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Hear Soyinka’s take on Nigeria at Amaechi’s book launch

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Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka seems to have difficulties describing what presently obtains in Nigeria’s political space today, although he gives credit to two individuals for making it happen.

Prof. Soyinka identified APC national leader, Bola Tinubu and Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State as the two main agents who brought down the PDP, commended Amaechi for standing up to President Goodluck Jonathan during the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) crisis.

He spoke in Lagos on Thursday, at the public presentation of the book “Dynamics of Change: The Amaechi Years”.

Soyinka said, “The political atmosphere today, whatever you call it, change or hope or cautious hope and naked hope or careless hope, I recognise two personalities, in particular, who led the chant of change. One of them, I call him the architect of the process, the architect, in fact, that houses the essence of hope. That is Ahmed Bola Tinubu. The other person was unconsciously, perhaps, the arrow head of that charge that led to the change and that is the man that we gather here to celebrate.”

Soyinka said Amaechi took a risky decision during the NGF crisis that inevitably exposed him to the wrath of the presidency.

“He (Amaechi) was the one who said no, we cannot turn the clock backwards. Nothing about the philosophy of the clock runs against what we were hoping for. It was a very unpopular and risky decision to take. But it exposed to us the basic arithmetic fallacy of governance in demonstrating that when 16 is said to be higher than 19, something is fundamentally wrong and the same kind of arithmetic leads to the cooking of figures in governance. And it was within that nexus that he stood up and challenged even his own colleagues, and said let’s change the mentality of the stock, let us re-orientate it towards the people and towards the nation and the electorate.

“I remember someone very close to me that said I hear you are close to Rotimi Amaechi, tell that young man that he is going to destroy himself, and I said, you know something, you have been in a position where I have had the opportunity of being your teacher and your mentor and you mean to say you never learnt from me that it is better to be destroyed on the basis of what you really live for? And you want me to deliver such a message? That person who is in Aso Rock wanted me to tell Amaechi to back off, to slow down and that he is playing with fire and playing with a catapult against big guns. I never delivered that message. All I did was to study him more closely and wait to see.”

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