Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka has urged President Muhammadu Buhari to rise to the occasion, match words with action and stop the killing spree by “murderous herdsmen” in Nigeria.
Soyinka in a statement titled, “On Demand: A language of non-capitulation, non-appeasement,” 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.
The Nobel laureate said Buhari’s claim that it was unjust for the public to accuse him of being silent on the killer herdsmen’s activities was based on their observation of his “erstwhile language of complacency and accommodativeness in the face of unmerited brutalisation.’’
He added that Buhari had yet to speak in the language that the “murdering herdsmen” understand by exhibiting that forceful seizure of land would not be tolerated in any part of a federation under his governance.
Soyinka said, “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.’’
The playwright noted that certain unconscionable events had taken place in the country which could not be ignored, adding that entire communities had been erased from the national landscape, thousands of family units in mourning and survivors scarred and traumatised beyond measure.
He stated that famine loomed in many areas, even in those lodged in acknowledged bread baskets of the nation, adding that “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…’’
Noting that land-grab must be reversed, Soyinka said the restored would still require to be defended and aggressors also served a lasting lesson both from the manifested responsibility of governance, and the resistant will of the people.
“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,’’ Soyinka said.
The playwright said it was a time of far-reaching, yet immediate decisions, because the nation was dying.
According to him, the time for false pride is over and if the nation lacks the necessary technical resources, then there remains only one blameless, overdue recourse and it is for the President to ‘Get help.’
Soyinka, who bemoaned the recent attacks on Barkin Ladi council area in Plateau State, noted that five young men were recently sentenced to death by a high court in Zamfara State for allegedly killing a herdsman.
The playwright stated that though he was not condoning murder in any cause or by anyone, it was necessary to insist on transparent and impartial justice.
He said, “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.’’
He revealed that when he visited the Governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom, some weeks ago, he bitterly lamented that security agencies had ordered his communities to surrender even the very machetes of routine use in farming.
Soyinka also said what he termed as ‘the Danjuma thesis’ that helpless Nigerians should defend themselves was neither new nor strange, but simply a restatement of the logicality of human response in the face of aggression.
He told the President that he strongly believed that the recent planned massacre had a numerical target which was the formal annunciation of a new law.
