One of the reasons why I struggled to be a good student (not a brilliant one) in school is that I do not advert my mind to simple things. That reduces my capacity to appreciate details around me. How could I possibly tell anyone that I never knew I share the same month of December with Hon. Wale Akinterinwa until Hon Yemi Olowolabi told me? That made me an Olodo rabata…

More than the above, if I could turn the hands of the clock, I would have wished I met you earlier in my political or professional journey in life. I am sure my story which has been of pains and anguish, of use and dump (despite my best efforts), would have been truly different.

Since, I met you, you seemed a complex phenomenon but a simple puzzle to decode. Your definition of life and relationship is of mutuality and not servitude.

During the last political process I tried to process you and navigate your persona using various variables essentially based on previous personal experiences. Despite working very closely with you, I maintained a dose of sustained distance from you to reduce the incidence of another heart break or of ” stories that touch the heart”.

In our clime, leadership is seen from the prism of generational servitude by followers and of maniacal demand for loyalty by leaders. To many it is an offence to disagree or have contrary views, but to you, it is the virtue of strength in any group. On many occasions, you are fond of asking ” what’s the opposite view”. If we say none, you will tell us, we do not have a finished product yet. Let’s think further”. Your search for an alternative view strengthens group solidarity and comradeire.

Unlike you, many leaders see followership only from the myth of what they benefit from me as a leader. You are not like that.
For you, leadership and followership stems from a commonality of purpose, a duality of efforts and a joint synergy of each others pains and triumphs.

You are a leader with emparthy, you are a common man with so much uncommon virtues. You seem distanced yet you are closer to events than could be imagined. You are in a constant search for opportunities for people and you live a life of essence to those you know. You live a life of simple actions moulded in great monuments. Not many are that blessed to know the “Essential WA”.

Our leader, friend and brother, as you clock a year older this Thursday, I am happy to be part of your journey of life and will be for years to come.

Happy born day in advance our own Ajanga.

**Sola Ajisafe, lawyer, journalist and Political Strategist, is the Programme Director of the WA Political Group.**

In the last few days certain conversations are been introduced into the political space by some janjaweed and jankariwo thinkers in respect of Mr. Wale Akinterinwa (WA) with respect to his political decisions or likely moves towards the November election.

Aside from what has been said or imagined after the primaries by those who are afraid of his political status and standing in Ondo State politics, his absence at the Southern Senatorial rally at Ore was interpreted to mean the road to a loss of the November 16, Governorship election by our party, the APC.
When that narration did not fly, a new and ” improved lie” was introduced suggesting that he has instructed his supporters to vote for the New Nigeria People’s Party at the election.

Contrary to these false information baked in some hidden covens, released into the airwaves and circulating on social media, it is pertinent to state that Wale Akinterinwa did not direct and would never direct his supporters to vote for the candidate of the New Nigeria People’s Party or any other party in the coming election.

This baseless claim is a deliberate attempt to discredit WA and to cause confusion among his supporters in particular and the APC family in general.

It is a fact that in every political season there are always many conversations. Among the dominant conversation in Ondo State this season is WA and the WA Team . A careful look at the WA team will reveal that it has the largest concentration of the organic members of the progressives in the APC which makes them the landlords or the authentic Aborigines of the party. What this means is that we have no where to go and no condition or situation can make us work against our party. It is not even in our character.

We may be hurt or angry about a situation, but we are always in control of our emotions. We are molded and schooled to always look at the bigger picture. That’s why we are proud of the phrase ” My Party is My Party”. That is, no matter what, our party’s interest is above and larger than every other interest.

Let it be known also that within the WA team, we consider electoral contests and party affairs as family matters which could be contentious but which must be resolved one way or the other in brotherly love for the benefit of the super structure, the party’s interest. While we feel embittered, unhappy and disappointed at the way the primary turned out, it never took us a long time to accept the verdicts of the party while we reconciled within ourselves that on no account should we raise any negative step against our party. There is always another day and another opportunity in politics. Why should we break the pot that holds the water? It’s not our ways.

