Professor Wole Soyinka explained why he was optimistic about Muhammadu Buhari’s emergence as Nigeria’s president-elect and what should be expected from Boko Haram. The prominent Nigerian made his position known in the course of the lecture “Predicting Nigeria, Electoral Ironies” delivered in the United States, The Punch reports. The dramatist insisted that Buhari could not
perform worse than the past presidents because he would be guided by a sense of history. When asked by Walter Carrington, the former US Ambassador to Nigeria, if the new president was capable of reforming the country like the late Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew, Soyinka replied:
“I am very, very cautiously optimistic.”
He predicted that Buhari would be influenced by those around him to “keep his nose to the letter of the law. In his zeal to absolutely eradicate corruption, he might take advantage of ambiguous areas in the law and the constitution to empower himself to deal very ruthlessly and quickly with those who have robbed the nation blind”.
The Nobel laureate, however, warned Nigerians against touting Buhari as the messiah:
“I think that Buhari has a sense of history. He knows that he must make a mark, a very positive mark, on Nigeria to be able to live with himself, or die with a clean conscience. We must make sure that Nigerians are not allowed to forget his past. They should not think that the messiah has finally arrived.
Regarding the issue of insurgency in the northeast, Soyinka doubted that it would end soon.
“We will never get rid of Boko Haram. They are jihadists who wish to impose Sharia law and ban Western learning across Nigeria as indoctrinated. They are fanatics who believe that if they die in the cause, they will go straight to heaven where they believe literally in the 77 virgins awaiting their arrival.”
Thisday adds that the professor faulted the outgoing President Goodluck Jonathan for his failure in the fight against Boko Haram:
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