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It is no longer news that the blockade of Strait of Hormuz has induced suffocating pressures on the global supply chains across continents and regions. Households are also bearing the brunt of the oscillating negotiation between the United States and Iran. Hence, individuals and businesses are adopting survivalist strategies to remain afloat. Wole Soyinka, professor of Comparative Literature, is one of them. Recently, he boarded a commercial motorbike while returning from a function at Abeokuta, stating that he could not afford to fuel his two vehicles with the average cost of a litre of PMS at N1,500.
Soyinka is not an everyday guy. At his age, he does not need to “catch cruise” to prove a point. He has paid his dues. He hit the international limelight early in life as the 1986 Nobel laurate in Literature. And as a master of the three major genres of literature – prose, poetry, and drama, he has a unique way of creating a perfect imagery that conveys his messages in a succinct manner. Soyinka’s eccentricity is well known. His brilliance is electrifying. His language power, like a double-edged sword, can pierce through fortified inner recesses of power. More importantly, he is also a humanist. Any social crusade he accepts to join is not taken lightly, locally and globally. For that fact the he is the second African to earn a Nobel Prize, when most of today’s millennials were toddlers and when the Gen Z were not born, etched a lasting pedigree on his persona. His interventions in the political space cling to the memory. Thus, he has over the years, deployed his intellectual war chest to hold the feet of successive leaders to the fire. Even at a great personal risk, his voice has refused to die down.
When the pogrom of 1967 snowballed into the avoidable Nigerian Civil War, Soyinka braced the odds and secretly met the secessionist leader, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, for a cease-fire negotiation. His self-given national assignment which had no authorization from Gowon-led federal government was misconstrued as an act of subversion. He was detained without trial for 22 months but he remained a vocal critic of the government. Again, at the height of Abacha’s crackdown on pro-democracy forces in the 1990s, he nearly lost his life if not for his escape by whiskers. He boarded a motorbike and left the shores of the country through what was known as ‘NADECO Route.’ In other words, he ran away through one of the country’s illegal borders.
In 2003, under the Obasanjo administration, Soyinka described the then ruling PDP as “a nest of killers,” apparently bemoaning the series of unresolved political assassinations, including that of his dear friend, Bola Ige, the former Attorney General of the Federation, who was murdered a few days before Christmas in 2001. However, Soyinka’s most dramatized outburst against incumbents was his joining the ‘Occupy Nigeria’ street protests in January 2012 against the increment in the pump price of PMS from N67 to N97. He also called out former president Goodluck Jonathan as the “biblical Nebuchadnezzar” because of what he termed the “reign of impunity” exemplified by the police siege at the National Assembly, Abuja, in December 2014.
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But since 2023, Soyinka’s loud silence on national issues tended to detract his elevated image of forthrightness and advocate of the masses. Some Nigerians began to accuse him of compromise. They said that he is no longer his vintage self, especially under the present Tinubu’s government, which suddenly removed the fuel subsidy regime and unleashed hardship on Nigerians. He was accused of playing the ethnic card. Some alleged that Tinubu must have helped in nourishing his old age through his usual magnanimity. The renaming of the renovated National Arts Theatre, Iganmu, Lagos as Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and the Creative Arts, reinforced the impression that his voice has been completely “captured.”
But he seemed to have woken from a deep slumber when he took exception to the number of security details attached to President Tinubu’s son, Seyi. He described it as a “heavily armed battalion” that is capable of forestalling a coup in a small country. For him, such deployment showed poor prioritization in a nation plagued by incessant kidnappings, banditry, and rural violence in under-policed places. Before then, he had criticized the imposition of emergency rule in Rivers State as a “dangerous overreach of presidential power.”
Nonetheless, the recent video of him on top of a commercial motorbike because of surging PMS prices, brought him to the spotlight. Hell was let loose. Gideon Ayeni who monitored the reactions to the viral video noted that “Social media users from across the country flooded the comments section with a mix of mockery, political jabs, personal anecdotes, and pointed criticism.” Despite his frail age, netizens had expected Soyinka to protest on the streets against Tinubu the way he did to Jonathan. They want him to continue to speak truth to power the way he did during the military regimes. And I dare say that the expectations are not out of place. Having built a reputation as a moral compass, keeping quiet at this time when his tribe’s man is in charge, is tantamount to “falling their hand.”
Be that as it may, I have a few posers for those who are throwing jabs at a man who will clock 91 in July 2026. What have they done for their country with their time, energy, knowledge and ingenuity? Soyinka was 33 when he tried to avert the Civil War’s bloodletting. He was 52 when he won the Nobel Prize and brought honour to Nigeria. He was 60 when he fled Nigeria in 1994 in the struggle for enthronement of democracy. Certainly, Soyinka is not a perfect man. But his footprints and consistent interventions in the public space remain a yardstick to the present generation. Let the younger elements take the baton and allow the old man to rest. Nations are not built by blame games and buck passing.
