Nigerian playwright and Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, has revealed that there was a plot to cancel the 2023 presidential election.
Soyinka stated this while speaking on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief on Wednesday.
“History was about to repeat itself, some people were determined to take us back to those days,” he said, while referring to the 1993 election cancelled by former military dictator, Ibrahim Babangida (retd.).
People who were calling for an interim government, he said, were determined to allow history repeat itself.
He said: “I am alleging that there was a conspiracy from the very beginning before the election to make sure the elections did not take place or that even if the voting did take place, that everything be reverted to what happened under Babangida.
“When we all just woke up and discovered that even though the results have been calculated, even though the results were in possession of international bodies, including monitoring embassies and so on, even if we had the results directly, it was suddenly annulled.”
“It was no longer a contest between individuals, it was now a contest between the so-called interim political party and democracy.
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“When you have a binary like that, I have no doubt or hesitation about what side of the barricade my position should be,” the poet stated.
Reacting to the comment of the 2023 vice-presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Datti Baba-Ahmed, Soyinka said it was “a disgraceful interview”.
Baba-Ahmed, a former House of Representatives member had asked the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Kayode Ariwoola, not to swear in Tinubu as duly elected President of the country.
Describing the comment as “menacing,” he said, “At that interview by Datti, that disgraceful and menacing interview, was for me the ultimate signal because this was somebody calling for the rubbishing of a structure he profited to ever become a Governor.”
“I am talking about Peter Obi. Even before the tribunal had said… , this spokesperson, in this case Datti, came on the television to threaten everyone if his interpretation of results was not upheld.
“This for me was amoral, politically and socially amoral, it was playing into a certain script, even if they didn’t know it.
“Sometimes democracy leaves the stage for an individual contest for power and then commences its own struggle for existence or actualisation,” he added.
