Africa’s first Nobel laureate for literature, Wole Soyinka, said
Nigerians must show a Nelson Mandela-like ability to forgive president-elect
Muhammadu Buhari’s past as an iron-fisted military ruler.
“I criticized him for certain acts during his stint as a military
dictator,” Soyinka, the 80-year-old playwright and poet, said in an interview
with Bloomberg TV Africa at his hillside home in the southwestern Nigerian town
of Abeokuta. “But I also insist that it’s about time we try our best to be
mini-Mandelas, to learn there’s a moment when we must put the past aside.”
Buhari’s 20-month term as the military head of state of Africa’s
biggest oil producer when he overthrew an elected government in 1983 included a
campaign against “indiscipline,” in which the press was muzzled, hundreds of
politicians, businessmen and journalists were jailed and police officers
ordered to hit people who didn’t line up to wait for the bus.
By voting in Buhari, a 72-year-old Northern Muslim who describes
himself as a “converted democrat,” many Nigerians have shown an ability to look
past his earlier misdeeds, said Soyinka. Buhari denies having ever perpetuated
human rights abuses.
“Mandela had a faith in the capacity of the boer, the masters of
apartheid, to reform,” Soyinka said in his booming voice in a living room
filled with wooden carvings. “There’s a moment when we must put the past aside,
most especially when what presumes to the present becomes untolerable and
continues and threatens to prolong itself, then we have to be more pragmatic.”