Wole Soyinka makes "hate speech" against the Igbos during lecture

While delivering a lecture titled ‘Predicting
Nigeria, Electoral Ironies’ at the Harvard
University Hutchins Centre for African & African
American Research, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, USA, Nobel Laureate and
foremost social critic, Wole Soyinka, is of the
opinion that Igbos are the only people in the
country who can be predicted accurately. He
also described the Igbos as “greedy”.
“Igbos remained unrepentant and resolute
towards their strategic objective of
secession at worst; or a Nigerian
president of Igbo extraction at best,” he
said at the lecture, which held on April
29.
“The climax of MASSOB’s war against the
Nigerian state was the call for sit-ins and
civil disobedience that shut down markets
and public services, as Igbos stayed at
home in a symbolic gesture to assert
Biafran independence. The call was
honoured by governors in the two
principal Ibo states, though without
fanfare.The Igbos are probably the only
group of Nigerians that you can predict
with great accuracy whom they will vote
for in an election, because they tend to
put their votes where their stomachs take
them; suffering as it were, from incurable
money-mindedness, as they would stop
at nothing in their quest for personal
financial gain.”
Commenting on the result of the Nigeria’s
presidential election, Soyinka said:
“Muhammadu Buhari was the better of
the two evils as the incumbent president
Goodluck Jonathan had been an
unmitigated disaster and failure.It was a
painful decision to tell people to vote
Buhari, but the country needed a new
beginning. I was more against Jonathan,
than I was pro-Buhari.
“Nothing is more unworthy of leadership
than to degrade a system by which one
attains fulfillment, and this is what the
nation witnessed time and time again
under Jonathan, who was increasingly
becoming intolerant of opposition in an
escalating streak of impunity and
authoritarian madness, which was most
blatant and unconscionable.The
‘militricians’ – soldiers turned politicians
in power – aren’t looking for excellence;
their civilian cohorts are worse. Short
cuts and how to circumvent the system
for the profit of a few are the norm of
governance. Those who do honest work
are derided as lacking the skill to fit it.
Ironically, things haven’t quite changed a
bit after 16 years of democracy in the
country,” he said.