Fascism comment: Chimamanda counters Soyinka, backs Datti Baba-Ahmed

Award-winning author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has faulted Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka for describing Labour Party’s vice-presidential candidate, Datti Baba-Ahmed’s comment on the general elections as fascist.

According to Chimamanda, she has a lot of respect for Soyinka, but strongly disagrees with his take on Baba-Ahmed’s comment.

She said this in an interview with Arise TV.

“I have a lot of respect for Prof. Soyinka, I admire him, I respect him as a thinker, as a writer, I think every one should read the The Man Died, Ake: The Memoir is beautiful, but at the same time, I disagree with him very strongly on this particular issue, and actually because I respect Prof. Soyinka so much, I went back and watch the interview, and I think fascist is a really strong word.

“We use it now to address this sort of authoritarianism that is often populist, and right-wing like Hungary, and even the former American president, and if you look at those situations, you can see why they have been termed fascist, and I didn’t see any reason Mr. Datti Baba-Ahmed’s interview would have been termed fascist.

“I think he was making a very strongly felt point about the election. I think a charitable way of reading Prof. Soyinka’s comments is that Professor Soyinka himself, I think it’s fair to say he is not given to restraint in language, in general, so maybe that’s where that word fascist came from.”

Recall Soyinka slammed the LP’s VP call to President Muhammadu Buhari and the Chief Justice not to swear-in Bola Tinubu, the president-elect.

Baba-Ahmed had insisted that declaring Tinubu a winner and issuing him a certificate of return was against the constitution.

Soyinka, in his reaction, described such statement as unacceptable because it alienates the people, and it is a ‘fascistic language.’Vanguard