"Wole Soyinka's foray into politics" [essay] & "Child of the Forest" [trailer]

[achali]

SOURCE
http://www.timeslive.co.za/opinion/artic...convention

Breaking convention: Wole Soyinka's foray into politics spells hope for Nigerians
By Akin Omotoso {producer of the film "Wole Soyinka child of the forest"}

Trailer:




(Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has long spoken out against the failings of Nigeria's government, but with the launch of the Democratic Front for a People's Federation, he has thrown his own hat into the ring)

Video of the launch of the DFPF:




The Big Read:Lagos is a city that doesn't let up. It leaves you breathless with wonder; the sights and sounds stimulate your senses. It is a city that understands life can be crazy.

Other cities in Nigeria have a grand "Welcome To X, we hope you enjoy your stay" sign. Until very recently Lagos had a sign that simply read: "This is Lagos!"

Nigeria was about to celebrate its 50th year of independence when I arrived in Lagos last month - but the mood on the ground was sombre: the country remains plagued by poverty, poor social infrastructure and corrupt leadership.

I received an e-mail from a friend. It was about Nigeria and although comic, it rang true: "My name is Nigeria! I need rebuilding and not rebranding. In the next few days, am going to spend 10-billion naira to celebrate my 50th birthday! I have the capacity to feed the whole of Africa but I import food instead. I am hungry, please help and rebuild me."

Part of that rebuilding came about after the Nigerian Central Bank had to inject a total of 400-billion naira into the banking sector after an investigation revealed the banks were low on cash reserves due to dodgy loans amounting to 1.5-trillion naira. The investigation led to Bank heads being fired.

In the midst of this chaos, following the death of President Umaru Yar'Adua, vice president, Goodluck Jonathan, took office.

Few among the political elite saw Jonathan as any kind of threat; it was widely believed he wouldn't seek to contest the 2011 election.

However, even as I changed my Facebook status to read, "in Lagos", Jonathan updated his to say: "I am running for president."

That announcement threw a spanner into the works around the controversial tradition of "zoning" the presidency. Ostensibly to keep the peace between the Muslim North and Christian South, the presidency has alternated from term to term between the north of the country, and south.

No one counted on Yar'Adua dying, though, and Jonathan, from the south, taking office.

But the truth is most Nigerians don't care where the president comes from.

What they care about is that the person at the helm turns the country around and makes it fulfil the potential it held 50 years ago.

Reading the local papers brought little joy.

Most of the politicians contesting next year's election are former military dictators who were responsible for bringing Nigeria to its current lamentable state.

I was in Lagos to attend the launch on September 25 of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's political party, called The Democratic Front for a People's Federation.

The intensity of Lagos seemed a fitting choice for the timing of the launch.

The DFPF had emerged from the pro-democracy movements of the National Liberation Front of Nigeria and the United Front of Nigeria, which were at the forefront of the anti-Abacha struggle between 1994 and 1998.

There was a lot of mystery around the DFPF in Nigeria, and everyone was obsessed with whether Soyinka was putting himself forward as a candidate for the 2011 presidential elections.

I wanted to see how a man who had consistently been a voice of reason - the conscience of the nation, even - would negotiate the presidential platform. From the time he burst onto the literary scene in the early 1960s, he was critical of the government.

The first 17 years of my life were spent in Nigeria, living in Ife, which is a university town similar to Stellenbosch. Growing up, I had the privilege of being surrounded by some of the greatest African writers of our time. Among them my father - Kole Omotoso - and Ben Okri, Nuruddin Farrah and Soyinka.

I was 12 when Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. My brother and I wrote a short, three-minute play, about two people trying to get to Sweden to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony.

We performed our two-hander for him when he came to visit one evening before leaving for Stockholm. At the time we were simply performing a play for "Uncle Wole".

I had seen a few of his plays but had very little knowledge of his political activity at the time. For instance, I didn't know then that in 1960, he had been commissioned to stage a play for Nigeria's very first celebration of its independence. In the play, A Dance of the Forests, Soyinka put forth a vision of a new Africa and warned Africans of repeating the mistakes of the past. It did not go down well with the political elite. But if that play didn't sit well with politicians, another act soon made him an icon to the people of Nigeria - and the world took note.

In 1964, an election took place in western Nigeria. The ruling party rigged the elections and used violence to silence its opposition. Afterwards, the "winning" party was due to address the region. The premier's message had been pre-recorded and merely had to be delivered to the radio station for broadcast at 7pm.

At the appointed hour, however, instead of the voice of the premier, people were shocked to hear a strange voice accosting the ruling party politicians, saying: "I call on you, in the name of the people, before your blood is used to water the streets, to go away, to pack up."

It went on for a few seconds before the people at the station realised what had gone wrong. Soyinka had hijacked the radio station and replaced the premier's speech with his own. He has never kept silent, no matter the cost.

What would happen to such a man if he were president?

"Comrades-in-arms in the embattled field of the Nigerian nation space - welcome!" Soyinka's voice resonated through the hall as he welcomed everyone to the launch of DFPF.

"This is not a political rally," he said. "It is simply a convention.

"A convention to clean up and transform Nigeria's nationhood into a democratic sanctuary for her citizens: The DFPF is an experiment, challenging some fundamental issues. Is it impossible to have a voice unless you are swimming in billions of naira? What if a party existed that was not interested in winning elections, but instead wanted to effect change one ward, one local government, one state at a time?"

Soyinka spoke of the vicious cycle of Nigerian politics as one in which the politicians "steal, use the proceeds to return to power, use power to steal some more, use the increased proceeds to return to power and so on and so on".

The DFPF, then, seeks to function as a civic platform that moulds, without standing corporately for elections, the democratic character of a people.

Is it impossible to have a voice unless you are swimming in naira? The DFPF has zero financial resources but as its manifesto says, it's a party of infinite resources, since the human resource of which its initiators are amply endowed is unquantifiable. That has to be worth celebrating.