Author: Phlippages
Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and members of his campaign team are unhappy with the statement made by Prof. Wole Soyinka, condemning a viral video showing members of the Pyrates Confraternity making a mockery of the former Lagos State Governor, Tinubu.
Members of the Confraternity were seen in a video during a procession, gyrated to an anti-Tinubu song and made fun of the APC Presidential aspirant for a speech he made in June in Abeokuta, Ogun State, where he asked that power should be handed over to him.
The members of the Confraternity sang, “Hand dey shake, leg dey shake, Baba wey no well, e de shout emi lo kan (Hands are shaking, legs are shaking. A sick old man is shouting, ‘its my turn’).
Tinubu, who most people saw as desperate during the speech had said, ‘Emi lo kan’, meaning ‘It’s my turn’.
He narrated how President Muhammadu Buhari was consoled by him (Tinubu) after he (Buhari) had failed three times to become Nigeria’s President. Eventually, a political alliance spearheaded by Tinubu made it possible for Buhari to win the presidential election in 2015.
However, Soyinka who founded Pyrates Confraternity as a university student in Ibadan, Nigeria, described making a mockery of Tinubu due to his ill-health as distasteful.
“I have listened to the lyrics of the chant intently and I am frankly appalled. I find it distasteful. I belong to a culture where we do not mock physical afflictions or disabilities. Very much the contrary. The Yoruba religion indeed designate a deity, Obatala, as the divine protector of the afflicted, no matter the nature of such affliction. This sensibility is engrained in us from childhood and remains with us all our lives. It operates on the principle of mortal frailty to which all humanity remains vulnerable,” Soyinka earlier said in a statement.
“One of my favorite authors, about whom, by a coincidence, I had cause to write quite recently, was CLR James, author of The Black Jacobins, Beyond A Boundary etc. etc. I called him my ideological uncle. He suffered from Parkinson’s Disease, but remained alert, lucid and combative for decades after the onset of the disease. We interacted politically at the Tanzanian pan-African Congress, the Dakar Festival of Negro Arts and a number of other cultural and political fora.
“We met frequently in his lifetime, dined together in restaurants, despite his challenge. it would be unthinkable, and a desecration of his memory to be part of any activity that mocked his affliction. A further statement will be issued when I have made further enquiries into this strange, uncharacteristic outing of the association.”
However, a close source to Tinubu has revealed that the APC candidate and members of his team are upset that Soyinka “systematically revealed that Tinubu got Parkinson’s disease, thereby confirming that he’s an invalid candidate.”
“They are angry that Prof. (Professor Soyinka) revealed too much about Bola Tinubu’s health condition,”he added.
