Popular Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has once again come down hard on the Obidient Movement, supporters of Peter Obi over their role in the recently concluded 2023 general election.
Africa Today News, New York reports Wole Soyinka, whole spoke speaking at the launch of his book, ‘The Putin Files: Excursions Around The Ideology Of Pain‘, yesterday, maintained that the Obidients were fascist.
Responding to a lawyer and poet Ogaga Ifowodo’s question about why he called Obidients fascists, he used the 2020 EndSARS protest as an example of a struggle driven by pure truth.
According to him, EndSARS is one of the most successful movements in this country.
Soyinka noted that he supported the EndSARS protest and even addressed some protesters when leaving Lagos for Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital.
Read Also: Obi’s Visit To Me Was Not For ‘Reconciliation’ — Soyinka
Comparing the EndSARS protest with the Obidient Movement, Soyinka pointed out that what the Obidients were trying to do was ‘the mobilisation of youth to defend an untruth’.
Soyinka likened most actions of the Obidient Movement to former president Muhammadu Buhari, ‘pushing people to kill innocent serving members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) by claiming he was cheated out of an election’.
He said long before the election; some people had schemed to tilt the country towards having an interim government.
‘So some of those who thought they were being radical, they were being ‘mumu’ (foolish) and “playing the script of others,’ Soyinka declared.
Africa Today News, New York recalls that Obidients had criticised Soyinka in May after describing them as fascists.
Soyinka, had a few weeks ago described as inappropriate and diversionary, the media reports that the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi had paid him a visit in Abeokuta, Ogun State for reconciliation.
Soyinka spoke in a statement on Monday titled, ‘A visitation, and the allure of ‘reconciliation.‘
Obi in a tweet after the visit noted among other things that he the visit on Sunday was one he most cherished because he intended to ‘erase the needless misconceptions about the relationship between the great icon and the Obidient family.’
The Nobel laureate had, on Channels TV and later on Arise TV, in April faulted the manner the vice presidential candidate of the LP, Datti Baba-Ahmed, attempted to dictate to the Supreme Court during an interview on Channels TV over the election won by the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.
But the ‘Obidients,’ a term denoting Obi’s supporters, trolled Soyinka online, abusing him and an ex-deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Kingsley Moghalu, who in a tweet described Soyinka as a phenomenon that ‘unlettered and uncultured people may not fully understand in an age of lazy social media in which many don’t read or think deep.’