Yoruba leaders attack Soyinka for criticising OBJ

The Yoruba Consultative Forum on Tuesday attacked the Nobel laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka has come under attack for his for “undisguised campaign of calumny” against former President Olusegun Obasanjo.

President of the Yorucba Consultative Forum, Prof. Tejumade Rhodes, stated this in a release Tuesday when he hammered Soyinka for “revelling in a poisonous vendetta and egregious abuse” against the ex-president.

Soyinka has always attacked Obasanjo whom he believes is part Nigeria’s problems.

In his recent book launched last week and various papers he delivered, the playwright warning Nigerians to be wary of the third force Obasanjo is championing in 2019.

Soyinka accused Obasanjo of hijacking movements led by some young people frustrated by the old hands running of the country.

In the book, Interventions VIII, entitled “Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?: Gani’s Unfinished Business,” Soyinka vowed that he would sustain his criticism of Obasanjo.

“He (Obasanjo) frustrated the June 12 and often puts himself forward on any issue… I don’t remember any good he has done. It will be very difficult to find one. I can’t remember any at this moment,” he said.

But this persistent attacks on Obasanjo, the YCF said, has “definitely crossed the bar of decency and civilised literary grace.”

“At a time when everyone is nudging Obasanjo forward as the courageous rallying point against the present dislocations in our polity, Soyinka is salivating in some primitive laceration of the old soldier, revelling in a poisonous vendetta and egregious abuse against Obasanjo,” the group said.

“In Soyinka’s warped cosmology, he insists that Obasanjo is not the fit and proper person to lead the new movement against the warped national polity. This is malicious, undignifying, spurious, a drooling mechanical twaddle bound for literary garbage.

“Of course Obasanjo, like all of us, is not perfect. But he is a courageous man, a superlative patriot who contends with any errant power with thorough sincerity, with masterful resolve to rectify the observable wrongs.

“Soyinka has now eroded his once sterling heights of great crusader and crashed his status to a Lilliputian pamphleteer, angry at the world, pouring venom everywhere without tactical purity.”

The forum said its now ready for the Nobel laureate “with balanced intellectual vigour wherever he erupts again in his crude vitriol against Obasanjo.”

Obasanjo, who had been distant to all Yoruba cultural groups because he thought himself a nationalist has been going about reconciling with them.

He met with the Afenifere recently in Lagos, a group he depsised for about two decades.