Former President Olusegun Obasanjo recorded spectacular failures in the 11 years he steered the affairs of the nation as Head of State and civilian President, Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, said on Friday.
Soyinka stated this in the preface of his new 148-page book, Intervention VIII: Ganiโs Unfinished Business, where he said Obasanjo had a phobia for education and intellectualism.
According to Soyinka, Obasanjoโs rulership records were clothed with lies, deceptions, misrepresentations, distortions and denigration of others.
Noting the ex-Presidentโs genuine attachment to the nation, the Nobel laureate said it would be most unjust to label him an outright failure, notwithstanding that he readily does so to his predecessors and successors in office.
He said: โHowever, to state starkly that he has recorded sumptuous, spectacular failures in the total of 11 years of managing the Nigerian real estate is to stay within arguable borders and that us where we choose to pitch our tent, daring even the most devoted of his apologists to dispute such an obvious assessment.โ
He said it would be the highest form of moral dereliction to fail to present a glimpse of a dark, sinister side of such โa paternalistic, caring figure.โ
โThis is a recurring decimal which now presents itself as a dedicated, even passionate rescue misnomer for a nation that is unarguably in need of a moral compass and competent leadership.โ
Soyinka went further to fault Obasanjoโs โseductive pretensions of ease and benign, protective assurance among school pupils,โ noting that even Adolf Hitler loved children so much that โhe created a Nazi Youth Brigade, a mind bending induction from which a subsequent leadership generation still strives remorsefully to dissociate itself.
โNot for a moment does one intend a comparison with that universal criminal, Adolf Hitler. We merely propose that cultivating the image of a committed child educationist in oneโs dotage does not obliterate certain records, such as that instance when, as Head of State our subject ordered that mothers, on their way to handover a letter of protest at the incineration of their children on the tarmac of Port Harcourt airport, should be stopped by all means.
โCompared to such a spectacle of infanticidal horror and executive callousness, the educational phobia that led to a policy of rabid anti-intellectualism under his watch, may be deemed mere trivia. Yet the damage done to a nation through such an unhindered detestation of educational institutions as the stamp of his ruling mandate remains to plague the nation.
โAnd there are other acts of anti-intellectualism provable against our born-again educationist and developer of youthful minds, implemented at a time when it crucially mattered- under his Watch! This crafted image of childhood love constitutes an obscenity, and remain offensive to any people of memory and discernment,โ he added.
