Yoruba group tackles Soyinka over comments on Obasanjo
A Yoruba group, the Yoruba Consultative Forum (YCF) has condemned what it called campaign of undisguised calumny by the Nobel Laurette, Professor Wole Soyinka against former Nigerian President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.
In a release issued in Lagos yesterday and signed by its President, Professor Tejumade Akintoye Rhodes, the YCF accused Professor Soyinka of crossing the bar of decency and civilised literary grace.
The group said, “At a time when everyone is nudging Obasanjo forward as the courageous rallying point against the present dislocations in our polity, Soyinka is salivating in some primitive laceration of the old soldier, reveling in poisonous vendetta and egregious abuse against Obasanjo.
“In Soyinka’s warped cosmology, he insists that Obasanjo is not the fit and proper person to lead the new movement against the warped national polity. This is malicious, undignifying, spurious, a drooling mechanical twaddle bound for literary garbage.
“Of course Obasanjo, like all of us is not perfect. But he is a courageous man, a superlative patriot who contends with any errant power with thorough sincerity, with masterful resolve to rectify the observable wrongs.
“Soyinka has now eroded his once Sterling Heights of great crusader and crashed his status to a Lilliputian pamphleteer, angry at the world, pouring venom everywhere without tactical purity,” YCF said.
The Yoruba Consultative Forum said it has now resolved to engage Soyinka “with balanced intellectual vigour wherever he erupts again in his crude vitriol against Obasanjo,” saying enough is enough.
