In his latest campaign of undisguised calumny against Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, Professor Wole Soyinka has definitely crossed the bar of decency and civilized literary grace. The old Professor appears to be bent on some contumacious personal malice and outright incorrigible savaging of the former head of state.
At a time when everyone is nudging Obasanjo forward as the courageous rallying point against the present dislocations in our polity, Soyinka is salivating in some primitive laceration of the old soldier, reveling in poisonous vendetta and egregious abuse against Obasanjo.
In Soyinka’s warped cosmology, he insists that Obasanjo is not the fit and proper person to lead the new movement against the warped national polity.
This is malicious, undignifying, spurious, a drooling mechanical twaddle bound for literary garbage.
Of course Obasanjo, like all of us, is not perfect. But he is a courageous man, a superlative patriot who contends with any errant power with thorough sincerity, with masterful resolve to rectify the observable wrongs.
Soyinka has now eroded his once Sterling Heights of great crusader and crashed his status to a Lilliputian pamphleteer, angry at the world, pouring venom everywhere without tactical purity.
We, at the Yoruba Consultative Forum, have now resolved to engage Soyinka with balanced intellectual vigour wherever he erupts again in his crude vitriol against Obasanjo.
Enough is Enough.
*Professor Tejumade Akitoye Rhodes
President, Yoruba Consultative Forum.
