Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has refuted making the statement that Northern Nigeria will retain power over the federal government regardless of who was elected president.
In his piece that appeared in THISDAY on January 22, Prof. Bola Akinterinwa quoted Soyinka as saying that “Northern Nigeria will continue to control the government no matter who becomes president.”
According to Soyinka, who was further quoted in the article, “They created fraudulent constitution in Nigeria, fraudulent population in the Northwest and more states in the North,” it would be difficult to prevent the North from controlling the presidency.
“More significantly, the African Nobel Laureate from Ogun State also noted that ‘Northern Nigeria was in charge of the government when Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan were Presidents. Even if you make Igbo president, Northern Nigeria will still control the government. The best solution to Nigeria’s problem is for us to negotiate our existence.”
Without taking away from the thoughtful article’s key points, Soyinka stated in a disclaimer on Monday that it was “unfortunate that he has fallen for the operations of Nigeria’s fake attribution industry, which has now attained hideous social dimensions.”
Prof. Soyinka said the statement attributed to him was not his, but rather was the result of the cunning actions of internet trolls with personal agendas who lacked the courage to answer their fathers’ names, adding that “there is an appropriate name for them, but we shall avoid using it here.”
He continued: “I never made such a statement. We have warned again and again. The increasingly bastardized social media will eventually set one country after the other on fire, leading eventually to a global conflagration. And the principal instigators will be those malformed sub-humans, who lack the courage of their conviction and must resort to Identity Theft of mounting impudence.
“Even the most elementary, but rational, mind-sustaining discourse has become a minefield of distortions, wholesale fabrications, half-truths, tendentious extrapolations that impose on serious thinkers and debaters superhuman navigation skills. I salute those who persist and attempt to retrieve this valuable medium from the mentally retarded minority.
“In this connection, one brief comment: Professor Akinterinwa missed out on one leadership qualification that the nation desperately needs: a mass psychiatrist or an exorcist. Preferably both rolled in one.”
