Celebrating Wole Soyinka at 86

With his ageless physique, it is almost difficult to acknowledge that our own Oluwole Akinwande Soyinka, affectionately called KONGI by his numerous admirers, is 86! Even though 86 might not be a remarkable milestone, it was in 1986 that the Nobel Prize came, hence the reason for this remarkable reckoning and why it’s worthy of celebration.

An opportunity happily came my way in 1994, when Prof. Soyinka who had become familiar with my work as a democracy activist in the UK through the New Nigeria Forum and its journal,, which I edited, and through my friendship with his son, Dr. Olaokun Soyinka, invited me to be part of the newly established National Liberation Council of Nigeria as Director of Communications.

His temperament rejects every iota of practices that suborn human happiness. Even in his old age, he continues to prick the conscience of the nation with penetrating homilies that poke a revelatory finger in the nose of public decadence. WS is that bitter remedy that purges a poisoned belly of its troubling constipation. His corrective words are like the surgical knife that cuts out the malignance of a petulant lesion.

Soyinka is impatient with the loud silence that punctuates clear cases that should strike a thunder of a mass anger. For him, until the obscurity of silence gives way to visibility of voices, any unexplained configuration about the existence of Nigeria will remain an empty indoctrination that serves the hypocritical cowardice of the nation’s power barons.

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