“This nation is at war, yet we continue to pretend that these are mere birth-pangs of a glorious entity. They are death throes. Vultures and undertakers hover patiently but with full confidence”.
With the above statement, Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, advised on Saturday that President Muhammadu Buhari must seek international help to avoid Nigeria’s disintegration.
Soyinka said this in reaction to the brutal killing of three of the abducted students of Greenfield University, Kaduna and other killings.
He declared in a statement that Abukakar Atiku had summed up the nation’s feeling – “this most recent savagery against our youth is heartbreaking. More than the heart is broken, however, more than millions of individual hearts that still lay claim to bonds in a common humanity.”
Soyinka lamented that the already over-stretched sinews of moral restraint had been snapped off the casing of nation being, and that nothing was left but the collective wails of impotence.
“Not for the first time, what many hoped was a Natural Law of Limitations has been contemptuously, defiantly breached. We need to remind ourselves of hideous precedents. We must remember Chibok. And Dapchi. And numerous antecedents and after, unpublicized, or soon relegated to the sump of collective amnesia. The wages of impunity never diminish, on the contrary, they distend,” he said.
Soyinka stated that one’s greatest fear, with this latest feat of cowardly savagery was that the nation must brace itself for a Beslan scenario, yet strive to avoid Nigeria becoming Africa’s Chechnya.
According to him, those who had been proven weak and incapable must learn to swallow their vain pride and seek help.
“Again, this is no new counseling, but of course the dog that will get lost no longer heeds the hunter’s whistle. I envy no one the task ahead, terminating the toxic harvest of past derelictions.
“Blame laying is for later. Right now is the question of – what needs to be done, and done urgently. We keep avoiding the inevitable, but that very unthinkable now hammers brutishly on our gates, the blood ransom arrogantly insatiable.
“This nation is at war, yet we continue to pretend that these are mere birth-pangs of a glorious entity. They are death throes. Vultures and undertakers hover patiently but with full confidence,” he stated.
Soyinka added: “The dogs of war stopped merely baying years ago. Again and again they have sunk their fangs into the jugular of this nation. The plague called COVID has met its match on the earth of some nation space once known as Nigeria.”
The Nobel Laureate said he grieved with the bereaved, but mourned even more for the youth so routinely sacrificed, burdened with uncertainty and traumatized beyond youth’s capacity to cope.
“To this government we repeat the public cry: Seek Help. Stop Improvising with Human Lives. Youth – that is, the future – should not serve as Ritual Offering on the altar of a failing State,” he said.
