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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
“The strange case of Nobel Schizophrenia”
The alert reader would’ve noticed that the headline above is in quotes. It is in quotes because I have borrowed it from Professor Ali Mazrui, one of Africa’s foremost scholars. Mazrui used it as the title of his reply to Professor Wole Soyinka who had attacked him in an article in The Guardian of February 12, 2000, titled “The Problem with you, Ali Mazrui.” Part of Mazrui’s reply was carried in The Guardian of March 25, 2000.
The Mazrui/Soyinka encounter was over Mazrui’s critique of a television documentary by one, Professor Skip Gates, titled “Wonders of the African World.” Among other things, Mazrui had said the documentary could not have been complete without filming in Nigeria, something which Gates did not do. Gates had argued that he left out Nigeria because it was under a reprehensible military dictator, General Sani Abacha. Mazrui countered by pointing out that Gates had shot films in Sudan whose leadership was even more reprehensible than Nigeria’s.
I will not detain you further with details of that interesting encounter between the two intellectual giants, especially since the details are not of direct relevance to the subject of this piece, namely Soyinka’s unrestrained diatribe against Major-General Muhammadu Buhari for renewing his 2002 bid to rule Nigeria as a democracy. I have borrowed Mazrui’s headline only because it, as well as the body of the Professor’s article itself, accurately sums up my view of Soyinka’s diatribe against Buhari.
In his reply to Soyinka, Mazrui accused the Nobel Literature laureate, among other things, of “being an inexact and careless scholar.” Soyinka, he added, was “prone to either overactive imagination or poetic hallucinations.” Reading through Soyinka’s diatribe against Buhari, one cannot agree more with Mazrui that Soyinka is an inexact and careless scholar and has once again presented a strange case of Nobel schizophrenia.
In reviewing Sonyinka’s lengthy article on Buhari as published in The Nation of January 17, among other newspapers, my first problem was that of his use of language. Soyinka may be a first class dramatist, but even his greatest admirers will agree with me that he suffers from the disease of linguistic bombast. Soyinka, I have said many times on these pages and elsewhere, writes essentially to impress rather than to communicate.
Among the most basic rules for effective communications, said George Orwell, one of the greatest wordsmiths in English, in his essay, Politics and the English Language, are (1) never use a long word where a short one will do (2) if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out, (3) never use a passive (word) where you can use the active, and (4) never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Soyinka’s article, consistent with his prose style, broke each and every one of these rules.
Anyone who has read Soyinka’s piece would agree with me that you need more than a dictionary to fully understand what he was exactly saying; dictionaries may tell you the meanings of words, but words in isolation do not say much. This is why the sentence rather than the word is the unit of language. Needless to say, the simpler the structure of a sentence, i.e. its syntax, the easier it is to understand. Even where you use simple words in a sentence, if it is complicated in syntax, you may leave your reader confused rather than clear-headed. Soyinka, you will agree with me, is a master of both the long word and the complicated syntax.
Take for example, the very first paragraph of his article in question. Space would not allow me to reproduce the whole of it, but the following sentences in that paragraph would do as representative sample of the whole article. “Recently,” he said, “I published an article in the media, invoking the possible recourse to psychiatric explanation for some of the incongruities in conduct within national leadership. I have begun to seriously address the issue of which section of society requires the services of a psychiatrist. The contest for the seizure of rationality is now so polarized that I am quite reconciled to the fact that it could be those of us on this side, not the opposing school of thought that ought to declare ourselves candidates for the lunatic asylum.”
I am almost certain that you needed to catch your breath, first to merely read those sentences, and then to crack your brain in order to grasp their meaning. If you did, it was because the sentences were full of long words, needless words, passive words and jargons, not to mention their complicated structure.
With such bombastic language as Soyinka’s the reader will understand, even forgive me, if, in dealing with the substance of his diatribe against Buhari, I misrepresent his arguments. However, I’ll do my best not to.
With this caveat, let me attempt a summary of Soyinka’s lengthy article in simple English. My summary is as follows:
Let us take these points one by one.
First, what is Soyinka’s evidence that Nigerians’ have been “overcomplacent” about Buhari’s presidential bid? If he has any, he did not present it. Most likely he had none because no one can say Nigerians have been complacent, never mind over-complacent, about Buhari. Certainly not with the freedom with which supporters and opponents of the former military head of state have traded tackles in the media over their positions.
Second, if Soyinka himself has been over-complacent, as he said he was, and he has now suddenly woken up to the danger he thinks Buhari’s presidential bid represents, it is, as he has said, because the bid has received support from unlikely quarters.
As a scholar who should have the courage of his conviction, he should have named those individuals and groupings. He did not, but it requires little or no imagination to see that Soyinka was talking about Afenifere, which has since declared support for Buhari, and General Ibrahim Babangida, whose support for same is now an open secret.
