“Reports Obi came to see me for reconciliation, which was ineffective and distracting” – Wole Soyinka

Playwright Prof. Wole Soyinka has criticized media reports that Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s presidential candidate in the election of February 25, 2023, visited his home in Abeokuta, Ogun State on Sunday in an effort to mend fences as inappropriate and distracting.

Soyinka spoke in a statement on Monday titled, “A visitation, and the allure of “reconciliation. ’’ Obi in a tweet after the visit noted among other things that he cherished the Sunday visit which was intended to “erase the needless misconceptions about the relationship between the great icon and the Obidient family. ’’

The Nobel laureate had criticized the vice presidential candidate of the LP, Datti Baba-Ahmed, in April on Channels TV and later on Arise TV for trying to dictate to the Supreme Court during an interview about the election won by the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.

However, Soyinka and an ex-deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Kingsley Moghalu, were harassed online by the “Obidients,” as Obi’s supporters are known. In a tweet, Moghalu called Soyinka a phenomenon that “unlettered and uncultured people may not fully understand in an age of lazy social media where many don’t read or think deep.”

The Nobel laureate responded by stating that the seeds of impending fascism in the political sphere had clearly blossomed in two separate statements in April titled “Fascism on Course” and “Media Responsibility.”

The essayist responded to the reports of Obi’s visit by writing, “Before it gains traction and embarks on a life of its own, I wish to state clearly that the word “reconciliation,” inserted into some reports of Peter Obi’s visit to me on Sunday, May 7, is a most inappropriate, and diversionary invocation.

He added, “Let me clarify: I know the entity known as Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party. I can relate to him. I know and can relate to the Labour Party on whose platform he contested elections. There are simply no issues to reconcile between those two entities and myself. However, I do not know, and am unable to relate to something known as the “Obidient” or “Obidient Family.” Thus, albeit in a different vein, any notion of reconciliation, or even relations – positive, negative or indifferent – with such a spectral emanation is simply grasping at empty air.

“During that meeting, attended by two other individuals only, the word “reconciliation” was never bruited, neither in itself nor in any other form. It simply did not arise. By contrast, there were expressions of “burden of leadership,” “responsibility,” “apology,” “pleading,” “formal dissociation from the untenable,” all the way to the “tragic ascendancy of ethnic cleavage,” especially under such ironic, untenable circumstances.’’

The senior statesman added that the conversations were open and inventive, repeating that the idea of reconciliation was obviously irrelevant and never brought up.

Soyinka stated, “The following should be understood, but never underestimated. What remains ineradicable from that weekend of orgiastic rave in the social media was the opening up of the dark, putrid recesses in the national psyche that we like to pretend do not exist. It invited – into minds seeking a grasp on reality – gruesome variations on images from Dante’s Purgatorio. A fathomless pit was exposed, at the bottom of which one glimpsed a throng of the damned, writhing in competitive lust for the largest of the gangrenous ladles in a diabolical broth. To peek over the edge of that pit for a prolonged spell was to turn giddy, with a risk of falling into the tureen of inhuman pus. To attempt to navigate one’s way, however gingerly, along a mat spread across the infernal abyss, is an invitation to moral suicide.’’

According to him, he draws attention to writings he wrote on the subject of truth-based reconciliation and the moral necessity of reparation for the serious-minded.

The Nobel laureate said, “There will be further elaborations forthcoming in Democracy Primer III – Bookcraft’s Intervention series, now brought forward for publication on June 12, the watershed extorted from the current regime as the nation’s Democracy Day.’’

The American boxer Mohammed Ali’s rope-a-dope strategy, where blind menace was left flailing helplessly at the disdainful manifest of truth, was something he also approved of. He noted that if from this point on, he complied with entreaties from several valued, genuinely concerned directions and ignored new provocations, however vile, it was only because of that.