*Debunks claim he has endorsed Tinubu’s presidential aspiration
AS permutations continue ahead of next year’s general elections, Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has distanced himself from partisan politics.
The professor of Comparative Literature said this in a statement today in reaction to reports that he had thrown his weight behind some aspirants.⁸
Soyinka said he had not even thought of 2023 much less inserting candidates into coveted positions.
The rebuttal is obviously the dramatist-essayist’s response to a poorly conceived and written post by one Michael Olugbenga Peter, who claimed that the laureate had endorsed the Presidential aspiration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The mischievous post shared widely on facebook and instagram, shows Soyinka and Tinubu in a poster and with excerpt of a statement of endorsement purportedly written by Soyinka, laughably identified as ‘Nobel Laurel’.
The fake news based the purported endorsement on the publicly acknowledged relationship between the two men during their days in the National Democratic Coalition, NADECO, which fought at home and overseas for the return of Nigeria to democratic rules in the heat of the General Sani Abacha maximum dictatorial rule.
An obviously irritated Soyinka in his statement titled, “Season of Fakery Galore” wrote:
“Here we go again, the same boring, illiterate public interlopers who lack the courage of their conviction and must steal the identities of their betters. One can only hope that the public has learnt to identify FAKE NEWS and join in the urgent task of exposing and disgracing these despicable touts.
“For the avoidance of doubt, I have not even THOUGHT 2023, much less inserted candidates into coveted positions. The signature of this latest moron is familiar — he or she oes do not even know the difference between “Laureate and Laurel”. This is an ancient forgery being recycled for the umpteenth time Those who pass it round do themselves and their recipients a disservice. Find something worthwhile to occupy your time.
“In any case, we have no business with politics in the land of the dead, and the most recent information I have on me is that I died sometime last year. The email account of the year’s Nobel “Laurel” was hacked by these same agents to publicise my demise, so who is this still politicking WS “Laurel”?”
