Professor Soyinka is a giant amongst men, he is not only erudite he is also a Patriot. hence it is not an easy task to fault him. However, fault him i will... The problem with Nigeria is not an intellectual problem, you do not need anything above average intelligence to see the root causes and posit solutions to it. There is no need for lofty speeches and intellectual debates. Hence his analysis is lost on most of us. He has posited the following: 1. Intellectual blindness 2 Ethic blindness 3. Corruption for all those that decide to vote GEJ against Buhari i suppose... I will start from the top. Im not sure what is meant by intellectual blindness, it sounds so much more like an oxymoron than anything, its either you see or not, sight is a function of knowledge/ understanding and not a function of intellect, intellect is defined as the ability or capacity for knowledge, hence it is a function of intelligence, which is also a function of a persons capacity to reason/ think. We have our fair share of intelligentsia in this country and voting GEJ or not has nothing to do with average or below average intelligence. Prof should go and speak to the man on the street in Lagos or Aba about the voting patterns next year and he will be shocked at the insights that laymen share at market squares.... Ethnicity is the major problem of Nigeria, and its most pronounced in the North and Eastern parts of this nation (apologies to minorities for the wazobia treatment, its entirely for brevity sake). The Average Yoruba man is not as ethnocentric (varies in degrees) as the average Fulani, Igbo or Ijaw, hence you will find out that it is only the Yorubas that will work full-heartedly with the Hausa/ Fulani or Ijaw/ Urobo man (this is not in anyway suggesting that the Yoruba man is superior to any of these tribes per this measure o). Ethnicity is Nigeria i posit, is therefore, not a function of enlightenment but that of communal preservation; Kith and Kin. Trust has not yet been earned across tribal boundaries, our dark colonel past, the burden/fear of the subsisting Fulani/ Hausa hegemony and subsequent civil war is still very fresh in our hearts. It will not dissipate in 3 decades, neither will it dissipate by rousing speeches and intellectual arguments. We do not trust each other! Prof, no amount of English will change this, we know we do not trust or better still, really care for anyone that cannot speak our mother tongue, yet we pretend as if our individual experiences is a sum of our collective memory as a Nation. i.e. just because most of my best friends are Igbo, does not translate that at the National Level Igbo leaders and Yoruba leaders can eat from the same plate (case in point Ojukwu in Aburi did not eat that food). So lets stop wasting time with all these analysis. We must build Institutions Who will help build these institutions, right now we are dealing with a few not so good men. GEJ, GMB, Atiku. We are in-between a rock and a hard place, those that are touting Buhari as the messiah to eradicate corruption, may be correct to the extent to which they prefer dictatorship to democratic institutions. There is however a huge difference in my estimation. The intellectual argument however for Buhari should not be for his messianic tendencies but should be about his messianic tendencies. Buhari is a fundamentalist and an Islamist. Those two traits are ingredients for chaos. For Sharia adherents he is a savior, for anti-sharia Nigerians he is terror personified. Read in-between the following lines: It is on record that in April 2002, preparatory to the 2003 presidential elections, General Buhari urged that Muslims should vote only for Muslims. His statement, which targeted at the very heart of our unity as a nation also sought to promote our nation’s religious fault line as a basis for electing a President. A stunned nation watched General Buhari flag off his campaign in 2011 in Kaduna with the pen logo of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) held like a spear in his hands and during which he told his supporters to use it (pen) to pluck out the eyes of anybody that tampers with their votes. As if unmoved by the consequences of his utterances in 2011, General Buhari on May 14, 2012, invoked imagery of bloodshed ahead of 2015 elections while addressing members of his defunct CPC who visited him in Kaduna when he said “If what happened in 2011 (alleged rigging) should happen again in 2015, by the grace of God, the dog and the baboon would be soaked in blood. Lets stop speaking from both sides of the mouth, please go and look at the voting patterns from the 2011 elections. All the twelve Northern States (largely Muslim) voted Buhari! all the of the remaining 25 states (Middle belt, South - largely Christian) voted GEJ only Osun voted differently, voting for Ribadu. Only a Yoruba state can be that detribalised! However if Prof Soyinka thinks that his detribalised APC will vote a Christian President then he must be getting senile.....Northern Muslims will not even vote, if there is no Muslim Candidacy in the 2015 elections, so it is so innane for us to start preaching that Southerners or Christians should be detribalised! They will never vote for you, but you should vote for them under the excuse of intellectual superiority and detribalisation, That is plain and utter bullcrap!....its downright wrong, evil and the height of hypocrisy!!!!!!
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 16:21:49 +0000
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