An award-winning novelist, Chimamanda Adichie, has countered Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, for accusing the vice presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Datti Baba-Ahmed, of making a fascist comment.
In a recent interview with Channels TV, Mr Baba-Ahmed said the swearing-in president-elect Bola Tinubu on May 29 would be the end of democracy in Nigeria.
He also claimed that Mr Tinubu didn’t meet the requirements of Nigerian law to be declared the winner of the February 25 presidential election.
Mr Soyinka, however, disagreed with the vice presidential candidate, describing his comments as “fascist”.
But speaking during an interview with Arise TV on Tuesday, Ms Adichie, who has also criticized the outcome of the 2023 election in a recent article titled “Nigeria’s Hollow Democracy,” expressed her disagreement with the Nobel prize winner.
She said: “I still do have a lot of respect for him, I have a lot of love for Prof Wole Soyinka. I admire him, I respect him as a thinker, as a writer, and I think everyone should read ‘The Man Died’ and “Ake”.
“His memoir is really beautiful, but at the same time I disagree very strongly with him about this particular issue, and actually, because I respect Prof Wole Soyinka so much, I went back and watched the interview.
“I had watched it when it aired initially but I went back and watched it because I thought am I missing something.”
“Fascist is really a very strong word. And I didn’t see any reason that Mr Datti Baba-Ahmed’s interview would have been termed fascist,” she said.
“Baba-Ahmed, I think he was making a very strongly felt point about the elections. What he was saying, which again I thought seemed fairly reasonable, is that if our democracy is rooted in our constitution and you then swear in a person who is being elected unconstitutionally then you are in fact ending democracy,” she said.
“I think it is quite a reasonable position. Of course, we can argue about what that bit in a constitution means,” the writer added.
Ms Adichie noted that the electoral umpire should rather be accused of fascism instead of Mr Baba-Ahmed.
“However, I have suggestions for what we could use fascist for, we could use fascist for INEC because as it is right now, many Nigerians feel deeply cheated by INEC, disfranchised by INEC and there is authoritarianism, which obviously is a basis for fascism at the centre of manipulating an election,” she declared.
She also said President Muhammadu Buhari and the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Mahmood Yakubu, missed a great chance to be heroes of Africa.
“I also think that President Buhari missed an opportunity for heroism, maybe his last chance for heroism, because I think Nigerians felt before the election that he meant well, that he meant to have credible elections, but I don’t think many Nigerians think that way now and I wish that he has taken a page from former President Goodluck Jonathan, he is really a good man, a moral man.
