in relay, some in military uniform, others in civilian clothing, but all clones of one another, united in a commitment to unabashed profligacy, mutually assisted corruption and, to add insult to injury, an obsessive hankering for self-perpetuation, necessitating the
cultivation of outright disdain for the elementary right of their citizens to a voice in leadership choice.
"Is this truly a nation that deserves the recognition, much less a gesture of respect, from any democratically elected leadership of the world, and one especially of such unprecedented political significance for the African continent itself?"
Soyinka said if it were possible for Obama to visit Nigerians to express his condolences for such an unmerited state of affairs, parley with non-governmental organizations, exchange views with political alternatives, interact with the labour unions, hold talks with the insurgents of the oil-producing Niger Delta region and offer direct succour to the neglected people of a benighted nation, Nigeria would have been his first choice.
To Soyinka, such a precedent being impossible, at least in these times - the only programme that remained would have been, at best, a "tokenist interaction with the other Nigeria, duly vetted."
The rest, he added, "would be to wine and dine, sign some effete agreements and exchange presents with the current symbol of national decay and leadership alienation, a nation whose claim to the status of a giant is upheld only by the gigantesque dimensions of its retrogression since independence, its governance ineptness and the colossal scale of its corruption.
"Obama knows that every other hand he would shake at a state reception is steeped in sheer putrefaction from the sump of robbery, perhaps every third elbow deep in the blood of perceived political threats - across all levels of contestation."
