Africa's Nobel Laureate have released a statement over the growing scourge of terrorism in Northern Nigeria.
Africa's literature giant, Wole Soyinka, is unhappy with the current situation in which Nigeria wallows.
Over the last month,vicious attacks by terrorist Islamic sect, Boko Haram, have left scores dead, many abducted, and thousands injured. In a message published on Facebook, Soyinka, who is revered by the African populace, have taken a stand against it, while taking swipes at the Nigerian Government. Read his full statement below.
Over the last month,vicious attacks by terrorist Islamic sect, Boko Haram, have left scores dead, many abducted, and thousands injured. In a message published on Facebook, Soyinka, who is revered by the African populace, have taken a stand against it, while taking swipes at the Nigerian Government. Read his full statement below.
The
sheer weight of indignation and revulsion of most of Nigerian humanity
at the recent Boko Haram atrocity in Yobe is most likely to have
overwhelmed a tiny footnote to that outrage, small indeed, but of an
inversely proportionate significance. This was the name of the hospital
to which the survivors of the massacre were taken. That minute detail
calls into question, in a gruesome but chastening way, the entire
ethical landscape into which this nation has been forced by insensate
leadership. It is an uncanny coincidence, one that I hope the new
culture of ‘religious tourism’, spearheaded by none other than the
nation’s president in his own person, may even come to recognize as a
message from unseen forces.
For
the name of that hospital, it is reported, is none other than that of
General Sanni Abacha, a vicious usurper under whose authority the lives
of an elected president and his wife were snuffed out. Assassinations –
including through bombs cynically ascribed to the opposition – became
routine. Under that ruler, torture and other forms of barbarism were
enthroned as the norm of governance. To round up, nine Nigerian
citizens, including the writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-wiwa, were
hanged after a trial that was stomach churning even by the most
primitive standards of judicial trial, and in defiance of the
intervention of world leadership. We are speaking here of a man who
placed this nation under siege during an unrelenting reign of terror
that is barely different from the current rampage of Boko Haram. It is
this very psychopath that was recently canonized by the government of
Goodluck Jonathan in commemoration of one hundred years of Nigerian
trauma.
It has been
long a-coming. One of the broadest avenues in the nation’s capital,
Abuja, bears the name of General Sanni Abacha. Successive governments
have lacked the political courage to change this signpost – among
several others – of national self degradation and wipe out the memory of
the nation’s tormentor from daily encounter. Not even Ministers for the
Federal Capital territory within whose portfolios rest such
responsibilities, could muster the temerity to initiate the process and
leave the rest to public approbation or repudiation. I urged the need of
this purge on one such minister, and at least one Head of State. That
minister promised, but that boast went the way of Nigerian electoral
boast. The Head of State murmured something about the fear of offending
‘sensibilities’. All evasions amounted to moral cowardice and a doubling
of victim trauma. When you proudly display certificates of a nation’s
admission to the club of global pariahs, it is only a matter of time
before you move to beatify them as saints and other paragons of human
perfection. What the government of Goodluck Jonathan has done is to
scoop up a century’s accumulated degeneracy in one preeminent symbol,
then place it on a podium for the nation to admire, emulate and even –
worship.
There is a
deplorable message for coming generations in this governance aberration
that the entire world has been summoned to witness and indeed, to
celebrate. The insertion of an embodiment of ‘governance by terror’ into
the company of committed democrats, professionals, humanists and human
rights advocates in their own right, is a sordid effort to grant a
certificate of health to a communicable disease that common sense
demands should be isolated. It is a confidence trick that speaks volumes
of the perpetrators of such a fraud. We shall pass over – for instance –
the slave mentality that concocts loose formulas for an Honours List
that automatically elevate any violent bird of passage to the status of
nation builders who may, or may not be demonstrably motivated by genuine
love of nation. According generalized but false attributes to known
killers and treasury robbers is a disservice to history and a
desecration of memory. It also compromises the future. This failure to
discriminate, to assess, and thereby make it possible to grudgingly
concede that even out of a ‘doctrine of necessity’ – such as military
dictatorship – some demonstrable governance virtue may emerge, reveals
nothing but national self-glorification in a moral void, the breeding
grounds of future cankerworm in the nation’s edifice.
Such
abandonment of moral rigour comes full circle sooner or later. The
survivors of a plague known as Boko Haram, students in a place of
enlightenment and moral instruction, are taken to a place of healing
dedicated to an individual contagion – a murderer and thief of no
redeeming quality known as Sanni Abacha, one whose plunder is still
being pursued all over the world and recovered piecemeal by
international consortiums – at the behest of this same government which
sees fit to place him on the nation’s Roll of Honour! I can think of
nothing more grotesque and derisive of the lifetime struggle of several
on this list, and their selfless services to humanity. It all fits. In
this nation of portent readers, the coincidence should not be too
difficult to decipher.
I reject my share of this national insult
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