Soyinka to U.S: We don’t need excuses

Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, asked the United States yesterday to stop giving excuses on why it would not supply arms to Nigeria.

 Speaking at a press conference in Lagos, Soyinka, who stated that the country is in a war situation, said what Nigeria needs was not emergency relief materials, but support to win the war.

He said: “Please, United States of America, could you please, overlook the arithmetical deficiency of governance and stop giving an excuse to this government for failing to protect us.  We are trying to create, I hope a situation, where we do have conflict affected households. We do not need emergency relief supplies. We want to stop the displacement of  humanity etc.

“So, please, just say that will not supply arms to Nigeria and leave it at that. But don’t  say that instead you will send other things. That is not the issue at this critical moment for Nigeria.  We are fighting a legitimate, a just war,” he noted.

The Nobel Laureate also descended  heavily on the Inspector-General of Police, (IGP), Mr. Suleiman Abba, for the recent invasion of the National Assembly  by the police. He said the action was an unambiguous declaration of war against the people. According to him, the nation has seen Abba’s type in the past and know what became of public officers, who thought that they were more than the state.

Soyinka said members of the House of Representatives, who scaled the gates to enter into legislative chambers to perform their duties must be applauded and not derided. According to him, if anybody is to be ashamed, it should be the Inspector-General of Police for “his slavish adherence to conspiratorial, illegal, and unconstitutional instructions – to undermine a democratic structure, and one – to make matters worse – convoked in response  to an emergency of dire public concern.”

According to  him, President Goodluck Jonathan “continues to surprise us in ways that very few could have conjectured.  Peaking at his own personalized example where he set the law of simple arithmetic on its head – I refer to the split in the Governors’ Forum, and his ‘formal’ recognition of the minority will in a straightforward, peer election – democracy has been rendered meaningless where it should be most fervently exemplified. Nothing is more unworthy of leadership than to degrade a system by which one attains fulfillment, and this is what the nation has witnessed time and time again in various parts of the nation, the recent affront against the legislative chamber being only the most blatant and unconscionable.  We know of course that this is not the first of its kind in the nation’s history, but precedents are not binding. Each leader selects his or her own model for emulation or avoidance, and that choice is certain indication of the true nature of such a leader, and a clue to the kind of conduct that a people can expect of him.  It is a warning. His choices for the occupancy of crucial public positions – such as the protective arm of the nation – constitutes an even more immediate and constant public alert. The signals are ominous – for and beyond 2015.

The Nobel Laureate said that to state the obvious, “these, to state the obvious, are not ordinary times. The menace of Boko Haram hangs over the corporate entity called a nation and over every individual, citizen or mere bird of passage. The cliché ‘heating up the polity’ may grate the ear-drums with its banality but I think that we have a right to demand of a leader not to stoke up the furnace in which events have cast its citizens. Every day records a new violation of our humanity.

“The atrocious targeting of the great mosque of Kano has rendered any lingering doubt of impending national imposition an invitation for collective suicide, preferably through piecemeal dismemberment. The theories of cause and effect can wait, or continue – it does not matter – the omniscient in such matters continue to pontificate, some of them blithely forgetting that they indeed contributed to policies that landed us in this brutal cleft. What does matter is an awareness that the nation is only part of a global eruption of fundamentalist delusions whose staple diet consists of destabilization and dehumanization – all summed up as an ideology of hate for the different,” he noted.

Soyinka said, “the  line has been drawn. The people must decide – whether to submit or resist. We may be no-count plebians in the sight of the new-born patricians of Aso Rock and their apologists but – must we revert to the Abacharian status of glorified slaves? Of course, it is up to any people to decide.”