The Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka of Nigeria has said that his country is experiencing ethnic cleansing with recent killings taking place across the country.
Nigeria has witnesses several killings as a result of clashes between herdsmen and natives of some states in Africa’s most populous nation.
The country’s security is also under threat from the activities of the militant group, Boko Haram which has been wreaking havoc for years now.
Soyinka, in a statement on Sunday described the ongoing killings in the country as “ethnic cleansing.”
He said in a statement published by local media that “No matter, one feels it a duty to call the attention to the painful convergence of both appropriations. Could such a co-option serve equally as summons for a last-chance, eleventh hour reprieve?”
The playwright also likened the present state of things in Nigeria to a pilot abandoning a flight thereby putting the lives of passengers at risk as he makes reference to the the Aeroflot Flight 593 of September 28, 1994.
The pilot of that flight was reported to have left his seat killing all passengers died
“After preliminary official denials, the undeniable – and tragically inappropriate factor of the crash was formally acknowledged – a laissez-faire, unprofessional conduct with human lapses, among which nepotism – by that, or any other name-loomed large. The captain was not even in the pilot’s seat – others were! They were the pilot’s family – mostly his children. The family member who actually begun the spiral of disaster by pulling the wrong control leaver was – the Captain’s son, to whom his even younger daughter, some moments earlier, had yielded the controls. The pilot’s seat had been turned into a family game of musical chairs.”
Soyinka has called on Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari to order the military and the police to treat illegal land occupiers as terrorists wherever they were found.
He said, “Give a nationwide order to all land-usurpers in the affected towns and villages across the nation to quit those forcefully occupied lands within a forty-eight hours deadline.”
Source: Africafeeds.com
