Privilege And Power: The Elite’s Role in Rebuilding And Making Sacrifices For The Nation – Wole Soyinka At 90

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SPEECH BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO, SAN, GCON, IMMEDIATE PAST VICE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA AT THE SOYINKA INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ORGANISED BY THE NIGERIAN ACADEMY OF LETTERS TITLED: “SOYINKA: THE IMPERATIVE OF A PUBLIC CONSCIENCE” IN LAGOS ON THE 11^TH OF JULY, 2024

PROTOCOLS

Let me begin by thanking the organizers of this symposium for the honor of inviting me. I have no real credentials to be a guest of honor at the 90th birthday symposium by the international literati, in celebration of a living literary legend, Nobel laureate, and a globally recognized thorn in the flesh of rulers, governments, and oppressors here and abroad. But it is Wole Soyinka’s versatility as a human that entitles us all to comment authoritatively on his life, times, and activities. He has little respect for anyone’s space, whether religious, political, or even culinary!

As Ivor Agyeman-Duah puts it in his introduction to Essays in Honour of Wole Soyinka at 80: “Soyinka has a diverse and interesting character which makes him amenable to playing different roles within society. He is an individual with creative ability in all genres of literature, an actor whose presence dominates a room, a university lecturer, a cultural activist with a notion of an egalitarian sense of life, and a collector of artworks, especially sculpture, painting, and poetry. He is also a musician, a shadow architect who designed his own house, globally travelled, a man with a trademark tunic shirt and able to design his outfits (if need be), a hunter by night and above all a wine connoisseur (a certified Commanderie de la dive bouteille of the Republic of France).”

Soyinka interfered and still interferes with everybody’s space! So, we must not be shy of interfering in his! But I am also grateful for this opportunity because it gives me a chance to return, even if inadequately, a priceless favor.

In 2007, I turned 50, and my wife and I decided to launch the Orderly Society Trust, a non-profit dedicated to the pursuit of a sane and organized society. To mark the day, my one preferred person to speak at the event for just over 50 guests was Prof. Wole Soyinka. It was a long shot, he could be anywhere in the world, and anyway, why should he bother to attend an event in honor of someone he barely knew? I called Makin, his son, who was my friend, and asked him if he would make the request on my behalf. He did. Prof. was traveling, and he wasn’t sure he could make it to Lagos. But the unbelievable happened: Prof. came and also created a controversy amongst my many pastor friends when he suggested that there might not be heaven!

Today, my intervention is restricted to a brief exploration of an aspect of the Soyinka phenomenon, what I have described as his public conscience. My topic is Soyinka: The Imperative of a Public Conscience.

A conscience is perhaps the most important attribute of a moral being; without it, a person is essentially amoral, a wholly bad situation where a person is unable or unwilling to distinguish between right and wrong.

Most of us have a personal conscience, but a public conscience is of a slightly different order of complexity. While the personal conscience monitors and regulates the individual’s own moral hygiene, the public conscience is that compelling urge, an obligation to mind the business of others and to make the community’s moral state one’s business.

It is what compels a person to find his place as a moral agent in society. It is what keeps a person awake at night because injustice is being done to someone else or some other persons, or that the rights of some are being trampled upon, and then causes him in the morning, to openly challenge the oppressor in all his might and dread at the risk of everything.

The public conscience is in those restless souls who can’t look the other way when something seems wrong. Their noses are too sensitive; they smell a rat or something more rancid all the time, and they just can’t keep quiet. They are those who help the vast majority of us more timorous souls to speak our minds; they express the feelings the majority are too petrified or too politically correct to utter.

All notions of dignity, all observances of dignity, flow from a public conscience—a belief that humans deserve to be treated as such, that their living conditions must reflect their humanness, and that how they are treated even when captured in war must acknowledge this basic fact.

In some senses, the public conscience is the intersection between the divine and the secular—how human agency does the work of a just and compassionate God. Indeed, justice is a by-product of the public conscience, the notion that evil must not go unpunished, that some accounting for wrong done to others is important, because few things are more humiliating, more demeaning for a person than to be cheated or taken advantage of without recourse.

Martin Luther King’s reassuringly optimistic words that “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” is another way of saying that justice, propelled and sustained by conscience, is the long moral arc. And it is conscience, the public conscience of the state or seekers of justice, that assures us that time does not run out on fairness and justice, and that they never become outdated; that the journey to justice, freedom, and equality, might be long but the destination is inevitable.

The public conscience can be an affliction, an irresistible urge to speak up or take action against perceived wrongs, injustice, or oppression. Depending on the society in which the moral/conscientious obligor is thus compelled to act, especially under tyrannical regimes, it may mean incarceration, torture, or death. The expression of the public conscience can be life-threatening. And I think it was in his memoir “You Must Set Forth at Dawn” that Soyinka himself describes the pathology of the affliction of public conscience as being, I quote, “due to an over-acute remedial sense of right and wrong.”

It is because this affliction called a public conscience can invite life- or liberty-threatening situations that it is often not considered a wise thing to have a public conscience. The Yorubas capture the alleged folly of a public conscience in the proverb, “eni ba fori e fagbon oni je’mbe,” meaning that the man whose head is used to crack the coconut will not be able to participate in the eating of the coconut… so why break your head? But it appears that men struck by the disease of a public conscience prefer another Yoruba saying, quoted by Soyinka (Reith Lectures), which translated means “sooner death than indignity” (iku san ju aibikita lo). So, for him, there is only one answer: it is that deprived of dignity, the head is worth nothing. And he makes the point even more poignantly when he said, “for me, justice is the first condition of humanity.”

