AS Nigeria marks 14 years of democracy, Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka has described the nation’s democracy so far as one that has been hampered by “unforced errors”– that is, errors that are quite avoidable if more care had been taken.
He also alerted the public to terrorist cells long-established in the Southern parts of the country through insidious cattle routes.
However, he insisted that May 29 is in no way Democracy Day but a mere “ego day”. June 12, according to him, remains the authentic Democracy Day.
In an interview with The Guardian on Tuesday at his home in Abeokuta, Ogun State, the literary icon noted that in lawn tennis, from where he drew his analogy, unforced errors occur in moments of sloppy thinking and/or overconfidence.
“There are many promises, first of all, unfulfilled. One, of course, is power (electricity), which is so essential to the generation of the economy… The problem till now has not been solved. There are many other infrastructure examples of that. It is scandalous, for instance, that the major artery that links Lagos to the rest of the country, the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, remains in such decrepit state. It is a disgrace to any regime. Whether you talk of Yar’Adua or about Olusegun Obasanjo; it is humiliating for the entire nation. Nowhere else in the world can that happen. I repeat, nowhere else in the world, either on this continent or Asia or Europe.”
According to Soyinka, such a disgraceful level of failure, in better climes, couldn’t have occurred without the culpable authorities “committing hara-kiri.”
The eminent scholar also cited what he called “high-handed actions” totally unexpected from a democratically elected president.
“I refer for instance to the action during the oil subsidy when suddenly armed police and the army were sent to take over a public square which does not even belong to the Federal Government but to a state where people were protesting a glaring deformity in governance…”
Soyinka noted that in instances where it becomes inevitable to insert any “minuses” into citizens’ lives, responsible and responsive governments look for ways of compensating for such by including some pluses by way of palliatives. But this, he lamented, was ignored when the Jonathan Administration removed fuel subsidy back in 2011.
“I said this confidently because I know that the president was advised at a time that ‘before you do this... do that and that and that. This wasn’t done. It was after the public rebellion broke out that things like transportation were introduced – buses were imported to be distributed all over the country. So that people like you and me will be quite happy to park our vehicle and take public transportation. This is what we are talking about the compensation pluses.”
Soyinka came down hard on the Nigerian Governors Forum over the controversy that trailed its recent election, describing it as a ‘disgraceful’ anti-democracy debacle.
“All of us must take a stand. For me, this issue is not a party matter, it is a national matter. This affects democracy. The governors, especially of the PDP have done great damage to the cause of democracy in this country. This is a disgraceful conduct. This in effect is their way of celebrating Children’s Day. In other words, this is their present for Nigerian children because there is no question that an election was held. To now suggest that a different result had been arrived at before the election is an insult to the intelligence, it is a sabotage of democracy and it is an act of contempt for the polity of this nation.
“What is unacceptable and treasonable in my view to the cause of democracy is when an election is held within an organisation of 35 members, the integrity of that election should be upheld as a service to democracy and as a lesson to the rest of the nation. In this case, what they have done has debased the meaning of democracy and set us back several years.
“They are giving an indication of what will happen in the next election. And the nation, all of us, must be on our guard to defend democracy with the last drop of our blood because this is a very bad example to set for children everywhere that we are teaching discipline, who are being lectured all over the place by various governors to live up to the principle of equity, to be good players in school sports. To have done this on Children’s Day is blasphemous.”
Declaring that true federalism is yet to be practised in the country, Soyinka urged governors to concentrate on developing their states in spite of whatever is happening in the centre: “That is why I say that the governors have the responsibility to push the envelope as far as they can. And to say sometimes to the centre: ‘go to hell. We are now concerned with our own salvation. We see you playing so much politics you have no time. Even to fulfill your responsibility to the state’.”
He added : “The governors should also learn that they are in a position to act far more autonomously than they are doing at the moment. My favourite word is decentralization. Even if the centre is under-developing the nation, the governors have the responsibility to develop their own area – and they can do this by independent action, by decentralizing the process of development. We have seen how Lagos has been transforming itself. We have seen this kind of action also being taken by certain governors in terms of education, health, public transportation where the Federal Government has been dragging its feet.”
While asserting that the emergency rule in force in three northern states of Adamawa, Yobe and Bornu, was long in coming, the professor of literature, citing discussions with the late National Security Adviser, Owoye Andrew Azazi, warned that insidious infiltration of the southern part of the country by terror groups, had been on for long through cattle routes that crisscross the region.
He declared: “During my lecture at the 100th anniversary of King’s College about two years ago, I warned that there are already Boko Haram cells in the South. I used the expression that ‘we are all here speaking grammar. Until they come over the wall and scatter all of us, before we get serious’. I said that there are cells already ... Azazi confirmed it when we met. We spoke for one and a half hours. Azazi revealed that we were being infiltrated via some of the cattle routes and this has been responsible for some of the clashes between the farmers that we have been witnessing and the ambushing of farmers in Oyo State in Ogbomosho even in Ogun State by Fulani herdsmen.
“When we met, he was coming from the United States, where he had gone to negotiate some surveillance helicopters, because through a number of these cattle routes, some of these Boko Haram people were already infiltrating into the South. The evidence is becoming quite open now and I don’t consider it a security matter any longer. People are waking up to the reality. When I go hunting, I move into the bush quite a lot. I see camps. I see cattle rearer settlements where they camp from time to time. It is some of those which have been, in many cases, converted to Boko Haram cells.”
