Soyinka Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, offered
President Olusegun Obasanjo an unusual
Christmas gift Wednesday by way of a 1,788-
word biting response to claims Mr. Obasanjo
made in his new and controversial three-
volume memoir, My Watch.
Mr. Soyinka mockingly described the old
general as “our Great Immortal, the
Unparalleled Achiever, Divinely appointed
Watchman”.
“Okikiola, [Mr Obasanjo’s middle name] the
overgrown child of circumstance,” was how
Mr Soyinka called out at the former president
whom he characterises as an individual with
“capacity for infantile mischief, and for
needless, mind-boggling provocations, such as
his recent ‘literary’ intrusion…”
Defining Mr. Obasanjo’s many public
interventions as a “compulsive career of
lying” and the former soldier as a “Master of
Mendacity,” Mr. Soyinka promised a “full,
frontal dissection of Obasanjo’s My Watch for
later, most especially since the work itself is
currently under legal restraint and is not readily
accessible to a general readership.”
However, he described Mr. Obasanjo as “a
seasoned predator on others’ achievements – he
preys on their names, their characters, their
motivations, their true lives, preys on gossip
and preys on facts, preys on contributions to
collective undertakings…even preys on their
identities, substituting his own where possible.
Well, hopefully he may actually believe in the
inevitable End to all vanities?”
The two elder citizens have a long history of
squabble and public disagreements, but in his
current comments, Mr. Soyinka is part-
sarcastic, part-playful, but still broad sweeping
from the personal to the policy ramifications of
Mr. Obasanjo’s life story.
He derisively described Mr. Obasanjo’s pet
possession, the Presidential library at Abeokuta,
as a “Presidential Laundromat,” pointing to the
circumstances of the acquisition of the land as
“morally dubious” and suggesting that it was
“blatantly developed through a process that I
denounced as ‘executive extortionism’.”
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