Last Call: Wole Soyinka Land
Corry, John
by John Gorry Wole Soyinka Land Lagos WO SOLDIERS DIED IN A BOMB BLAST the day I arrived T here; there was an attempt to assassinate a leader of the anti-government opposition just before I...
...FOR ONE THING, THE ASSASSINATION PLOT was announced in advance on Radio Kudirat, the pirate station that Soyinka founded, reportedly with the backing of Scandinavian supporters...
...If it should increase, the government almost surely will call the elections off...
...On the other hand, this may be what the violent men want...
...Blood was splattered on the wall of the clinic...
...But he does...
...No one claimed credit for the bombings, but official speculation centered on the National Democratic Coalition, or NADECO, the best known organization opposing the military government...
...Since then the military government has certified five parties to contest further local elections in March...
...They fired seven shots through the back of the Mercedes, and then they sped away...
...THE FIRST TWO BOMB ATTACKS were aimed at the army colonel who is the military governor of the Lagos region...
...NADECO denied any involvement in the bombings, although it has a self-proclaimed armed wing...
...He also wrote a book that was featured on the cover of the Sunday Book Review of the Times...
...By virtually everyone's reckoning he is an able administrator and an honest man, and he is popular with Lagosians...
...The bombing attacks that Soyinka refused to condemn may have been inspired by left-wing revolutionary logic, but the attempted assassination of the anti-government opposition leader seemed bizarre...
...He has promised to move Nigeria to a democracy by next year, and while there is no guarantee he will do so, there are encouraging signs...
...there was an attempt to assassinate a leader of the anti-government opposition just before I left...
...It assumed that he would never condone bomb attacks against other Nigerians...
...National elections are scheduled for next year, and most Nigerians seem to expect them to take place...
...When BBC Radio asked him about the recent bombings in Lagos, he said, "I cannot condemn violence directed at Abacha's regime...
...It also said that the attempt would be made by soldiers from the Second Mechanized Division of the army...
...CONSEQUENTLY THE BOMB ATTACKS that Soyinka declines to condemn will not terminate the existence of the military government as he suggested...
...The third bombing was less discriminate...
...Nigerian politics are tortuous, and even the best informed Nigerian may not know how to explain them...
...It calls itself the National Liberation Council of Nigeria, or NALICON, and it has the same relationship to NADECO as the Irish Republican Army has to Sinn Fein...
...The only clear thing is that violent men want to stop Nigeria from becoming a democracy...
...like many other literary intellectuals, Soyinka believes that violence has its uses in politics...
...The army would not want Abacha to give up power if the country was being destabilized, and the only purpose violence might serve would be to prevent the transition to democracy...
...Nigeria held local elections last year...
...Sani Abacha, the Nigerian head of state...
...The great imponderable, however, is the violence...
...The IRA, however, is led by faceless men, while NALICON is led by Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel laureate in literature...
...As Adesanya was being driven from his law office in his Mercedes Benz, he was followed by gunmen in another automobile...
...The review did not associate Soyinka with violence, and it took him seriously as a moral thinker...
...SOYINKA, A SELF-EXILE, TAUGHT LAST YEAR in the Afro-American studies department at Harvard...
...A dreary historical pattern is reasserting itself in the largest country in Africa...
...And that organization, of course, is NALICON, while Abacha is Gen...
...Then the assassination attempt takes place on a crowded street in bright daylight by gunmen who are so dopey they wear their uniforms...
...Agents provocateur were a possibility, of course, although the only sure thing was that violent men wanted to stop democracy...
...There is no doubt that shots were fired, and that Adesanya was fortunate to escape unharmed, but other than that it was all murky...
...It said an attempt would be made to kill Abraham Adesanya, the 74-year-old deputy chairman of NADECO...
...It shattered an army bus that was passing by a hospital clinic, killing the two soldiers and injuring twenty-six more, as well as two civilians...
...Adesanya, who somehow was not hit, said afterwards that the market women who saw what had happened said the gunmen were all wearing uniforms...
...86 March 1997 • The American Spectator...
...The opposite is more likely to happen: if the bombings continue, they will prolong the government's existence...
...Four days later, the would-be assassins struck...
...Dissident politicians called for a boycott, but some 6o percent of those eligible to vote did so...
...An assassination is announced in advance, and the assassins are identified as soldiers...
...THE WHOLE EPISODE WAS STRANGE...
...Subsequently, Adesanya called a press conference, and announced the plot himself...
...I approve of action that is necessary to terminate the existence of the Abacha regime—so does any organization to which I belong...
...The bombing—the third carried out against the military in a month—may be thought of as the work of a political left, but the assassination attempt was more ambiguous...
...He said he had heard about it from Radio Kudirat...
Vol. 30 • March 1997 • No. 3
