Soyinka opens up, backs Obasanjo’s stand against Buhari’s administration

Nobel laureate Prof Wole Soyinka has backed former President Olusegun Obasanjo over a comment credited to him that Nigeria is more divided under administration of President Muhammadu Buhari.

Soyinka in a statement released on Tuesday, urged President Muhammadu Buhari to change his style of governance otherwise Nigeria maybe heading towards collective suicide.

He said: “We are close to extinction as a viable comity of peoples, supposedly bound together under an equitable set of protocols of co-habitation, capable of producing its own means of existence, and devoid of a culture of sectarian privilege and will to dominate.

According to him, the nation is divided as never before, and this ripping division has taken place under the policies and conduct of none other than President Buhari.

“Does anyone deny that it was this president who went to sleep while communities were consistently ravaged by cattle marauders, were raped and displaced in their thousands and turned into beggars all over the landscape? Was it a different president who, on being finally persuaded to visit a scene of carnage, had nothing more authoritative to offer than to advice the traumatized victims to learn to live peacefully with their violators?

According to him, to reel off any achievements of a government – genuine or fantasied, trivial or monumental – is thus to dodge the issue, to ignore the real core concerns.

Continuing, he said: “May one ask what action has been taken to rectify that presumably “nation-unifying” compilation? It all casts a long, unedifying shadow backwards to those days of agitation by Tai Solarin and the mercuric engineer, Awojobi when the same Buhari took forceful charge of that ministry, promised to get to the root of the flying charges – anyone still recall the saga of the missing millions? He made a beeline for the home of a prominent political leader and carted away loads of files in his illegal possession. In vain the nation awaited enlightenment – Nothing!

“Past leaders will not be permitted to forget or gloss over own self-centred interests and nation corrosive lapses that brought us to this parlous present. But we do endure in this here and now, in the immediacy of current governance, so let no uppity flunkey attempt to divert attention from current realities, realities that now clearly pronounce this nation of once promising prospects a basket case of abject penury and insecurity, where hordes of trained minds and sturdy limbs roam the streets as beggars, as haphazard vendors of the products of other peoples, other lands!” he added.