According to Punch, the Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has said that he has no respect for Obasanjo, who he described as an indescribable liar.
Soyinka carpeted the former president on Friday night when he was responding to questions during a programme tagged: ‘An evening with Wole Soyinka’, organised by Globacom.
Asked to respond to Obasanjo’s assessment of him in the former president’s book titled ‘My Watch’, where he notes that Soyinka is good at hunting and wines but a political illiterate, Soyinka said that he was hardly bothered because he believed that Obasanjo was a liar.
Soyinka said, “Obasanjo is entitled to his opinion. But the question is: ‘Who respects the opinion of a liar?’
I can spend the whole night proving that he is a liar. Obasanjo was once described by an economist, the late Prof Ojetunji Aboyade, as an economic illiterate. They nearly ‘went into blow’ that night. It was Prof. Mabogunje who separated them, Punch reported Soyinka as saying.
“So, if an economic illiterate calls somebody a political illiterate, no problem at all.
“In ‘ My Watch’, Obasanjo told the first lie when he said he deplored lies. Anybody who said he never plotted to have an unconstitutional third term in office, even as a writer, I need a word to describe him.”
Punch also reported that the former President and the Nobel laureate have been in a running battle taking swipes at each other over a lingering issue between them. Obasanjo had once stated that Soyinka once vowed that the differences between the two of them would not be resolved on earth.