It must also be noted that we recognize the fact that, while there is a beneficiary of the whole exercise being the candidate of our party and the flag bearer, he is just the symbol of our collective struggle towards the election. The ultimate test and focus of all party members is that his party succeeds in an election. Many of us have stayed too much in opposition that we cannot afford to become opposition politician in Ondo State in February 2025. It is not only politically undesirable but affliction shall not arise a second time and thunder does not strike a point twice.

So, for anyone to imagine that WA will give instructions that his group within APC to work against the party is to show the hollowness of some people and to think that even if such instruction is given, some of us will obey it, is a crude thought.

Let it be known that across the various Committees that were set up, our members have been involved and participating actively and ready to do more for the success of our party in the election. For instance, immediately, I got to know I was a member of the Protocol Committee on the eve of the visit to Akure South, I reached out to Hon Alex Kalejaiye and Hon. Olajide. I was physically present at the campaign at the Deji’s Palace, NEPA Roundabout and at Oda. I have made some inputs into the working of the Committee through Hon. Olajide and ready to make more. By Tuesday, we would be on the road again. Our own Yemi Olowolabi is totally involved in the work of the media and the candidate of our party is aware of his efforts already. The same thing goes for other members of the WA Team at various levels. So who are those that will be behind or vote for NNPP?

If WA has not been physically present, it is the height of excessive malady for anyone to conjure this type of insidious thought. The fact that many of his supporters have been making contributions should kill the wrongful narrative of antagonism towards the party during the election.

WA is the head of our group within the larger APC. He is the aggregation of our political interest. He is totally committed to our party in the election through the mandate given to our flag bearer His Excellency Lucky Orimisan Aiyedatiwa whose election on November 16, 2024 is a history waiting to happen.

I must say that we are not unaware of the source of this snide side talks are coming from. We are also not unaware of it’s intended threats and implications. Let it be known that we have the courage to say those threats and challenges pales into insignificance with the victory that would be achieved in November. We have the tenacity and the courage to see through all these threats to our collective political interest in the WA Team sooner than expected.

In conclusion we urge all supporters of WA and our party to remain vigilant and disregard misinformation spread by mischief makers. Let’s focus on promoting factual information and maintaining a united front in our political endeavors.

As we march towards the election, we would walk hand in hand and side by side to an assured victory.

In the interim, let the right and proper conversation ennure while the “jedijedi” and ” penkelemesi” conversationists continue in their forlorn narratives.

Please note that For This Election Let Us Stay Informed, Stay Vigilant.

Sola Ajisafe, Esq
Director of Programmes WA Team (Member Protocol Committee of the Campaign Council).

When Oluwole Akinwande Babatunde SOYINKA, Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature, clocked 80 in 2014, this essay raised an 80-cannon salute in his honour as one of Africa’s most enigmatic pathfinder.

At 90, the bard remains a torch-bearer for continental excellence and an inspirational global export from Africa to the world.

The ‘90’ volley count is an intentional multiple of the traditional 21-gun salute in recognition of his exceptional humanity and an acknowledgment of Ogun, his companion deity.

In the African literary precinct, where minds form thoughts and thoughts mold minds, Wole Soyinka, until perhaps another revelation in his class, will remain the definitive Africa’s confounding literary enigma and the actual definition of literature itself for eons to come.

Granted that Kongi himself is not given to wanton adulation or competitive overgeneralization, especially the typically African tendency to rank, I am not Kongi and neither is this bias without basis – or reckless without a just cause.

There were great African writers before Soyinka happened to Africa. Some wrote in their indigenous languages and as a result, had a restricted audience.

There were and there are still great African writers who were contemporaries of Soyinka. Many although contemporaries of Soyinka, wrote in the language of yore leaving the reader with the literary taste that the writer was attempting to re-create the African past. Not Soyinka.

He communicated in the contemporary language of his time and with such suaveness that both awe and appeal. There will continue to be great African writers after Soyinka. Soyinka is however not just a great African writer. Neither is Kongi just another literary icon. He is literature. His life sealed and cemented his place in African history. Soyinka’s being has come to represent a theatre in 3D as his very life embodies the very substance great dramas are made of. At a relatively young age, when many feared to dare, Kongi , a one-man battalion stormed the broadcasting house in the then Western region of Nigeria, and successfully replaced the recorded lies of one of the thieving politicians at the time, with his. That was Soyinka, literature in motion.