Third, Soyinka says Buhari’s bid was as preposterous as Babangida’s. Really? Barely two and a half years ago, Soyinka spoke differently of at least Babangida’s bid. Late August 2004, Soyinka, readers will recall, said Babangida should be free to run for president in 2007 provided he apologized to Nigerians for canceling the June 12, 1993 presidential elections. Considering the well-documented record of how Soyinka himself had consistently dismissed Babangida’s transition programme as fraudulent, does it not defy logic for him to say that “June 12” is the only basis for dismissing Babangida’s bid for the presidency as preposterous? Soyinka, I am sure will agree with me that a strong super-structure is impossible without a strong foundation. Or as his friend and fellow compatriot, the late Bola Ige, once put it even more graphically, “You cannot plant peanuts and reap coconuts. Never.”
In other words, considering the dubious foundation on which it was erected, “June 12” has been more hype than substance and it cannot be used, as Soyinka did barely 2½ years ago, to judge whether Babangida’s presidential ambition was “preposterous.”
Which takes us to the fourth and final point, namely why the Nobel Laureate thinks Buhari is unfit to rule a democratic Nigeria.
Altogether Soyinka listed eight crimes against Buhari. These can be collapsed without any danger or misrepresentation into four i.e. (1) Buhari’s refusal to appear before the Oputa panel, (2) his draconian 20-month rule 22 years ago, (3) his alleged selective justice against Second Republic politicians and (4) his “humiliation” of two of Nigeria’s leading traditional rulers for traveling to Isreal. The other issues of the controversial 54 suitcases and those of Alhaji Alhaji and Fela, Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor and Babatope, are merely details of the charge that Buhari was repressive and engaged in selective justice.
Of all the four charges only the second, i.e. that Buhari’s was a draconian dictatorship, can stand close examination. On the first charge that Buhari refused to appear before Oputa to answer charges of extra-judicial killings of three drug convicts, the fact was that Buhari’s refusal was not an act of impunity. He refused to appear, along with Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar, because Oputa, as the three former heads of state believed, was not properly set up and its objective, as was clear from its initial terms of reference and as has since become even clearer from the way the President has consigned its report to the cooler, was vengeance, not reconciliation. Babangida, the reader will recall, went to court to prove his case and was vindicated.
Therefore on legal grounds, if not on the moral, all three were right to refuse to appear before Oputa. As for the moral argument, it would be a foolish man who will put his neck in a noose just because he is told that the noose will not be tightened round his neck once he can establish his innocence!
As for the charge that Buhari practiced selective justice because, among other things, he kept Shehu Shagari “in cozy house detention in Ikoyi while his powerless deputy, Alex Ekwueme, was locked up in Kirikiri prison”, or because the elderly Adekunle Ajasin, the Ondo State governor, was jailed several times over for no offense, nothing could be more grossly distorted. As an intellectual I expected Soyinka to be more rigorous in presenting evidence for his claims. Instead he merely peddled beer parlour gossip as evidence. If Soyinka had been more rigorous in making his charge he would have discovered that Ekwueme had the company of fellow politicians in his Ikoyi prison while Shagari was kept in solitary confinement. Any prisoner would tell you that, other than physical torture, there is nothing worse than solitary confinement. But not only was Shagari kept in solitary confinement the curtains of his bungalow were permanently in place. As a result he almost lost his sight before he was released. In the case of Ajasin, if Soyinka was honest enough he would have admitted that the elderly man was not the only one Buhari jailed many times over without proof beyond reasonable doubt or detained without trial. The governor of many Northern states, including Buhari’s own Katsina State, were jailed. Again if ministers like Umaru Dikko and Uba Ahmed escaped abroad, others like Adamu Ciroma, highly regarded as a man of integrity, were detained without trial. In other words, no one could, in fairness, accuse Buhari of a systematic attempt to discriminate among Second Republic politicians on grounds of tribe, region or religion, in jailing them or detailing them without trial.
Finally on the case of Emir of Kano and the Ooni of Ife, isn’t it strange that Soyinka would talk glibly of the two traveling as private citizens? As a scholar does Soyinka in all honesty believe an emir, any emir, not to talk of one like that of Kano who is the fourth ranking in order of protocol in the old North, and the Ooni who is arguably the first in Yorubaland, are private citizens? But even with private citizens can Soyinka, as a well traveled scholar, honestly claim he does not know that countries bar their citizens from visiting other countries they do not recognize? At the time the Emir of Kano and the Ooni chose to visit Isreal, did we have any diplomatic ties?
In examining Soyinka’s four main charges against Buhari, I said he was essentially correct in only the charge that Buhari ran a draconian dictatorship. Even then Soyinka grossly distorted the facts by saying Buhari turned Nigeria into “a slave plantation” and “gloated and gloried” in it. In a slave plantation, no master will brook “the cartoons and oblique, elliptical reference” that Soyinka said media professionals used to sustain the people’s campaign for a time-table to democratic rule.
Soyinka wants neither Yar’adua nor Buhari or Atiku as Nigeria’s next president. In Buhari’s case he says the former head of state is not fit to rule because he is simply incapable of changing from his tyrannical past. If the Nobel Laureate had any evidence of Buhari’s incapability of changing since he turned into a politician over five years ago, he did not present it in his article.
However, as Soyinka knows, very well, scholarship demands rigour and exactitude in presenting evidence and in the use of language. As with his encounter with Mazrui nearly seven years ago what Soyinka has demonstrated with his diatribe against Buhari is that he is an inexact and careless scholar and a literary giant who, all too often, uses the English language to confuse rather than enlighten.
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