To Kongi, with reverence and disquiet, By Osmund Agbo

I have struggled for some time to write this letter, and I wish there were a better way to reach you, Prof. It is not because I have ever doubted the urgency of what I feel compelled to say. Rather, it is because, as the low man on the totem pole, I am acutely conscious of the audacity involved in responding to a sage. One does not casually engage someone whose words have shaped one’s thinking and whose stature has commanded one’s admiration for decades.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about telling an elder you revere that, on certain matters, you see things differently. It feels almost filial, like telling one’s father, with as much tact as one can muster, that he may have taken a turn he did not intend to take. Yet perhaps true reverence does not demand silence. Sometimes, it demands the courage to speak honestly, especially when those who admire him most may be too afraid to do so.

And then there is the small matter that we are both chiefs from storied kingdoms… hehehe! I know, right? Perhaps that, too, makes this conversation a little more complicated and, at the same time, a little more familiar. Chiefs, after all, ought not to stand by in silence when another chief appears to have misread the room. We may admire the Bùbá, respect the Abẹ̀tí-ajá, and honour the pedigree, but there are moments when someone must still find the courage to say, “Bàbá, ẹ má ṣọ́ra kí ẹ má bà a kọsẹ̀.”

By the way, I have been wondering about the curious appearance of the “Reverend” in this whole affair. I have always imagined Kongi to be far more at home in the company of Orishas than clerics, so I confess to being somewhat mystified by the circumstances in which this particular epistle came to be inspired by the prompting of a priest of a foreign God.

You may not know but the last time I wrote you a tribute, some of your Boys could scarcely contain their excitement. They fell over themselves trying to welcome me into the fold. A few even greeted me with an enthusiastic “Ahoy!” I decided to go with the flow rather than explain that they had probably mistaken admiration for membership. I hope that this time around, they will not brand me a killjoy and demand to be appeased with nothing less than my severed head.

I have now read your letter in its entirety. And, Professor, I must confess that I once again found myself wrestling with its characteristic turgidity. This is not a complaint. Anyone who has read you over the years knows that Soyinka does not merely write a sentence. He gives the sentence a passport, escorts it through customs, sends it wandering across three continents, and then summons it back to give an account of its travels. But beneath the literary acrobatics lies a serious matter, and I believe it deserves an equally serious conversation.

You lament the degeneration of public discourse and describe Nigeria as a “Republic of Liars.” On that point, I have little quarrel with you. Our public conversation has become toxic, vicious, and increasingly indifferent to the discipline of facts. People manufacture statements, attribute them to public figures, circulate them through social media, and then become incandescently outraged by the very inventions they have helped create. DISINGENUOUS!

As an Igbo, I cringe when I hear people casually hurl words like “bigot” at you. It is all the more painful because history records that, at a time when silence would have been far easier, you stood up against the genocide in Biafra and paid a terrible personal price for doing so, including the sacrifice of your own freedom. Ẹ má bínú o!

But, Professor, truth be told , this is hardly a new Nigerian affliction. We have always loved to sling mud, but you were largely immune to it, and deservedly so, by virtue of what you represented. What has changed, however, is that you now appear to many Nigerians to occupy a different position from the one in which they have historically placed you. And that, perhaps, is how a part of that immunity vanished.

But I tell you, Professor, I know why those caged birds sing. Your generation had the best of Nigeria, yet you still protested. Imagine those born after all these locust years, with nothing to look forward to, no dreams to nurture, and no future to anticipate. The late Pius Adesanmi christened them the Impella generation; they were thrown into the wild almost immediately after parturition. One cannot even begin to fathom the anger, frustration, and profound sense of betrayal they must feel, and hence their lashing out. You became collateral damage in their struggle to rid the system of those they now believe you are in cahoots with.

For most of my adult life, Nigerians regarded you as the quintessential independent voice. You criticized governments because you believed they deserved criticism, not because you belonged to the opposition. You could quarrel with one administration today and another tomorrow without anyone seriously imagining that Soyinka had enlisted in somebody’s political camp. That perception, I fear, has shifted.

