Excerpts of Wole Soyinka’s interview with ChannelsTV on #MorningBrief
“I am alleging that there was a conspiracy from the very beginning before the election to make sure the elections did not take place or that even if the voting did take place, that everything be reverted to what happened under Babangida.
When we all just woke up and discovered that even though the results have been calculated, even though the results were in possession of international bodies, including monitoring embassies and so on, even if we had the results directly, it was suddenly annulled.
History was about to repeat itself, some people were determined to take us back to those old days.”
-Wole Soyinka
He continued :” So for me, it was no longer a contest between two individuals.
It was now a contest between a so-called interim political party and democracy. And when you have a binary like that, I have no doubt, no hesitation at all about what side of the barricade my position should be.
And that interview by Datti, that disgraceful, menacing interview was for me the ultimate signal. Because this was somebody calling for the rubbishing of a structure by which he himself had profited to even become a Governor, I am talking about Peter Obi.
He was what we know as a Judgement Governor, and even before he attended the tribunal, his party, his spokesman in this case Datti, came on television to threaten everyone, to threaten hell if his interpretation or results was not upheld.
This for me was politically amoral, socially amoral. It is playing to a certain script even if they didn’t know it, because later I began to express my suspicion that they were part of the script.
At the beginning, I was like look at these buffoons, they don’t see that they are playing to other people’s script, what a pity. So, at that time hostilities were not yet too intense, so this was what i was referring to, that sometimes democracy leads the stage for individuals contest for power and then commences its own struggle for existence, for actualisation.
Democracy as you and I know, you cannot accept judgements only when they favour you if you go by the same arbitration panel, same arbitration structure. You cannot just say, I will accept this only when it suits me, I mean that is an insult.”
