Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka has once again called on President Muhammadu Buhari to wake up from the slumber and realize all is not well with Nigeria.
Soyinka in a statement on Saturday titled “The endless Martyrdom of youth,” called on the Buhari-led administration to seek help in curbing the many challenges facing Nigeria as a country.
He noted that the heart of many Nigerians are already broken and the people live in despair, unsure of what lies in stock for them in the future as everything looks bleak.
Soyinka noted that Nigeria is already getting overstretched and desperately in need of solutions as the country with every passing minute tends towards a failing state.
He reiterated the need to stop playing politics with the future of the youths of the country but to sit tight and find solutions to ravaging problems threatening to tear the country apart.
The statement reads in part: “Abubakar Atiku has summed up the nation’s feeling – this most recent savagery against our youth is heartbreaking. More than the heart is broken, however, more than millions of individual hearts still lay claim to bonds in common humanity.
“The already over-stretched sinews of moral restraint have been snapped off the casing of nation being, and nothing is left but the collective wails of impotence.
“Not for the first time, what many hoped was a Natural Law of Limitations has been contemptuously, defiantly breached. We need to remind ourselves of hideous precedents. We must remember Chibok. And Dapchi. And numerous antecedents and after, unpublicized, or soon relegated to the sump of collective amnesia. The wages of impunity never diminish, on the contrary, they distend.
“One’s greatest fear, with this latest feat of cowardly savagery, is that the nation must brace itself for a Beslan scenario, yet strive to avoid Nigeria become Africa’s Chechnya. Those who have been proven weak and incapable must learn to swallow their vain pride and seek help.
“Again, this is no new counselling, but of course the dog that will get lost no longer heeds the hunter’s whistle. I envy no one the task ahead, terminating the toxic harvest of past derelictions. Blame laying is for later. Right now is the question of – what needs to be done, and done urgently.
“We keep avoiding the inevitable, but that very unthinkable now hammers brutishly on our gates, the blood ransom arrogantly insatiable. This nation is at war, yet we continue to pretend that these are mere birth-pangs of a glorious entity.
“They are death throes. Vultures and undertakers hover patiently but with full confidence.
“The dogs of war stopped merely baying years ago. Again and again, they have sunk their fangs into the jugular of this nation.
“The plague called COVID has met its match on the earth of some nation space once known as Nigeria. I grieve with the bereaved, but mourn even more for our youth so routinely sacrificed, burdened with uncertainty and traumatized beyond youth’s capacity to cope.
“To this government, we repeat the public cry: Seek Help. Stop Improvising with human lives. Youth-that is, the future – should not serve as Ritual Offering on the altar of a failing State.”
Meanwhile, the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, has confirmed the killing of one of its commanders, with the group threatening to deal with the Governor of Imo State, Hope Uzodinma.
Naija News had earlier reported that police and other security agents killed IPOB’s commander known as Ikonso and six other militia members in Imo.
The security operatives killed the IPOB men during an early morning raid on their hideout at Awomama village, Oru East Local Government Area of the state on Saturday.