NOBEL Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka, has distanced himself from a statement attributed to him on the northern Nigeria.
An article published in THISDAY of Sunday January 22 by Professor Bola Akinterinwa quoted Soyinka to have said: “Nothing could be more interesting than what Professor Wole Soyinka was quoted as saying: ‘Northern Nigeria will continue to control the government no matter who becomes the president. This is because they created fraudulent constitution in Nigeria, fraudulent population in the Northwest and more states in the North.’
“More significantly, the African Nobel Laureate from Ogun State also noted that ‘Northern Nigeria was in charge of the government when Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan were president. Even if you make Igbo president, Northern Nigeria will still control the government. The best solution to Nigeria’s problem is for us to negotiate our existence.”
However, in a statement he personally signed, Soyinka said: “I never made such a statement. We have warned again and again. “
He added: The increasingly bastardised social media will eventually set one country after the other on fire, leading eventually to a global conflagration. And the principal instigators will be those malformed subhumans who lack the courage of their conviction and must resort to Identity Theft of mounting impudence.
“Even the most elementary, but rational, mind-sustaining discourse has become a minefield of distortions, wholesale fabrications, half-truths, tendentious extrapolations that impose on serious thinkers and debaters superhuman navigation skills. I salute those who persist and attempt to retrieve this valuable medium from the mentally retarded minority”.
