Obasanjo Is An Overgrown Child Of Circumstance – Soyinka

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Award winning playwright and poet Professor Wole Soyinka, has described Nigeria’s former president, Olusegun Obasanjo as an overgrown child of circumstance, The Punch reports.

The Nobel laureate criticised Obasanjo in his new book, titled InterInterventions: Between Defective Memory and the Public Lie – A Personal Odyssey in the Republic of Liars, presented at the MKO Abiola Cultural Centre, Abeokuta, Ogun state on Saturday, October 24.


Soyinka while speaking at the inauguration of the Soyinka Foundation, said he owed it a responsibility to fundamentally respond to the lies that the former president allegedly told against him in his latest biography, titled, “My Watch”, describing his book “Interventions” as Three-Carat Watch.

So, let it be with Okikiola (Obasanjo’s middle name), the overgrown child of circumstance.

He said: “I brainstormed with him over meals both when he was military Head of State in Dodan Barracks and in his home, Ota for some time after he left office and early in Aso Rock at his ‘second coming.’ Today, it is a different situation. If he offered to host me, I would wait until he had first swallowed a morsel from the same dish.

I had fully attuned myself to the fact that our Owu retiree soldier and prolific author is an infliction that those of us who share the same era and nation space must learn to endure. However, it does appear to me that there is no end to this individual’s capacity for infantile mischief, and for needless, mind-boggling provocations, such as his recent ‘literary’ intrusion on my peace.”

Soyinka added that efforts of intervention by some stakeholders made was a ‘cordial’ conversation he had with Obasanjo recently.

According to the Nobel laureate, during the conversation, he praised Obasanjo for the creative way he had developed the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library, which he described as a Presidential Laundromat and a product of executive extortion.

Soyinka, who chronicled the various places his path had met with that of Obasanjo since childhood, insisted that the lies in which the former President allegedly thrived were so unthinkable that he and some other people had started working on another book solely on Obasanjo.


In the book, Soyinka also talked about the controversy surrounding the ownership and leadership of the board of the Centre for Culture and International Understanding, over which he and Oyinlola recently exchanged words.

Source: Naij

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