By the time the Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria were locked in a titanic survival battle with the side claiming to represent a united Nigeria, Soyinka saw through the charade of the kind of unity on offer and dared to embrace a destiny in opposition to the leading tendencies back then – he backed the right of the Igbo people to self-determination if that was what they desired as a people. The core of his stance was very simple, the Igbos had the inalienable right as humans to determine how they would want to exist as a people.

For so daring, Soyinka was hunted, hounded, arrested, and imprisoned. That was Soyinka, literature in motion.
Then came the Nobel prize. Prizes, especially super-prestigious types of the calibre of the Nobel have a way of changing their beneficiaries. Most would begin to hang out only with the rulers while then doing their bidding. Not Soyinka. Rather, Soyinka became more Soyinka. From the battle to erase apartheid in South Africa, to the precarious and dangerous challenge he mounted against vicious military rulers, Soyinka was at the forefront of civil action for the protection of the ordinary people from arbitrary rule of the juntas. How the Ibrahim Babangida government loved to dismiss Soyinka as a dramatist! But the dramatist was one of the forces who ensured Babangida was forced into submission and had to abdicate in a hurry when the hearth became too hot. That was Soyinka, literature in motion.
Soyinka in the public service. Before the ultimate showdown with Babangida, Kongi, following a call akin to an ‘if you know how to do it, then come do it’ dare from Babangida, accepted to establish and serve as the foundation Chairman of the Federal Road Safety Corp (FRSC). Many had expected the crusader to fail at this assignment. Not Soyinka. As Nigerians would still admit today, Soyinka’s era in the road safety corps remains a watershed in the nation’s history. That was the era when no officer of the Corp would collect bribes from anybody even though their sister organization, the Nigeria Police, was notorious at the time for only two things – bribery and corruption. As Dele Momodu recently revealed, when an attempt was made to soil Soyinka’s reputation with a smear campaign, news hounds from the African Concord were dispatched to get the juicy details of the ’embezzlement charge’, Kongi, though 28 years behind the passage of the Freedom of Information Act, personally wrote to the bankers of the FRSC with the instruction to make all their accounts public! That was Soyinka, literature in motion.
While Wole Soyinka’s predilection as signposted by these experiences is about integrity, what is right, and what is just, irrespective of tribe, race, religion, or social status – his later life would cement his place as an avowed advocate of universal justice – no matter who the victim is. This is where he stands shoulder higher than any of his contemporaries. While some of them were perennially locked in the defense of their kin, Soyinka’s mind transcended Ake or his Oduduwa clan and captured the universal spirit that defined and separated truly great beings from the rest.
Soyinka the philosopher could be glimpsed from The Interpreters, where the bard sought to know whether it was appropriate to insist on a spot in the water whereas the water as an entity was definitely constantly mowing. In the trial of Brother Jero, it would be difficult to resist a good laugh as the prophet successfully predicted the promotion of Chume to Chief Messenger with an additional prophecy still that he would become Chief Clerk. Soyinka in that work clearly saw tomorrow as every antic of the main character has now become the trademark and a powerful tool through which self-professed spokesmen for God swindle unsuspecting folks in 2014 Nigeria. Soyinka inspires. Any student activist in the past 30 years, would either have used or have heard the famous words “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny” taken from The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka. It remains the number one rallying cry to free the souls of the undecided for battle against forces of repression in Nigeria’s unending Armageddon of civil unrest against abusive use of power and positions against the interests of the masses. Of Soyinka, John Updike in Hugging the Shore (New York: Knopf, 1983) says ‘he is remembered in Nigeria with awe, both for a political boldness that landed him in prison and for a commanding intellect that is manifest in every genre he tackles’. And what do you make of the poem, Telephone Conversation? Read the last verse, again;
“THAT’S DARK, ISN’T IT?” “Not altogether.
Facially, I am brunette, but madam, you should see
The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
Are a peroxide blonde. Friction, caused—
Foolishly, madam—by sitting down, has turned
My bottom raven black—One moment madam!”—sensing
Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap
About my ears—“Madam,” I pleaded, “wouldn’t you rather
See for yourself?”
– Wole Soyinka in Telephone Conversation

90-cannon salute to Soyinka! The African god of literature is 90. Iba!

By Olatunji Ariyomo (@olatunjiariyomo)