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| Prof. Wole Soyinka |
Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has
criticized President Muhammadu Buhari for his reaction to increasing
attacks and killings by herdsmen in several states in the country.
Soyinka in an address to the National Conference on Culture and Tourism on Wednesday said he was shocked by the President’s claim that the attacks would soon be over.
He added that comments made by the
President and the government fell short of expectation and did not
provide any reassurance for Nigerians.
He said, “When I read a short while ago,
the Presidential assurance to this nation that the current homicidal
escalation between the cattle prowlers and farming communities would
soon be over, I felt mortified.
“He had the solution, he said. Cattle
ranches were being set up, and in another 18 months, rustlings,
destruction of livelihood and killings from herdsmen would be ‘a thing
of the past’. Eighteen months, he assured the nation. I believe his
Minister of Agriculture echoed that later, but with a less dispiriting
time schema.
“Neither, however, could be considered a
message of solace and reassurance for the ordinary Nigerian farmer and
the lengthening cast of victims, much less to an intending tourist to
the Forest Retreat of Tinana in the Rivers, the Ikogosi Springs or the
Moslem architectural heritage of the ancient city of Kano. In any case,
the external tourists have less hazardous options.”
The Nobel laureate, who said the signs
were already clear and the rampage of impunity was already manifesting a
cultic intensity of alarming proportions almost a year ago, noted that
the current violence and killings by the herdsmen would among other
things hurt tourism in the country.
Despite the warning signs, he said the
government failed to react with his attempt to utilise the Open Forum
platform of the Centre for Culture and International Understanding,
Oshogbo, to launch a national debate on the topic – ‘Sacred cows or
sacred rights’ almost a year ago also failing to take place.
The plan had been to invite Buhari to give a keynote address at the event.
The failure to react to the warning signs allowed the situation to degenerate beyond arbitrary violence, according to Soyinka.
He said, “It is not merely arbitrary
violence that reigns across the nation but total, undisputed impunity.
Impunity evolves and becomes integrated in conduct when crime occurs and
no legal, logical and moral response is offered. I have yet to hear
this government articulate a firm policy of non-tolerance for the serial
massacres have become the nation’s identification stamp.
“I have not heard an order given that
any cattle herders caught with sophisticated firearms be instantly
disarmed, arrested, placed on trial, and his cattle confiscated.
“The nation is treated to an
eighteen-month optimistic plan which, to make matters worse, smacks of
abject appeasement and encouragement of violence on innocents.
“Let me repeat, and of course I only ask
to be corrected if wrong: I have yet to encounter a terse, rigorous,
soldierly and uncompromising language from this leadership, one that
threatens a response to this unconscionable blood-letting that would
make even Boko Haram repudiate its founding clerics.”
Soyinka, who said herdsmen were perhaps
humanity’s earliest known tourists, said they must be thought about the
culture of settlement and “learn to seek accommodation with settled
hosts wherever encountered”.
“The leadership of any society cannot
stand idly and offer solutions that implicitly deem the massacres of
innocents mere incidents on the way to that learning school,” he warned.
“For every crime, there is a punishment,
for every violation, there must be restitution. The nomads of the world
cannot place themselves above the law of settled humanity.”
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