Perhaps that judgment is unfair to you. Perhaps you have genuinely altered your method. Perhaps, as you explained in your letter, you have simply concluded that there are more consequential things to do than answer every political provocation hurled in your direction. You have every right to make that choice. But perception matters. And in public life, optics often acquire a reality of their own.

When a man who has spent a lifetime subjecting governments to relentless scrutiny suddenly appears more measured when the government in question is headed by a personal friend, people will inevitably begin to ask questions. They may be mistaken about your motives but their questions are not entirely inexplicable.

This is where I fear your present trajectory may become unnecessarily damaging to the extraordinary legacy you have spent lifetime constructing. Professor, forgive me for saying this, but portions of your letter reminded me of Chief Obasanjo’s repeated denials concerning his aborted third-term ambitions. The more emphatically the denial was repeated, the more Nigerians seemed to discuss the very thing being denied. Sometimes, Professor, the more energetically one insists that there is no elephant in the room, the more determined everyone becomes to locate the elephant.

And then there is Peter Obi.

I noticed that, among the many alleged falsehoods you chose to confront, you devoted considerable attention to the claim that you said Peter Obi should not be allowed to contest. I understand why that would anger you. A man who has spent a lifetime defending democratic principles would understandably recoil at being portrayed as someone who wishes to prevent a political opponent from participating in an election. I have no reason to believe that you said such a thing. In fact, I can bet with my life that you didn’t.

You did, however, concede something else: that you have expressed the view that Peter Obi is unfit to lead Nigeria. That is your right but it is also an opinion. And here, Professor, is where I think you may be underestimating the reaction. Once a public figure expresses a political judgment, particularly one as consequential as who is or is not fit to lead an entire nation, people will inevitably ask the most elementary of questions: WHY?

Some will agree with you. Others will disagree. Some will do so respectfully. Others, particularly the Gen Zs and millennials raised in the gladiatorial arena of social media, will disagree with the subtlety of a chainsaw. That, unfortunately, comes with the territory.

And some will inevitably compare the candidate you have rejected with the candidate with whom you have maintained a longstanding friendship. They will ask how you arrived at the conclusion that one is unsuitable, while the other appears to have earned your patience, indulgence, or silence. You may regard the question as unfair, but it is hardly mysterious.

Professor, there is another point I hope you will consider. There is no dignity to be found in publicly punching at a man who has shown you nothing but grace and deference. Since Obi made no effort to fight back, an unpaid, unruly, and vicious army rose to his defence. As long as you keep punching, I am afraid, they will keep dragging you along. Public sympathy rarely gravitates toward the person perceived to be wielding the larger stick.

There is another distinction worth making. Peter Obi cannot reasonably be held responsible for every person who calls himself an “Obidient.” That movement, like every large political constituency, contains the reasonable and the unreasonable, the thoughtful and the frivolous, the serious and the utterly unserious. It would be uncharitable to make the man himself answer for every foolish thing said in his name.

A lot of activists wonder how a billionaire businessman who never had to choke on police tear gas throughout his life somehow became the face of a national liberation struggle. I know, and I wonder too. But, Professor, you see, God chooses whom He chooses to lead, by His own criteria. It may sound counterintuitive, but how do we litigate that? I liken the choice of Obi to the way a woman chooses whom to love. It is not that she does not appreciate the sacrifices of others; she is simply loyal to her feelings.

I believe we also sometimes forget to reckon with the fact that the Obidient movement has very little to do with Obi as a person. It is, in large measure, an expression of Nigerian youths venting their anger and frustration against a system and a country they believe have been profoundly unfair to them. They adopted Peter Obi as a vessel through which they might overcome that system, but the movement is hardly about him.

Besides, Professor, you have spent too much of your life confronting governments and institutions to allow an amorphous army of social media rats, unworthy of your spit, to become the occasion for diminishing your godlike stature. And this brings me to the uncomfortable subject of friendship.

