OPEN LETTER TO PROF. WOLE SOYINKA

You may have been wondering what the content of my letter would look like? Why Prof. Wole Soyinka, but not any other person? Oh! May be you are thinking I intend to throw verbal punches at the maestro of words. Come off it! His barrage of words would be gargantuan for my cerebrum. I am just musing.

I was going through some of my paper collections and notes; then stumbled on an almost twelve years (12years) old unfulfilled promise of the prodigious Professor, who was a conspicuous member of the opposition in exile between the late 1980’s and 1999 quoted in page 5 of the of the Guardian newspaper of October 17, 1998 thus:

..the press, and let me seize this opportunity to stress this, the press has been magnificent, really magnificent, heroic and one of these days, when there’s more pleasure, we are going to see personally to this, that a statue for heroism of the press is erected at a prominent place in this country, we must never forget…

The years between the late 1980’s and 1999 in Nigeria when the country returned to civilian democracy of sorts were marked by overt state repression countervailed by the intense activity of an aroused civil society. As the throes and woes of a derailed adjustment policy, as well as the country’s pariah status in international relations hit home; sections of civil society rose in protest against the increasingly dysfunctional and venal state.

Nigeria’s vibrant media played an influential role in the struggles over democratization and a reformed polity in these years. Defying censorship laws, closure of media houses, detention and abduction of journalists and the mysterious disappearance of key opposition figures; a section of the media, drawing on a protest motif dating back to the colonial days, carried the struggle against the monumentally corrupt military class to a new pitch.

Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka experienced these heroic and indefatigable press and thus said the afore-quoted to pay tribute to them.

Sir, come October 17, your promise of an erected statue to the Nigerian press will clock twelve years old. And a twelve years old boy has begun to make plans for his future. So, on behalf of the numerous Nigerian press, both dead and alive, I ask that “When shall we have our statue erected?

Just musing!