Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has warned that the current spate of insurgency enveloping Northern Nigeria would soon spread to other parts of the country if the Federal Government doesn’t act decisively and employ ‘lateral thinking and new constructs outside orthodox boxes of military engagement.’
The Nobel laureate gave the warning in an address at the launching of the memorial publication on the late General Ibrahim Attahiru held at Ladi Kwale Hall, Abuja on Saturday. He noted that the current spate of insurgency challenging the country spreads at breathtaking speed and capable of contaminating and breeding mutations in the least expected places in the country.
Soyinka said: “The times are not normal and thus require off-beat, lateral thinking, new constructs outside orthodox boxes of military engagement. Above all, let no one imagine that the ongoing insurgency will forever remain within its present borders. It spreads. It contaminates. It breeds mutations in least expected places.
“To anticipate, and prepare, is not even military thinking but the urging of common sense – and that, is universal territory. However, let me explain that this implicit call for total mobilization is not meant to expand the military as a career but to induce its social integration as a calling. The entirety of national life, lifestyle, priorities, urgently demands re-designing to respond, holistically, to the exigencies of current abnormalities,” he explained.
The poet further stated that “The much touted, consistently sidelined, willfully misrepresented call for national restructuring, for instance, as well as proposals for state and community policing, are only alternative and/or partial expressions of this holistic and urgent imperative. We continue to ignore it at the peril of total, messy, irreversible disintegration.”
While commenting on the recent lynching Deborah Samuel, a 200-level student of a College of education in Sokoto State by irate young Muslims, the Nobel laureate contended that the ‘onesided tolerance culture of the nation and its permissiveness empowers murder through surrogates, instigating killing sprees at will.’
He argued that just like Samuel, many innocent Nigerians have been slaughtered for no just cause, while their killers are roaming the streets in the country unharmed.
Soyinka stressed that while many leading voices in the country never hesitated to condemn the Samuel’s killing, ‘a glorified cleric, no less than the Grand Vizier of the iconic Mosque of the nation’s capital, Abuja, Professor Ibrahim Maqari, inserted a dissenting voice. He said for declaring that Samuel deserved to die, the cleric must be sacked from his position as ‘he has declared himself a Supreme Being with the power of life and death over all the denizens of the world.’
“That apostate of the creed of humanity, Professor Maqari, must be removed from office. It is no longer sufficient for all to declaim that Islam is this and that, let all pietistic denunciations be backed by affirmative action. The Grand Seer of Abuja mosque should be hounded from office. He should be tried under any existing laws that approximate hate rhetoric, incitement to murder and abuse of office,” he stated.