Professor, Nigerians know the history, notwithstanding whatever attempts may have been made by the powers that be to diminish its significance. Your relationship with the man you affectionately refer to as oloríkunkun (“the stubborn one”) stretches back decades, including the dark years of resistance to Abacha. You both lived through exile, danger, and the uncertainties of a regime that showed little mercy to its adversaries. You have also spoken of the assistance he and his wife extended to you and your family during one of the more difficult periods of your life.

That history matters. Friendship matters. Gratitude matters. Indeed, friendship can create some of the most difficult moral obligations precisely because the debt is emotional rather than financial. An old friend does not have to ask you to defend him. Sometimes the friendship itself summons the instinct to do so. That is why the old admonition to choose one’s friends carefully contains more wisdom than we sometimes are willing to acknowledge.

Enemies attack from the front. Friends can, under certain circumstances, place you in situations where you discover only later that loyalty has become an expensive currency. Every profound friendship carries some version of an implicit “I owe you.” The danger begins when that debt interferes with the freedom to say, “My friend, you are wrong.” I am not suggesting that this is what has happened to you.

I am saying only that this is what many Nigerians now believe has happened.

And that distinction matters.

You have earned the right to be judged by the totality of your life’s record, not by the political temperature surrounding a single presidency. You have fought too many battles against bad government to allow the final chapters of your extraordinary public life to be interpreted primarily through your relationship with one president. That would be a cruel irony.

You once taught generations of Nigerians that intellectual independence means retaining the courage to stand against power, even when the person exercising that power happens to be someone you know and, perhaps, even someone you love. Perhaps, then, the greatest service you can render yourself at this stage is to stop fighting battles that diminish rather than enlarge you. Professor, you have nothing left to prove.

You have already fought the good fight. You have endured dictatorship, exile, persecution, disappointment, and political betrayal. You have written enough to occupy several lifetimes. You have earned the privilege of deciding where to expend whatever ammunition remains. So, please, Professor, reserve some of that ammunition for the things worthy of Soyinka.

Nigeria needs your literary energy. It needs your historical memory. It needs your irreverence, your courage, your inconvenient questions, and that extraordinary capacity you have always possessed to make power uncomfortable. But perhaps it does not need you perpetually embroiled in every political quarrel on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever the latest battalion of digital combatants has established its headquarters. You reminded us in your letter that silence can itself be productive. I agree.

And perhaps you, of all people, should not have to spend your twilight years explaining why you remain the same man who spent his youth confronting power. I say this not as a critic standing outside the gate, but as one of the many Nigerians who still hold you in extraordinary regard.

We may disagree with you. We may question you. We may even tell you, respectfully, when we believe you have taken a wrong turn. But that is precisely because we still care about the man whose voice taught generations of Nigerians that no government, no president, and no powerful individual is entitled to our unquestioning obedience. You have given Nigeria more than your fair share.

Prof., perhaps I should remind you of the events of 15 October, 1965, when, at the age of 31, a mystery gunman managed to infiltrate the heavily guarded premises of the NBC, causing quite a stir. You were protesting the massively rigged Western Regional election, which favoured Chief SL Akintola’s government, and famously commanded: “Akintola, go! Drop your stolen mandate, leave town, and take your reprobates with you.” Today, I would only encourage you to leave those reprobates behind. All they do is dress you up in garlands, only to turn around and use your prized image to clean up after themselves. I believe that was why Achebe avoided them like the plague and repeatedly declined their coronation.

Please do not allow friendship, politics, or the passing provocations of social media to consume the final chapters of that remarkable journey you have spent a lifetime writing. Leave the politicians to their politics. Leave the quarrels of the moment to the moment. Give us Kongi.

I believe I have said what I needed to say, perhaps imperfectly, but with sincerity and profound respect. Having said it, I find that the weight in my heart is lighter.

Whatever else may be said, I hope these words are received in the spirit in which they are offered: not as an act of rebellion against the elder, but as an act of loyalty to the man whose voice taught many of us to question, to resist, and to speak.

With the utmost respect Prof. Always.

Osmund Agbo is a medical doctor, author, and the 2026 recipient of the Thabo Mbeki Prize for Scholarship and Public Service