Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka yesterday took a look at the unfolding political drama in the country � April polls, tug of war between President Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice President Atiku Abubakar, the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) saga and the disqualification of aspirants � and declared that the nation was heading for anarchy.
Soyinka in a statement titled �Will of One and the Rule of Law� said preparations for the April polls had been slipshod and that the utterances and actions of INEC Chairman, Professor Maurice Iwu leaves much to be desired.
The Nobel Laureate said: “I watched the performance of Professor Iwu, INEC’s Chairman, on television last night (Thursday). It would be excessive to claim that I was frightened for the nation. Let me restrict myself to admitting that I felt very apprehensive. The Obasanjo-Atiku saga has taken a dimension that reaches far beyond the issues that are actually touted, the loudest being corruption, probity, integrity etc. etc. We are now firmly within the terrain, not even of the rule of law, but of the paranoid will of any individual, however powerful, against the very fabric of society, against such seeming intangibles as confidence in the ability of the law to protect the individual and the community. In other words, we are speaking of freedom and its protective mechanisms.”
Soyinka expressed regret that the National Assembly had failed to impeach Obasanjo and Atiku following their roles in the PTDF scandal. He said though, within both Houses, the idea was mooted and eventually abandoned, but he was now glad that the effort failed, “because it has brought this nation to a defining exercise, rubbed its face in an issue that goes to the very roots of social co-existence, without which we would continue to coast along predictable paths of easy compromises. We would continue to evade the possibility, for instance, that our capacity for mural revulsion, and our support for the promotion of ethical grounding in governance, can be manipulated by wily, power-driven individuals. The common expression is, ‘being taken for a ride’, and the destination in this case is, surely, our own perdition.
Mar172007