NIGERIA: Soyinka’s Supporters Abroad Welcome His Temporary Flight

By Lahai J. Samboma Reprint | | Print |

LONDON, Nov 22 1994 (IPS) - The dramatic exit from Nigeria of Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka this week, despite the seizure of his passport by the Lagos authorities, will serve to focus attention on the country’s deepening political crisis, say campaigners here.

Poet, playwright, novelist, avowed socialist and Nobel prize laureate, Soyinka, 60, is one of the widest known and most outspoken critic of the military government of General Sani Abacha.

He made his first public appearance in Paris Monday since escaping from what he called the “stone age despots” who rule his native Nigeria in a manner “not unlike apartheid South Africa.”

“Soyinka’s escape is good news,” said John Filani, chairman of the London-based Nigerian Democratic Movement. “Abacha and his cronies know what he stands and were afraid to let him out. Now he will paint the true picture of what his happening in our country.”

Filani doubted that Soyinka would try to seek political asylum in France or elsewhere. “With his high profile and international stature, Soyinka knows it is better for him to stay in the country, where he will be more helpful to the democracy movement.”

Nigerian activists say the writer plans to liaise with human rights and international writers’ organisations and focus the international spotlight on Nigeria.

The current human rights and political crisis is the most serious the country has faced in the past 34 years, said international human rights watchdog Amnesty International.

“This could end in bloody civil war. They don’t want the international community to sit on the fence doing until heads start rolling. his could be another Rwanda,” argues Filani.

Writers are increasingly being targetted by repressive regimes, says Catherine Drucker, campaigns coordinator at Article 19, the international anti-censorship group based in London.

Ken Saro-wiwa, the writer and political activist, is currently detained without trial in Nigeria. The regime confiscated Soyinka’s passport in late September when he tried to travel to a conference of the International Writers’ Parliament in Lisbon.

Drucker recalled a recent incident in Egypt when another Nobel laureate, Naguib Mafouz, narrowly escaped assassination. “No writer wants to leave their homeland, which is their source of inspiration,” she said. “For Soyinka to leave like that is a symptom of how bad repression in Nigeria is.”