Africa’s first Nobel laureate for literature, Wole Soyinka, said Nigerians must show a Nelson Mandela-like ability to forgive 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 on Wednesday 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 intolerable and continues and threatens to prolong itself, then we have to be more pragmatic.”
Monopoly Broken
Buhari, a three-time loser in presidential races, beat President Goodluck Jonathan, 57, the candidate of the People’s Democratic Party in elections held last weekend in Africa’s most populous nation, breaking the PDP’s 16-year monopoly on power. His victory comes against the backdrop of a six-year Islamist insurgency that the government says has killed more than 13,000 people and a collapse of crude prices that has hammered the economy.
Buhari won under the banner of the All Progressives Congress, an alliance of the main opposition parties that formed two years ago and drew support across religious and ethnic divides. That coalition helped Buhari, who is wildly popular in the north, make inroads in parts of the country that haven’t supported him in the past, particularly the southwest, home to the Yoruba people.
“I think more in terms of the APC winning the election,” said Soyinka, who is close to some of its members. Soyinka said reports from APC members and his own observations suggest Buhari was “struggling to be a party man.”
‘Corrupt Figures’
Buhari’s win paved the way for the first democratic transition of power in Nigeria from one party to another. Many members of the ruling party defected to the
