By Denrele Animasun
Professor Soyinka, world renowned playwright and Nobel laureate, has had it with disrespectful Nigerians especially Internet trolls who hide behind their screen and spout out hatred and abuse.

The last time I look, it’s a free country and everyone has the right to express themselves anyway which way. Having said that, it is important to know that with freedom comes responsibility.

The professor has the right to express himself like all the trolls that called the good professor names and land unmentionables. So where do we draw the line? What are the boundaries to which we draw the line when expressing our opinion. If the professor wants to tear up his green card and Like he said: “not the business of any stupid Nigerian to open his or her mouth”  it’s his right whether he wants to leave the  United States, it is his prerogative and no one else.

It seems some people may feel resentment towards the professor because he has the privilege to free travel whenever and wherever he pleases. This privilege was deserved for a life time of body of work. Not many Nigerians have contributed to the literary world like Soyinka and Achebe.

Soyinka

These notable Nigerians have our respect for their contributions to literature and they have inspired many more Nigerians in the chosen field. The professor was taken out of context: it was about what he would do if Donald Trump became president of the United States. He said: “If in the unlikely event he does win, the first thing he’ll do is to say [that] all green-card holders must reapply to come back into the US. Well, I’m not waiting for that, the moment they announce his victory, I will cut my green card myself and start packing up.”

Of course, there were the scrum  who wants to hold the professor to his word and rendering the mischievous camp have bombarded with the request to fulfil his promise . Honestly, it is just a storm in the teapot.  It is in good taste to harangue an old man to his utterances.  It is actually not about Soyinka but we should look to those who feel it is all right to bully an old man to fulfil his promise which is really no business of anyone but his.

He did say that he torn his green card, but it is clear that he is irritated by the verbal digs from different quarters: “noisome creatures” whose problem he said was “ignorance”. Furthermore he said: “If I decide that I want to leave the United States and I want to leave it in a particular way, that’s my business,” he said.It’s not the business of the Internet; I don’t know what the excitation is all about. As the saying goes, why do Nigerians wail louder than the bereaved? What is your business?

“What is the business of any stupid Nigerian to open his or her mouth to challenge my right to say I am leaving? Did you get the green card for me? Do I eat in your house? The arrogance of some Nigerians is overwhelming. I don’t interfere with you, why would you interfere with me?

“One had the impudence to write that he needs a video to reassure him that it’s been done. Video? Are you mad? I don’t know you, I don’t respect you. Do you think I am here to entertain you? They want cheap thrill.” The affront of some people.Where has our decency gone and where do we draw the line.  The prof has paid his dues and he has earned his stripes to jolly well do what he wants.

The level of disrespect has moved him to consider moving his foundation from Nigeria.

“I am going to move the residency operated by my foundation out of this country, I have already begun to make arrangements. It is my property, I can do what I like with it,” he said.

“Maybe I should not be exiting the United States, maybe it’s Nigeria I should be exiting from because how can the people on behalf of whom one have struggled for all one’s life can be so slavish in mentality as to start querying the right of their champion to free speech?”

I have read as much of the verbal garbage that some miscreants have shared and to be honest with you, it is better to ignore such people as they have never amounted to anything and would never archive the success of the likes of Soyinka, Achebe and the others.

How can people grow when they continue to throw away the proverbial baby with the bathwater? See below same topic from my archive:

From my archive

I am writing at a time in Nigeria, when there is more that should unite us than divide us. There are some of us that are hell-bent on espousing hatred -this was before the great man passed on October 21, 2012. ‘I have not bought my copy of the book so I cannot make any comment on its contents. What, I however, find disconcerting is: some people’s attitude to the fact, that Chinua Achebe had the gall to have an opinion and write it in a book! If people disagree, by all means say so. What I do find disturbing is, we   always go off the boil and go as far as insulting his character, his literary   integrity and his tribe in one quick swoop.  This is not an isolated case, it seems that is the given that one tribe is pit against another tribe in this fashion.

I don’t know about you, but it is very disrespectful, discourteous, it shows bad upbringing and dismissive in the way they react to people who may have a different view from theirs. This is not the first book written about the war and will not be the last; some good, some not so good and a few written by non – Nigerians! At least this is written from a first person account and a Nigerian too.

Chinua Achebe put it so well when he said: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter”. That is exactly what he did and he was pilloried for that! Therefore, by condemning a view because they disagree with it, they will ultimately close doors to the growth of a cohesive society and it seems they want to create a place where only Yes people can exist? Without giving my age away, I have heard horrifying and personal stories of the war, each gruesome than the next.

Though I was very young during the civil war, I remembered vividly the bombardments in Lagos. I have dear friends who lost their parents and their siblings. My father, a journalist, covered the war and he saw and wrote about the causalities of the civil war on both sides. The war is what we have not talked about; it has prevented us from moving forward. We have consigned it to folklore and use it to whip up hatred and division and we now feed this hatred to those who were not present to see what it did to the nation and its people.

For those who experienced it, they have the memory seared in their souls. They cannot forget, nor have they even forgiven each other for the tragedy either.  This is one of the reasons they fight, argue and create mayhem but always stop at the threat of another civil war. It is the trauma that still exists in the fibre of the nation. If anything,  Chinua  Achebe  has  rightly  or  wrongly  made people talk  of  the  civil war and yet the wounds remains  still  raw. Let us be open and be honest to have an open discussion and look for a way forward. Sadly, these Nigerians always revert to form when someone cast a whim of tribal, political or religious aspersions or a mere mention of what they find offensive to their sensitivities.

These people are quick to throw away the proverbial baby with the bathwater. This does not make room for growth, in fact, it’s the height of intolerance and regression.

When people fail to reason, their fear is then nurtured into hate and then it is difficult to reason with unreasonable people.  There needs to be an open dialogue to solve this self-hatred, as no one will make breakthrough until we address what plagues some people to behave in such manner and help everyone move forward.

There is a lot of manipulations by the powerful and the wealthy to pit ordinary people against one another, this stops the ordinary Nigerian from seeing what is actually going on: high youth unemployment, grinding poverty, substandard education and lack of opportunities for working age adults, inadequate and expensive health facilities, bribery and corruption, poor transport and   deteriorating and archaic institutional facilities. How can people not understand that growth only occurs when one can think rationally for oneself?

Too many Nigerians are taken in by hatred and intolerance and they turn on people, they do not agree with and will stick by those who are wrong simply because of their affinity with them. A  bit  of decorum  is   needed  please, so  we   do  not  lose  the  essence  of  the  event. The War happened and a lot of   people suffered and died. The   rule of   engagement differs in time of war than in time of peace.  Remember that. We need a degree of intelligence to process the faulty logic of refusing other people’s viewpoint and only entertaining those that agree with our own viewpoint.

What is needed is for people to show a level of humility and to admit that sometimes they are not always right. And in order to grow, they have to entertain other people’s view without necessarily taken everything as gospel. Nigeria and Nigerians need to show more empathy and compassionate to cleanse some of the ills that plague the country and the people. This is everyone’s responsibility and it is a shared responsibility.