By Rotimi Fasan

PETER Obi is in most part hardly different from most Nigerian politicians in terms of their capacity for mischief. Any careful student of his politics will see that he is something of a demagogue which aligns with the fascist tendencies of his obdurate supporters.

At a time, last week, when it seemed like the decibel of noises surrounding his audio leak and brief detention in the United Kingdom had cast a sobering spell on his Obidient base, that was when he chose to rouse the rabble in a direct address that praised their forbearance in the face of attacks by those he claimed are respected people that would otherwise be expected to speak in support of their misguided adventure to upturn the outcome of an election he clearly lost. 

As for Obi’s business deals, his failure to declare his assets before taking office as governor and the alleged corrupt use of state funds for personal family business, all Nigerians need to do is check the Pandora Papers that were released in 2021. They provide ample evidence of Obi’s immersion in the corrupt underbelly of Nigerian politics as opposed to his mostly evidence-free claims of electoral fraud in the 2023 elections.

Until he is able to prove his claims before the courts, they remain largely speculative propaganda. It is part of his lack of transparency and his supporters’ disrespect of facts that he who came third fancies himself as the winner of an election in which aside the structure provided by churches and his ethnic base, his party didn’t even have candidates in most states outside the South-East.

How could he have won in those non-Christian parts of the Northern states (which have most of the Northern votes), if his illusory claims can be overlooked in some South-West states? Isn’t this propaganda taken too far? How does the issuance of threats and cursing of opponents, as his Obidient supporters  are prone to, win elections? 

The campaigns are over and not being a member of any political party, much less a spokesperson of any of them, one may not have much reason rehashing his remarks or many of the holes people have identified in his frequently statistics-heavy speeches. But it is sufficient to say that Obi has hidden in plain sight to commit serious infractions. His own veiled and his supporters’ uneducated attacks on Wole Soyinka is another proof of their duplicity. Their problem with Soyinka was his failure to subscribe to their herd thinking methods.

That’s what got the goat of Obi’s IPOB supporters misnamed Obidients who are obedient to nothing but their own voice. In his Arise Television interview, Soyinka didn’t even support Bola Tinubu but Obidients heard what they had in their heads and wanted him to make a baseless claim like their Arise idol who spoke of Ayo Fayose’s leaked audio on air as a matter of proven fact. Everything about Soyinka had to be condemned simply because his was not an unqualified endorsement of Obi.  

His criticism of the debunked, outrageous claim that the Chief Justice of the Federation, Olukayode Ariwoola, met Bola Tinubu in London is unacceptable. Everybody must support their foolishness. No answer will satisfy them but the one they were programmed to hear which is an unconditional statement that Obi won the presidential election and Tinubu is a drug baron.

They lack the ability for any nuanced argument. It’s either you agree with them 100  per cent or they come at you wildly like the fiendish horde that they are. Many of those who appear to support their attacks on Soyinka appear to do so simply because they have an axe to grind with Tinubu who  they’d rather see Soyinka attack even without reason. Others would seem to have their own axe to grind with Soyinka himself. 

But as Soyinka noted in his robust responses, what stops his critics taking up as their own personal project those acts of intervention they think he failed at? Must he, at almost 90, lead every attack? Soyinka is the age mate of some of his critics’ grand and great-grand parents. What stops these critics or their grandparents leading the charge that Soyinka has led in the last seven and a half decades? He lives a full working life outside Nigeria.

His critics’ grand parents, his age, are probably in sanatoriums or care homes. But Soyinka has a full time job as a university teacher! His most recent appointment, which evidently accounted for his “silence” before and during the 2023 elections, was in August 2022, as Arts Professor of Theatre in New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. His first appointment there was in 2019.

He was Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg in 2017. These are positions he holds on a regular basis around the world. His fecund mind which is kept constantly busy earns him far more than he can need now despite attempts to make it look like he is on the payroll of politicians.  

Many of his critics like Charly Boy have very short career of civic intervention that is already tainted by corruption charges. We all know Charly Boy’s case with Deji Adeyanju. He says Soyinka can never be the man Chinua Achebe was. Why would or should he be? Perhaps, it was because he was not that he is who he is today, the most intellectually engaging and satisfying writer out of Africa as Isidore Okpewho memorably wrote.

It is also why he is the most studied African writer and one of the most studied writers ever. Attacks on Soyinka are not new. On the intellectual plain, he went through this with his ideologically-minded proteges in the 1970s. They called him names for his so-called un-ideological stand at a time when every two-penny scholar in Nigeria identitied as a socialist/marxist. They criticised his writing at a time Achebe had long been canonised as the father of African literature. Yet, he responded vigorously to his critics in both critical and creative essays as he has done to his critics on the 2023 election. The cumulative result was the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Ethnic envy, that notorious Nigerian malaise, can’t be ruled out as the animating force behind these attacks that cannot make any dent on Soyinka’s reputation that has withstood the vicissitudes of at least seven continuous decades. If anything, the attacks  speak to his greatness and relevance at a time when most people his age and years of public engagement are either in total obscurity, care homes or long dead. He needs neither the juvenile endorsement nor excoriation of cyber terrorists. He is capable and will remain capable despite the vacuous noises of the market place.