Wole Soyinka has lived his 90 years on earth with a severe form of this affliction, which has often led to his “breaking the coconut with his head”, especially in the many cases where, in apparent acceptance of the impotence of the pen or the theatrical stage, he abandoned them, heading for the barricades himself. Sometimes carrying on as though a skull broken against the coconut of injustice was worthwhile if the blood from it made the juice in the coconut undrinkable for the oppressor!

So, Wole Soyinka has interfered with everything. He escaped a jail term when he held up a radio station at gunpoint that was announcing the fake results of a rigged election, but he ran out of luck when he interfered in a civil war. He had said at the start of the conflict that Biafra could never be defeated and that the so-called police action of the Federal Government was no more than an inglorious war. He then followed up with a visit to the rebel enclave in 1966, words and actions considered supportive of secession and thus treasonable by the then Federal Government. Consequently, he was locked up and in solitary confinement for over two years.

Wole Soyinka’s public, for which his conscience burns, is borderless. In the farcical play “Opera Wonyosi,” Soyinka creates a brutally ludicrous caricature of Jean Bedel Bokassa, one-time maximum ruler of the Central African Republic, who amongst other crimes, killed several school children. Most people would be wary of saying anything against Idi Amin, especially if you were a frequent visitor to Uganda, but not Soyinka. Long before the official inquiry affirmed Idi Amin’s lust for blood, Soyinka had concluded that he was, and I quote, “a practicing cannibal who actually kept the heads of his perceived enemies in his freezer for periodic contemplation.”

As long ago as 1959, he had taken a stand on the infamous Hola Camp Massacre in British-colonized Kenya, where 11 members of the Mau Mau movement held in detention were beaten to death, while 77 were injured, under the direction of British officers. Soyinka raised the issue of this travesty again, much to the embarrassment of some in the British establishment, at his Nobel Lecture before the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1986.

There is perhaps no greater demeaning of a human person than his being wronged without recourse. The State and seekers after justice are the public conscience that ensures that the aggrieved are given an opportunity for redress.

I think we may all agree that this disease called a public conscience is one for which an epidemic is desperately desirable among the Nigerian elite. Because it is this affliction that might force introspection on the elite, such that we realize the responsibility that privilege places upon us. A realization that the privileged or the elite, both individually and collectively, have a responsibility, an obligation to society to plan it, organize it, order or reorder it, and above all, to make sacrifices for it, for the maximum benefit of all. This is the burden of privilege. It is their expected role to find common cause across professions, vocations, ethnicities, and faiths, defining the minimum terms and conditions for the safety, security, growth, and prosperity of the community. They define clearly what is lofty, what is noble, what is deserving of honor, and how these values can be sustained, preserved, and enforced. This is the burden of privilege.

So, it is a living public conscience that enables the governing elite to fully appreciate the responsibility of planning an educational system and a relevant curriculum for a country growing at 6 million a year! So, the public conscience forces you to the conclusion that grand corruption in a country with so many poor is a crime against humanity, and we must fight it with the vehemence that such a travesty deserves.

It is the public conscience that spurs the implementation of universal healthcare in a nation where over 70% pay for healthcare out of pocket because we recognize that we owe the people we govern the environment for decent lives and livelihoods. The individual and collective sacrifices required for nation-building are impossible without a public conscience. This is what enables us to discount tribe and religion and focus on the good in all.

But there is a strange pall over the land, over the public conscience. There seems to be no voice anymore, perhaps it is the overload of information, the anonymity of social media; a man can hide to fight. In the good old days, you spoke your truth with your chest! And when the authorities came, that was that.

Today, you can hire a crowd to support a cause, any size of a crowd if you can afford it, complete with well-printed placards and T-shirts with whatever slogan you prefer. Someone on the run from the law has a crowd; those after him have their crowd. You can hire a public affairs analyst or an expert complete with a bow tie. The government can have their own; you can have your own too. The public affairs analyst says he has never seen such a travesty of the rule of law; his opponent’s public affairs analyst praises the judiciary for their sagacity and declares a victory for the rule of law. The press offers no opinion and no analysis. Is there a retreat of the public conscience? Perhaps this is why there is still a place for a 90-year-old veteran of many battles to don his battle fatigues and arm up for a fight.

At 90, Soyinka is entitled to take a back seat and watch others take on the issues, join or lead the marches, rain abuse on errant public officials, and generally be obnoxious to oppression. But it appears that the severe affliction of the public conscience has become chronic through the years and now only seems to have metastasized. He is not letting up, and he cannot till he dies because life is worth nothing if it is lived without challenging indignity and injustice. When he quoted those now immortal words: “the man dies in him who lives in the face of tyranny,” as with everything else, he stubbornly meant and still means it!

Before I take my seat, I will pray for you, whether you say amen or not, that the coming years will be years of excellent health and joy for you, and in God’s good time, the Nigeria and Africa of your dreams will come in Jesus’ name.

Happy Birthday, Prof.