Keeping Nnamdi Kanu in prison wrong — Soyinka

Nobel laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka, speaks to Noble Eyisi on the Nigerian civil war and its lessons, Biafra agitation of Nnamdi Kanu and the ‘Obidient’ movement of Peter Obi, among other issues, in Episode Nine of the Noble Nigeria Podcast on YouTube titled, ‘Humanity Over Religion’. GODFREY GEORGE brings excerpts

You are 89 years old now and will be 90 in July. What is your secret to living a good life?

A secret? I have no idea but I think it is largely luck. I try to make sure that all my problems are taken care of during my normal working hours which can be around 18 hours a day or more but when I get to bed, I fall asleep.

What was growing up in Nigeria like for you?

I was  a voracious reader. I read everything and any piece of paper lying around, including scraps. I was just fascinated by the reading word, and of course, I was also intrigued by a lot of things going around me. I asked questions. I was always asking questions and not satisfied with the surface of things.

How would you describe the civil war of 1967 to 1970?

A waste! It was a total waste. (It was) A gross and costly error. It was an avoidable error. It was an unjust war. I was appalled by the fact that we went to war so easily. I believe very much in the right of self-determination. Otherwise, what was Independence all about? What was the entire struggle for liberation on the African continent all about if it was not about the rights of people to determine their own destiny? To find us fighting a war to preserve the demarcations inflicted on us by foreign instruments was for me a function of abject mental enslavement. It was surrendering our will. And the readiness to go to war and lose close to two million people to preserve something that was imposed on us by total aliens was for me a humiliating fact. It is worse than the crime against ourselves. It is also a denial of who we are as creatures of reason, volition and self-determination. It made nonsense of what I considered we were. The consequences are still with us today.

You  met the late General Odimegwu Ojukwu, who led the Biafrian side of the war when he was alive. How would you describe him?

He was a mixture. He was very conscious of his class. He belonged to an affluent family. He had an affluent father who was a businessperson. He was sent to the best schools for education. I think he went to Oxford University. When he came back, we met as young people. He was older than I was. In the beginning, I didn’t even like him at all. Before I went away, I knew he was very class-conscious, rich, and wealthy. He drove a sports car while I rode along on my father’s bicycle. I remember very well. We used to meet in the same areas, seeing that we had mutual friends.

But, when he came back – and this happened to so many young people – he definitely felt a sense of mission to the Biafran cause. He tried to rise to that occasion as fast and as determinedly as he could. I thought that for somebody with that background and those challenges, that he didn’t do too badly. He made some terrible decisions though. He also had to accept responsibility for the entire scenario – going to war. However, all the people in leadership at that time were culpable. But, in my view, we on the Federal side, had a greater culpability.

When you compare some of the decisions Ojukwu made with that of Nnamdi Kanu, who is trying to resurrect that Biafra spirit, and others who are also trying to secede; what would you tell them?

The first thing I have to say as I said at that time – which got me into serious trouble – is that you cannot defeat Biafra. People took a merely simplistic approach to understanding that. They felt I was talking about the battlefield. When the people are determined, they are willing to sacrifice anything to preserve their identity. When they feel they are on a righteous cause, it is difficult to defeat them. If there is any military defeat, it is only temporary. The real issues remain unsolved. That is a lesson of history all over the world. So, when I made that statement, I was seeing the Biafran notion and concept, and all that it represented both antecedents and the future. When you have that kind of combination of different causes, it is very difficult to defeat them.

So, Nnamdi Kanu represents that concept. He is one of the younger generation who inherited a burden of defeat, resentment, and a determination in their view, not to make the same mistakes of their predecessors. They have a new will and a new understanding of history. The only problem I had was the language Kanu used over Radio Biafra. I listened to some of it. It was very incendiary and also disrespectful of even his own people.

What we fought for – for those of us who stood on the other side – was a Biafra of conscience, and for me, that is very critical. People like Nnamdi Kanu or IPOB (Indigenous People of Biafra) or MASSOB (Movement for the actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra) for that matter should not act against what I call the ‘core of our humanity’ which is one of conscience

Nothing surprised me at all. What surprised me was that it took so long.

Would you say there are similarities with the Yoruba Nation agitators, for instance, especially with the way the Federal Government is treating things?

It was a mistake keeping Nnamdi Kanu in prison; I believe they kidnapped him. He had the right to pursue his cause in any way he wanted. He was never accused of using physical force or bombing or killing anyone. Yes, his language was inciting but you don’t kidnap people. President Muhammadu Buhari seems to have an obsession with kidnapping people. It seemed to be his trademark. I think that politically speaking, if they have any real charges against him since he is in their hands, they should try him. All these technical postponements, delays, and tactics of avoiding the basic issue, for me, are counter-productive.

What would you say about Nigeria’s standard of education as a Nobel laureate yourself?

We require a whole revamp of our mentality. The idea that one can rush people through a course and, in the end, give them certificates, dealing with the yardstick of quantity rather than quality, has to be expunged. It is not the pupils or students; it is the teachers themselves. They have to totally abandon the idea that education is perfunctory and go back to those early times when education was educating the entire person, not memorising, pouring things down, and regurgitating whatever is put in one’s head.

When you go to a museum, it is not about what you learn at that spot. It is the curiosity that it inspires within you in the direction of history, geography, culture, and productivity. It stimulates the mind. When we were school pupils, we used to go to places like that – like Olumo Rock in Abeokuta Ogun State, and Blaze Memorial Factory which produced canned fruits and juices. I remember I had a fascination with how these things worked. It didn’t matter if I became a scientist or not. The important thing is that my entire mental, critical, and understanding faculties were engaged. This is what one carries over into textbooks so it goes beyond question and answer. All that has varnished. How often do you see students on the streets of Lagos being accompanied somewhere? The teachers themselves are then challenged further by such exposure of these school pupils.

The environment is also important. If you have a rundown, ghetto environment, you would bring out ghetto-barricaded student mentality, where the entire world is locked up in a very narrow physical environment.

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