Wole Soyinka, a 31-year-old dramatist and playwright, was arrested for the first time in 1965, accused of holding up a radio station at gunpoint following the 1965 Western Nigerian elections, which were marred by allegations of fraud. His goal was to replace a tape of a recorded speech by the Premier of Western Nigeria with a different tape containing allegations of election malpractice.
Soyinka, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Literature, was released after a few months of confinement as a result of international writer protests.
Recently, the Nobel laureate was dragged on social media for criticizing the Labour Party’s vice-presidential candidate, Datti Baba-Ahmed, who expressed his displeasure with sweeping fraud in the 2023 elections, for using “fascistic language.”
According to Soyinka, “I denounced the menacing utterances of a vice-presidential aspirant as unbecoming. It was a gladiatorial challenge directed at the judiciary and, by implication, the rest of the democratic polity”.
Baba-Ahmed and his principal, Peter Obi, are currently arguing before the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal about the election won by President-elect Bola Tinubu, as declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The 2023 elections, like the Western Region elections of 1965, were marred by widespread irregularities.
Many have therefore wondered why the Nobel laureate who was not a candidate in the 1965 elections but took part in what could be considered treason will now turn back to question why Baba-Ahmed, a party’s vice presidential candidate, will make such a statement.
In a recent interview, the Professor of Comparative Literature admitted that he had warned Obi that if he lost the presidential election, it would be because of the attitude of his supporters.
Soyinka, it appears, felt the same way as Obi’s supporters when he made the decision to seize the Western Nigeria radio station at the time. Could he not have waited for the court to have the “last word,” as he suggested?
Soyinka famously admonished everyone in his prison notes, The Man Died, to speak up in the face of obvious injustice. During Muhammadu Buhari’s military junta, a Nigerian court banned the public use of his prison notes (published in 1972).