Interview
Nigeria is at war – Soyinka
Renowned Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka on Saturday joined other Nigerians in condemning the killing of three of the abducted students of Greenfield University, Kaduna.
He said the murder of the students was another confirmation that the country is at war.
He asked President Muhammadu Buhari to seek help to deal with the situation.
Soyinka, in a statement on the development, said: “This nation is at war, yet we continue to pretend that these are mere birth-pangs of a glorious entity. They are death throes. Vultures and undertakers hover patiently but with full confidence.
“Not for the first time, what many hoped was a Natural Law of Limitations has been contemptuously, defiantly breached. We need to remind ourselves of hideous precedents.
“We must remember Chibok, Dapchi and numerous antecedents and after, unpublicized, or soon relegated to the sump of collective amnesia. The wages of impunity never diminish. On the contrary, they distend.
“Again, this is no new counseling, but of course, the dog that will get lost no longer heeds the hunter’s whistle. I envy no one the task ahead, terminating the toxic harvest of past derelictions.
“Blame laying is for later. Right now is the question of – what needs to be done, and done urgently. We keep avoiding the inevitable, but that very unthinkable now hammers brutishly on our gates, the blood ransom arrogantly insatiable.
“The dogs of war stopped merely baying years ago. Again and again they have sunk their fangs into the jugular of this nation. The plague called COVID has met its match on the earth of some nation space once known as Nigeria.
“To this government we repeat the public cry: Seek Help. Stop Improvising with Human Lives. Youth – that is, the future – should not serve as Ritual Offering on the altar of a failing State.”
