Nobel Prize Winner Wole Soyinka on Friday offered presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari qualified support of his quest, as he rejected President GoodluckJonathan’s claims to re-electability.
“The clock of Change cannot tick sufficiently fast,” he said with just one week to the election, but warned that Nigeria faced a difficult and queer challenge.
“There are no blacks and whites,” he pronounced. “It is not a contest between saints and demons, not one between salvation and damnation. If anything, it is closer to a fork in the road where uncertainty lurks - whichever choice is made.”
He questioned where the hopes of a Buhari presidency may lead, in view of the resentment of his previous leadership with its record of “grievous assaults against Nigerian humanity, with a landscape of broken lives that continues to lacerate collective memory.” 
He wondered whether Nigeria could hope, in that regard, that the All Progressives Congress candidate could be held to have been politically “born-again”?
“It is pointlessly, and dangerously provocative to present General Buhari as something that he probably was not,” Soyinka wrote. “It is however just as purblind to insist that he has not demonstrably striven to become what he most glaringly was not, to insist that he has not been chastened by intervening experience and – most critically - by a vastly transformed environment – both the localized and the global.”
In that consideration, he recalled that Nigerians have been deceived before, drawing attention to an unnamed “former ruler,” who, having been presumed to have been “purged and transformed by a close encounter with death, and imprisonment, has turned out to be an embodiment of incorrigibility on several fronts, including a contempt for law and constitution.”
Soyinka, who was most probably alluding to President Olusegun Obasanjo, asked in the case of Buhari, “Would it be different this time round?”
Calling for vigilance over Buhari’s candidature, he said, “Whatever demons got into a contestant to declare the spread of Sharia throughout the nation his life mission must be exorcised – indeed, are presumed to be already exorcised. Never again must any leader ban the discussion of democratic restoration in the public arena. Nor must we ever again witness the execution – even imprisonment! - of a citizen under retroactive laws.”
He noted Buhari’s persistence as a presidential candidate, and warned him about the debt he owes Nigeria if she took a chance on him.
“This persistent candidate seeks return, but let him understand that it can only be as a debtor to the past, and that the future cannot wait to collect,” he declared. “If this collective leap of faith is derided, repudiated or betrayed under a renewed immersion in the ambiance of power or retrogressive championing, of a resumption of clearly repudiated social directions, we have no choice but to revoke an unspoken pact and resume our march to that yet elusive space of freedom, however often interrupted, and by whatever means we can humanly muster. And if in the process, the consequence is national hara-kiri, no one can say that there had been no deluge of warnings.”
Restating the failure of Mr. Jonathan’s leadership, Soyinka posed one final question about the Sword of Damocles that hangs over Jonathan’s head in the form of his abandonment of the Chibok girls who were abducted last April.
“If you had received news of your daughter’s kidnapping, how long would it take you to spring to action?” he asked of Mr. Jonathan. “Instantly? One day? Two? Three? A week? Or maybe TEN days?”
