The Labour Party’s Peter Obi paid Wole Soyinka a visit on Sunday, and according to the Nobel laureate, no words of “reconciliation” were spoken during the meeting.
In reaction to numerous reports of the visit that have surfaced, Soyinka revealed in a statement on Monday that the visit was not intended to mend any fences.
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Obi’s visit to Soyinka’s comes days after the writer received harsh criticism on social media from the LP candidate’s supporters, known as “Obidients,” after criticising Datti Baba-Ahmed, the LP vice presidential candidate, for using “fascistic language” in his remarks.
In response to criticism from LP supporters, the dramatist declared in a statement that “Obidients” wore their refusal to “accept constructive criticism as a badge of honour.”
However, Soyinka said he had no problems reconciling with Obi or the Labour Party, despite the fact that he had called the phrase “reconciliation” a “inappropriate and diversionary invocation.”
“Let me clarify: I know the entity known as Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party. I can relate to him. I know and can relate to the Labour Party on whose platform he contested elections,” the statement reads.
There are simply no issues to reconcile between those two entities and myself.
However, I do not know, and am unable to relate to something known as the “Obidient” or “Obidient Family”.
Thus, albeit in a different vein, any notion of Reconciliation, or even relations – positive, negative or indifferent – with such a spectral emanation is simply grasping at empty air.
Soyinka reiterated that during the meeting, the word “Reconciliation was never bruited, neither in itself nor in any other form.
It simply did not arise. By contrast, there were expressions of “burden of leadership” “responsibility”, “apology”, “pleading”, “formal dissociation from the untenable”, all the way to the “tragic ascendancy of ethnic cleavage”, especially under such ironic, untenable circumstances. Discussions were frank and creative.
The notion of Reconciliation was clearly N/A – Non Applicable. It was never raised.
The following should be understood but never underestimated. What remains ineradicable from that weekend of orgiastic rave in social media was the opening up of the dark, putrid recesses in the national psyche that we like to pretend do not exist. It invited – into minds seeking a grasp on reality – gruesome variations on images from Dante’s Purgatorio.
