Nigeria’s Hottest Political Romance and Why It Matters

It is doubtful if the seat of power in Nigeria has, of late, hosted a more strategic visitor than Professor Wole Soyinka, Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature, who was there on August 11th, 2016. Or if a better example of an anti-climax can be found in Nigerian politics. It turns upside down the established wisdom in these matters captured in the aphorism about birds of the same feather flocking together. Here is a perfect example of where birds of different feathers are flocking together. The binder is still not public knowledge but not the symbolism of the visit.
Professor Wole Soyinka must have been the most acerbic and most consistent critic of President Buhari, ever since the mid 1980s. Now, it seems the dynamics have worked out in such a way that the permanence of interest has overwhelmed the contingency of enmity. This seems a self-evident truth now. When the President eventually constituted his cabinet late last year, culture was missing from the list of ministries that survived the merger exercise which preceded it. The Nobel laureate was aghast and he conveyed it in a manner uniquely his. Promptly, culture was added to the list as the Federal Ministry of Information became Federal Ministry of Information and Culture.
As a Nobelist, it goes without saying it that he is an international celebrity. Every international celebrity is, to a great extent, a government in and of himself or herself, as the case may be. Thus in geopolitics, they occupy a centre stage, a very vital instrument for expanding state power because of the power that comes to them as the most key of the actors in the management of meaning. In one word, they can break barriers. It cannot be for nothing that a whole sub-discipline is in place dedicated to the study of celebrities. It is called Celebrity Studies. Combined with the age in which popular culture is such a powerful force in global politics, Soyinka’s tigritude is there for all to see without him having to demonstrate it. Instructively, when journalists asked what he went to do in The Villa, he told them he was there to discuss national and international matters with the president.
The third symbolism or utility of the visit must be the relief it must have brought for a president under fire from every quarter of the country on the basis of the belief that his government has delivered more pain than pleasure. There are several spaces in Nigeria where Soyinka’s presence in The Villa translates to automatic gain for the president and The Presidency. So, who would not value such a visitor?
It is a spectacle watching Soyinka’s transition from aloofness from state power to a certain embrace in the twilight of his life. It, indeed, is because previous cases of plumage with power could be called plumage with his friend, IBB rather than with power. So, there is a turnaround in praxis. This turn must be a positive one. For, who knows, he might just be the force for good who is to come in terms of scaring away those purveying unhelpful frameworks that the president always attacks verbally but finds himself implementing.
That leaves only one more thing Soyinka has not done and is unlikely to be able to do soon. That is contesting election as a councillor at the local government council level. A unique intervention it would have been because no lumpen local government council chairperson would have messed around with Kongi if he were a member of the legislature at that level. Or would he still do it in his own way?