Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has urged President Buhari to get off his high horse and accept the reality that the country under his watch is at war.
Soyinka said rather than reading unintended meanings to every genuine intervention on national issues, the government should start thinking outside the box to find solutions to the myriad of problems bedevilling the country.
Soyinka made this known on Monday in a statement titled, ‘Presidential comeuppance’.
The writer, human right activist made the statement against the background of the rising insecurity in the country, particularly the recent abduction of unspecified number of students of Government Science Secondary School in Kankara, Katsina State.
Soyinka noted that the president and his retinue of aides should stop responding to every criticism of the current administration with subtle threat and monotonous expressions, which according to him, have become “banalities”
The statement read in part, “A government refuses to accept that, as indicated several times over, the nation is at war. At war within itself, and that it requires drastic measures, away from spasmodic responses after the dread deed, if there is any will left over to salvage what is left of nationhood.
“The appropriate expression here is thinking outside the box. When others do, they deserve better than to be rewarded with banalities such as: ‘The government will not be stampeded. The presidency will not be blackmailed. Stop politicising the issue. The president is committed to preserving the integrity of the nation. We will not be bullied into abandoning our commitment to national unity. The sovereignty of the nation is non-negotiable…. and so on and on, ad nauseam’.
“Has anyone been detected marching to a contrary tune? Sure, we are assailed with such minority rhetoric from time to time but, is unity what is profoundly at stake?
“Does such predictable rhetoric remotely touch upon the existential anxiety of millions of humanity? Or are we confronted, at its most primary level, with a growing question of the ability of the nation to even feed herself? When defenceless farmers are set upon – what does it matter if it is fifty or a hundred? – are butchered in one fell swoop, harvesting their crop, does the sheer suggestion that they met their deaths because they did not seek military cover not speak to the parlous state of a nation, and her need to urgently think outside the box?”
The prolific writer, who restated his position that President Buhari is not in charge, stressed that those truly in control had proprietary hold on him.
Soyinka noted that it was “that segment of the cabalistic control” that succeeded in convincing him that honouring the invitation by the National Assembly is beneath him, hence his decision to renege on his initial promise by spurning the invitation.
“That, to come to the present, constituted General Buhari’s response to the National Assembly’s invitation to drop in for a chat. He did not consider it infradigat the beginning..
“He responded to the polite invitation to rub minds urgently over a people’s security anxieties as one who still struggled to preserve the tattered remains of his Born-Again democratic camouflage.
“However, his reversal of consent raised yet again the frightening situation report I have fervently posed: Buhari is not in charge. Whoever is, that segment of the cabalistic control obviously cornered him on the way to the lawmakers’ chambers and urged: Dont! Their invitation is infradig! He succumbed.” Soyinka added.
Soyinka, however, added that the recent kidnapping of schoolboys in Katsina, the state of the President, much as it looks as a deserved punishment for Buhari for treating the entire country with disdain is “merely the latest in the serial stinging slaps across the face of the nation and it draws blood from every sensing citizen.”
The 1986 Nobel prize winner lamented the country’s culture of unpreparedness which made it to be caught napping even five years after the abduction of school girls in Chibok.
He, therefore, made a renewed call for restructuring.
He said, “It is over five years since Chibok, we have yet to anticipate, and to guard against a repeat. We continue to hand over innocent wards cheaply, en masse, to the agents of darkness and despair.
“What is tragically demonstrated daily in all departments of citizen survival is the need to overhaul the nations structural existence – beginning, obviously, with the imperative of guaranteeing that very existence.”
