Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has said that re-election of President Goodluck Jonathan would have been “disastrous,” insisting that the President-elect, General Muhammadu Buhari, is better option.

He described Buhari as the better of the two evils, saying President Jonathan had been an unmitigated disaster and failure.

In a lecture he delivered, entitled: Predicting Nigeria, Electoral Ironies, at the Harvard University Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Soyinka said: “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.”

In what could pass as a damning verdict on the Jonathan administration, Soyinka said: “Nothing is more unworthy of leadership than to degrade a system by which one attains fulfilment, 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.”

On the pattern on voting by Igbo in the last election, the Nobel laureate said: “Igbo remained unrepentant and resolute towards their strategic objective of secession at worst or a Nigerian president of Igbo extraction at best,” adding: “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 Igbo stayed at home in a symbolic gesture to assert Biafran independence. The call was honoured by governors in the two principal Igbo states, though without fanfare.”

He stated that Igbo had become predictable “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.”

•Adapted from Daily Sun. Photo shows Soyinka.

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