Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka has described the Igbos as people who can be
predicted when it comes to voting. According to him, the Igbos vote
based on their stomach and have an incurable money mindedness. Prof.
Soyinka said this while delivering a lecture titled 'Predicting
Nigeria,
Electoral Ironies’ at Harvard University Hutchins Centre for African and
African American Research", in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
"Igbos remained
unrepentant and resolute towards their strategic objective of secession
at worst; or a Nigerian president of Igbo extraction at best,” he said
at the lecture which held on April 29.
"The climax of MASSOB’s war
against the Nigerian state was the call for
sit-ins and civil disobedience that shut down markets and public
services, as Igbos stayed at home in a symbolic gesture to assert
Biafran independence. The call was honoured by governors in the two
principal Ibo states, though without fanfare. The Igbos are probably the
only group of Nigerians that you can predict
with great accuracy whom they will vote for in an election, because
they tend to put their votes where their stomachs take them; suffering
as it were, from incurable money-mindedness, as they would stop at
nothing in their quest for personal financial gain. Muhammadu Buhari was
the better of the two evils as the incumbent president Goodluck Jonathan
had been an unmitigated disaster and failure. It was a painful decision
to tell people to vote Buhari, but the
country needed a new beginning. I was more against Jonathan, than I was
pro-Buhari.
“Nothing is more unworthy of leadership than to degrade a system by
which one attains fulfillment, and this is what the nation witnessed
time and time again under Jonathan, who was increasingly becoming
intolerant of opposition in an escalating streak of impunity and
authoritarian madness, which was most blatant and unconscionable. The
‘militricians’ – soldiers turned politicians in power – aren’t
looking for excellence; their civilian cohorts are worse. Short cuts and
how to circumvent the system for the profit of a few are the norm of
governance. Those who do honest work are derided as lacking the skill to
fit it. Ironically, things haven’t quite changed a bit after 16 years
of democracy in the country.” he said
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