 |
| Prof. Wole Soyinka |
Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka, said he rejected Nigeria’s centenary award bestowed on him because of the inclusion on the honours list of the late Nigerian tyrant, General Sani Abacha and other known killers and looters of Nigeria’s treasury.
In a rejection note headlined ”The Canonisation of Terror”, Soyinka observed that the inclusion of Abacha on the list does not only show a failure of a moral rigour but it calls into question ”the entire ethical landscape into which this nation has been forced by insensate leadership”.
He reminded those who have forgotten so soon that General Sani Abacha was a vicious usurper under whose authority the lives of an elected president and his wife—M.K.O and Kudirat Abiola— were snuffed out.
It was under Abacha, he said, that assassinations became routine, that torture and other forms of barbarism were enthroned as the norm of governance.
”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 of 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 canonised by the government of Goodluck Jonathan in commemoration of one hundred years of Nigerian trauma”
Soyinka said that the refusal of successive governments to remove the signposts in the nation’s capital bearing Abacha’s name, the inability ”to muster the temerity to wipe out the memory of the nation’s tormentor from daily encounter” demonstrates national self-degradation and a patent lack of political courage.
Soyinka argued that: ”What the government of Goodluck Jonathan has done is to scoop up a century’s accumulated degeneracy in one pre-eminent 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 of 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”.
What if Atiku's family were amongst the children killed in Adamawa,What if Buhari's daughter was amongst those killed in Yobe? What if Obasanjo's grand son was in the school where our children were massacred? What if Babangida's daughter in-law was a teacher in any of those schools? What if Tinubu's cousin was visiting the dormitory where those children were murdered? What if Jonathan's son attends any of those schools? It is sad to imagine our leaders are celebrating 100 years of mismanagement, misappropriation, insecurity and lack of sense of good judgement at a time when we lost over a hundred of our school children!What if David Marks' only daughter was amongst the innocent children murdered? Would these shameless leaders have any thing to rejoice over? Would it NOT be enough reason to postpone this wastage called centenary celebration. We have the right and power to ask GEJ and his cohorts to apologize for their incompetence. This is NOT about PDP or APC. The Nigeria political class has failed us. Our children's life no longer matter. What if any of these kids are theirs? Enough is enough!!!Let us push this message forward. You would be surprised this message would get to over 60million Nigerians. Sufficient to remove any of these so called leaders. Please don't break the link! Send this message to everyone on your own network. Every Nigerian child has right to LIFE. Your own child would NOT be murdered by boko haram. Amen!
ReplyDeleteThe hoi poloi are saying no to these ragtag and bobtail politicians who are egocentric and masturbating themselves in the corridors of power. Their children are flexing abroad and the innocent children are befying in a pestillential aqua. The question is, when will these imbroglios, hullabaloos, debacles and bruhahas stop?
ReplyDelete