By Uche Amunike
Nobel Laureate and world acclaimed playwright, Professor Wole Soyinka has faulted the Buhari’s administration for ignoring the issue of armed herdsmen that go about terrorizing innocent farmers and killing them, while pointedly proscribing the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), who are merely seeking their secession from the country.
Speaking, during an exclusive interview on Channels Television’s Monday night pre-recorded programme, NewsNight, the literary giant stated that Nigeria should learn to remember her history always in order to understand security challenges.
His words: ‘My temperament does not accept that anyone should chase me out of my God-given earth. So, it’s a temperamental thing as well,” Soyinka said.
‘The idea that you can unleash terror on me because you want my little patch of territory or you want my soul, that is, you want to subjugate me, you want to turn me into a slave. Well, I would sort that out first.’
‘And then, I’ll make up my mind whether I want to leave. So each outrage, unfortunately, has the opposite effect. Whether the outrage is taking place in Benue, Kaduna, or is taking place in Owo. Or whether it is taking place right here on the (Ogun state) border – we’ve been subjected also to this lunacy, of the subjugation mentality which some minority people hold. And I find it very difficult to accept to be chased out of my entitled portion of the earth.’
‘Many people just either do not know the history or do not understand the purpose of history. And then there’s a different group also who are very selective about history; they know how to distort or misuse history’, he reiterated.
Professor Wole Soyinka took his listeners back to history, when the menace of the Fulani herdsmen as well as the Miyetti Allah started. According to him, their spokesperson made a statement that has remained evergreen in his memory. He claimed that they once ruled in Borno state and could take back their land anytime they wanted. Soyinka found it really sad that even though these herdsmen caused the Bornu people a lot of trauma, the spokesperson had the audacity to gloat, saying that there lies the danger as such comments can only contribute in chaos as only selective parts of history were cited.
Hear him: ‘I remember that statement; I have never forgotten it. In the midst of the trauma of these people, somebody comes gloating and then citing selective portions of history. I said this person should be arrested and locked up, who says he wants to repeat his history of conquest – he is admitting either knowledge, before or after, or support, anyway. Is not there anything like hate speech anymore? Why are you proscribing IPOB without proscribing Miyetti Allah?’
The 88 year old Playwright asked the federal government to proscribe the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN), who are the real Fulani pastoralists, just as they proscribed the IPOB whose crime was that they made moves to secede the South East from Nigeria.
