Nigeria’s Nobel laureate for literature and civil rights activist, Wole Soyinka has said Nigerians must show a Nelson Mandela-like ability to forgive President-elect Muhammadu Buhari’s past as an iron-fisted military ruler.

“I criticized him for certain acts during his stint as a military dictator,” Soyinka, the 80-year-old playwright and poet, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV Africa on Wednesday at his hillside home in Abeokuta. “But I also insist that it’s about time we try our best to be mini-Mandelas, to learn there’s a moment when we must put the past aside.”

Buhari’s 20-month term as the military head of state of Africa’s biggest oil producer when he overthrew an elected government in 1983 included a campaign against “indiscipline,” in which the press was muzzled, hundreds of politicians, businessmen and journalists were jailed and police officers ordered to hit people who didn’t line up to wait for the bus.

By voting in Buhari, a 72-year-old northern Muslim who describes himself as a “converted democrat,” many Nigerians have shown an ability to look past his earlier misdeeds, said Soyinka.

He also told the international broadcaster that some of his friends in the All Progressives Congress and his own observations suggest Buhari was “struggling to be a party man.”

Soyinka, who admitted that he hasn’t felt this optimistic about Nigeria since the end of military rule in 1999, said he hopes not to be disappointed again.

“Against my rational instincts, I believe that we have here a genuine case of a born-again democrat,” he said. Ultimately, “the real heroes of this exercise have been the Nigerian people and that gingers me up.”

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