Nigeria’s Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has expressed his criticism for the president of the nation, Muhammadu Buhari, especially with the way he’s handling the case of the Fulani herdsmen.
The Nobel Laureate while delivering an address at the National Conference on Culture and Tourism on Wednesday said it was shocking for the president to claim the continuous and incessant attacks by the Fulani Herdsmen will soon be over.
In the address, he said: “When I read a short while ago, the Presidential assurance to this nation that the current homicidal escalation between the cattle prowlers and farming communities would soon be over, I felt mortified.
“He had the solution, he said. Cattle ranches were being set up, and in another 18 months, rustlings, destruction of livelihood and killings from herdsmen would be ‘a thing of the past’. Eighteen months, he assured the nation. I believe his Minister of Agriculture echoed that later, but with a less dispiriting time schema.
“Neither, however, could be considered a message of solace and reassurance for the ordinary Nigerian farmer and the lengthening cast of victims, much less to an intending tourist to the Forest Retreat of Tinana in the Rivers, the Ikogosi Springs or the Moslem architectural heritage of the ancient city of Kano. In any case, the external tourists have less hazardous options.”
Soyinka noted that the increasing rate of terrorism will hurt tourism in the country. He further lamented that the government failed to react to his move to set up a national debate with the topic – ‘Sacred cows or sacred rights’ at the Open Forum platform of the Centre for Culture and International Understanding located in Oshogbo.
He added that his plan was to invite the president to deliver a keynote speech at the national debate.
“It is not merely arbitrary violence that reigns across the nation but total, undisputed impunity. Impunity evolves and becomes integrated in conduct when crime occurs and no legal, logical and moral response is offered. I have yet to hear this government articulate a firm policy of non-tolerance for the serial massacres have become the nation’s identification stamp.
“I have not heard an order given that any cattle herders caught with sophisticated firearms be instantly disarmed, arrested, placed on trial, and his cattle confiscated.
“The nation is treated to an eighteen-month optimistic plan which, to make matters worse, smacks of abject appeasement and encouragement of violence on innocents.
“Let me repeat, and of course I only ask to be corrected if wrong: I have yet to encounter a terse, rigorous, soldierly and uncompromising language from this leadership, one that threatens a response to this unconscionable blood-letting that would make even Boko Haram repudiate its founding clerics.”
Soyinka however described the herdsmen as humanity’s earliest known tourists pointing out that they must be taught to co-exist peacefully with hosts and about the culture of a settlement.
“The leadership of any society cannot stand idly and offer solutions that implicitly deem the massacres of innocents mere incidents on the way to that learning school,” he warned.
“For every crime, there is a punishment, for every violation, there must be restitution. The nomads of the world cannot place themselves above the law of settled humanity.”
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