Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has condemned the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation’s (NBC) recent decision to ban a song by veteran artist Eedris Abdulkareem, describing it as a dangerous return to censorship.
Abdulkareem’s latest song, Tell Your Papa, takes aim at President Bola Tinubu and his son, Seyi, over worsening economic conditions. The NBC barred the song from being aired, citing its “objectionable nature”—a move that has sparked widespread criticism.
Reacting from New York University in Abu Dhabi, Soyinka criticized the ban, saying it reflected a troubling pattern of suppressing critical voices. “Courtesy of an artist operating in a different genre – the cartoon – who sent me his recent graphic comment on the event, I learnt recently of a return to the culture of censorship with the banning of the product of a music artist, Eedris Abdulkareem.”
With irony, Soyinka added, “It is not only the allegedly offensive record that should be banned – the musician himself should be proscribed… Let’s simply go the whole hog!”
Though he admitted he hadn’t heard the song, Soyinka stressed that the principle of free expression must be upheld in any democracy. “It cannot be flouted. That, surely, is basic,” he said, noting that censorship often backfires and ends up boosting the artist. “Mr. Abdulkareem must be currently warbling his merry way all the way to the bank. I envy him.”
He also warned that governments which only accept praise and reject criticism are on a “downhill slide into the abyss.”
In the same statement, Soyinka mourned the mob killings in Edo State, where 19 people were recently lynched. He compared it to the 2022 killing of Deborah Samuel in Sokoto, whose killers went free.
“As long as the culture of impunity is given the sheerest strain of legitimacy… a reversion to brutish existence [will] become a nation’s stamp of identity,” he warned.
He called for accountability: “The culprits are in plain sight and so are witnesses. There can be no excuses.”
