Former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, has made a life-long career of compulsive lying, Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, claimed on Wednesday.

In an abridged response to the former president’s scathing delivery on the literary giant in his latest memoir “My Watch", Soyinka went to town with his age-long social adversary, lampooning him as one bedeviled with the enigmatic spirit of legendary fable-teller, the late D.O. Fagunwa.

He disclosed of peace efforts by unnamed peacemakers to smoothen sustained rough edges between him and Obasanjo, before the latest attack by the former president which, he noted, went well with him, as he was ready for the fresh ding-dong which would put every reconciliatory plan in abeyance, particularly a burgeoning collaborative plan with Obasanjo Centre.

Parodying Obasanjo as an over-grown child of circumstance, Soyinka described his fellow Egbaman as “an incorrigible addictive moralist, who lies through situations to put others down by playing the divinely-appointed watchman and trumps up his own importance and achievements by playing the unparalleled achiever.”

While promising a fuller version of his response, the literary giant asked the former president to remember the fictional character, Iku (Death) in Fagunwa’s Igbo Olodumare, wondering about Obasanjo’s knack for playing the Great Immortal. Soyinka said that were he to pursue every libelous statement of the former president against him, such would form an independent volume of The Nigerian Law Report.

The response entitled “WATCH AND PRAY, WATCH AND PREY!” reads in part: “I had fully attuned myself to the fact that our Owu retiree soldier and prolific author is an infliction that those of us who share the same era and nation space must learn to endure.

“However, it does appear that there is no end to this individual’s capacity for infantile mischief, and for needless, mind-boggling provocations, such as his recent ‘literary’ intrusion on my peace.

“Perhaps I ought to interrupt myself here with an apology to some mutual acquaintances – ‘blessed peacemakers’ and all – especially in this season of ‘peace and goodwill to all men’. Please know that your efforts have not been entirely in vain.

“I had a cordial exchange with Obasanjo over the phone recently – engineered by himself, his ground staff and/or a chance visitor – when I had cause to visit his Presidential Laundromat for the first time ever. During that exchange, I complemented him on making some quite positive use of landed property that was acquired under morally dubious circumstances, and blatantly developed through a process that I denounced as ‘executive extortionism’.

“To return to our main man, and friendly interventionists, you may like to note that I went so far as to engage him in light banter, stating that some of his lesser sins would be forgiven him for that creative conversion of the landscape – a conversation that he shortly afterwards delightedly shared with at least three mutual acquaintances.

“I promised a follow-up visit to view some mysterious rock script whose existence, he informed me, was uncovered by workers during ground clearing. The exchange was, in short, as good as ‘malice towards none’ that any polemicist could hope to contribute to the ongoing season of peace and goodwill. Obviously that visit will not now take place, any more than the pursuit of vague notions of some creative collaboration with his Centre that began to play around my mind...

“D.O. Fagunwa, the pioneer Yoruba novelist, was a compulsive moralist. I suspect that he may have exerted some influence on our garrulous general, resulting in his pupil’s tedious, misapplied and self-serving deluge of moralising. It seems quite likely indeed that the ghostly, moralistic hand of Fagunwa reached out from the Great Beyond, sat his would-be competitor forcefully before a mirror and bade him write what he saw in that image. I invoke Fagunwa because, at his commemorative colloquium in Akure in August last year, I drew my audience’s attention to a remarkable passage in Fagunwa’s Igbo Olodumare.”

•Adapted from Nigerian Tribune. Photo shows Obasanjo's controversial book.

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