Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has narrated how he was abducted and robbed in Bucharest, Romania, during his recent visit to attend the prestigious Sibiu International Theatre Festival (FITS).
Soyinka, who was invited as Guest of Honour at the festival by UNESCO Ambassador Simona-Mirela Miculescu, was to receive a star on the Walk of Fame. But his arrival in Bucharest quickly turned into a nightmare.
Speaking in an interview with PMNEWS on Tuesday, September 9, in Lagos, the Nobel Laureate recounted how, after landing at 12:10 a.m., he missed the party meant to pick him up at the airport and boarded what appeared to be an official taxi to his hotel.
Instead of taking him to Novotel, where he was scheduled to stay, the driver—later discovered to be part of a criminal gang—drove him to an isolated location. There, the driver attempted to extort him using a POS machine, forcing him to input his bank PIN.
“It was close to 1 a.m. when he stopped. I thought we were at the hotel, but suddenly he brought out a POS machine, hiding it from my view. He kept insisting, ‘Enter your PIN.’ It became a battle of wills inside the car, lasting 25 to 30 minutes. I deliberately entered the wrong PIN, playing for time, hoping someone would come along. But the area was completely deserted,” Soyinka said.
The encounter, which he described as “surreal,” left him imagining the worst. “Was it a gang-infested area? Why had he dropped me there? It was a weird and uncomfortable situation,” he added.
Eventually, Soyinka made it safely to his hotel and was later taken to Sibiu by festival organisers. He noted that while Romanian authorities and organisers were shocked by the incident, the follow-up was unsatisfactory. “I expected they would bring the felon to me for confrontation, but they seemed more interested in dousing the whole matter,” he said.
Although money was stolen, Soyinka stressed that the issue was larger than personal loss. “It was not just me as an individual who was assaulted. It was the whole community. For me, this is not about the money—it’s about crime and punishment, and a network that clearly preys on visitors under the guise of official taxi services.”
The Nobel Laureate revealed he has detailed the experience in a book, to get his mind off the matter, and it will be released soon.
