Former President Olusegun Obasanjo and
Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, on Wednesday knocked President
Muhammadu Buhari for doing little to stop killings by herdsmen amid the
general insecurity in the country.
Obasanjo, who paid a condolence visit to
Governor Simon Lalong of Plateau State on Wednesday, said the magnitude
of security challenge the country was experiencing under Buhari’s watch
was on the high side when compared to what happened during his tenure.
However, Soyinka noted that killings by
herdsmen had been persisting because the Federal Government under Buhari
had been treating killer herdsmen with kid gloves.
Obasanjo challenged the federal and
state governments to identify the root cause(s) of insecurity and deal
with them so that people would get a reprieve from the incessant
violence in the country.
Obasanjo admitted that although there were problems during his time in government, “but not in this magnitude.”
“Even in my time, we had problems but
not in this magnitude; we thought we were dealing with them as of that
time but the earlier we deal with it, the better. I believe we can find
solutions, we must find solutions,” he emphasised.
The former President, however,
expressed optimism that solutions could be found to address the
challenges and extended his condolences to the bereaved families.
Obasanjo said, “I’m here (in Jos) to
express my condolences; what happened is very sad that in this day and
age, this type of barbaric act is taking place in our country. I have
suggested and I will say it again that we should find out the root cause
of this problem and deal with it.
“There must be the remote and immediate
cause, if we deal with it; we are not going to be multiplying condolence
visits. I believe that any human problem has human solutions, I do hope
and plead with the government at the federal level, those of you in
states and even local government level, to join hands even at the
community level to find the causes and deal with them permanently. We
offer our condolences to the bereaved families, all we can say is that
God knows the best.”
In his response, Lalong appreciated Obasanjo for the visit, saying that a phone call would have been okay.
He said, “Insecurity is not new to me,
we thought we could handle it. When we came in, we quickly put up a team
including Berom and Fulani. They came out with a road map to proffer
solutions, we adopted the recommendations and have implemented some and
was in the process of implementing the remaining ones. We have done our
best, we have learnt our lessons. We will be very firm.”
But 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.
The playwright stated, “From
now on, for every missing, maimed, even legally seized cow-perhaps for
trespassing and damage-one human being shall die, and the commensurate
land shall be forfeited. Make no mistake, that is the message! Berom or
Ondo, Tiv or Efik. Egba or Igalla — it makes no difference — this is the
language, and if your government does not understand it yet, we, whose
field is language, both spoken and symbolic, must decode it for you.’’
Soyinka said he also learnt that a
former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Chief Olu Falae,
whose ordeal of being kidnapped by the “marauders was still fresh in the
nation’s mind,” was still under siege by the same forces as neither he
nor his workers could routinely attend to the farms.
“An aggressor who sniffs, however
faintly, the permissive air of immunity, is near totally beyond recall.
Only the stern language of reprimand, manifested in act, will deter
him,’’ he stated.
He noted that the language of the
leaders of Myetti Allah whom he described as ‘self-vaunting instigators’
in the nation’s herder colonisation was being promoted by the Minister
of Defence, Mansur Dan-Ali, on behalf of the government.
Soyinka added that if an individual
qualified to be the guinea-pig for testing the outrageous hate bill
speech contemplated by the nation’s lawmakers, it was the ‘unedifying
pronouncements of the Minister of Defence, who “continues to defend the
indefensible through his arrogant, provocative dismissals of an agenda
of ethnic cleansing, dehumanising the victims anew, and camouflaging the
failure of the government by his gratuitous blame-passing.”
According to Soyinka, the language of
the Dan-Ali is a language that is now being contradicted by the meaning
of ‘land grabbing shall be reversed.’
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