Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has condemned the President Muhammadu Buhari administration for “erstwhile language of complacency and accommodativeness in the face of unmerited brutalisation.’’
He said that killings by herdsmen had been on because the federal government had done little to contain them.
Soyinka was reacting to the latest killing of more than 100 people in Plateau state in a statement titled, “On Demand: A language of non-capitulation, non-appeasement.”
He urged President Buhari to make killer herdsmen pay for their crimes to send a strong warning that his administration would not tolerate forceful land seizure anywhere in Nigeria.
“That the temporary acquisition of weapons of mass elimination by any bunch of psychopaths and anachronistic feudal mentality will not translate into subjugation of a people and a savaging of their communities,’’ he said.
The playwright noted that certain unconscionable events had taken place in Nigeria which could not be ignored.
He said entire communities had been wiped out from the national landscape, thousands of family units in mourning and survivors scarred and traumatised beyond measure.
“Impunity, gleeful and prideful impunity substitutes for decent self-distancing from once unthinkable crimes – let us not even speak of expressions of remorse and human empathy.
The instigators, increasingly fingered as directors of human carnage are strutting around, defiant, justifying the unspeakable, daring a nation…,’’ he added.
“Accounting for crimes is also part of that responsibility, and such criminality must not be seen to be rewarded through idealistic solutions that paper over crimes against humanity.
For that is the present actuality. Crimes against our humanity have been committed, and restitution must be made.
Nothing less will restore confidence in a government, and reassure the people of its integrity, its commitment to equity in internal relationships and the rightful custodianship of ancient resources.’’
The playwright said it was a time of far-reaching, yet immediate decisions, because the nation was dying.
“The agitating question then is this: since this rampage began, has even one herdsman been brought up before those same courts on a charge of murder, much less sentenced to death at such lightning speed? Shall we wake up and find that they have been hanged?
Yet Zamfara has lost hundreds to the homicidal orgy of these same herdsmen. There is a skewed application of justicial proceedings here that baffles many, this writer among them.’’
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