Prof. Wole Soyinka berates the Federal Government for adding
his name alongside that of the late notorious Nigerian Dictator, General Sanni
Abacha. His angst can be felt amongst other things. Click to read the full
write up.
The sheer weight of indignation and revulsion of most of
Nigerian humanity at the recent Boko Harma atrocity in Yobe is most likely to
have overwhelmed a tiny footnote to that outrage, small indeed, but of an
inversely proportionate significance.
This was the name of the hospital to which the survivors of the massacre
were taken. That minute detail calls into question, in a gruesome but chastening
way, the entire ethical landscape into which this nation has been forced by
insensate leadership. It is an uncanny
coincidence, one that I hope the new culture of ‘religious tourism’,
spearheaded by none other than the nation’s president in his own person, may
even come to recognize as a message from unseen forces.
For the
name of that hospital, it is reported, is none other than that of General Sanni
Abacha, a vicious usurper under whose authority the lives of an elected
president and his wife were snuffed out.
Assassinations – including through bombs cynically ascribed to the
opposition – became routine. Under that ruler, torture and other forms of
barbarism were enthroned as the norm of governance. To round up, nine Nigerian citizens,
including the writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-wiwa, were hanged after a
trial that was stomach churning even by the most primitive standards of
judicial trial, and in defiance of the intervention of world leadership. We are
speaking here of a man who placed this nation under siege during an unrelenting
reign of terror that is barely different from the current rampage of Boko
Haram. It is this very psychopath that was recently canonized by the government
of Goodluck Jonathan in commemoration of one hundred years of Nigerian trauma.
It has been
long a-coming. One of the broadest avenues in the nation’s capital, Abuja,
bears the name of General Sanni Abacha. Successive governments have lacked the
political courage to change this
signpost – among several others - of
national self degradation and wipe out the memory of the nation’s
tormentor from daily encounter. Not even Ministers for the Federal Capital
territory within whose portfolios rest such responsibilities, could muster the
temerity to initiate the process and leave the rest to public approbation or
repudiation. I urged the need of this purge on one such minister, and at least
one Head of State. That minister promised, but that boast went the way of
Nigerian electoral boast. The Head of
State murmured something about the fear of offending ‘sensibilities’. All
evasions amounted to moral cowardice and a doubling of victim trauma. When you
proudly display certificates of a nation’s admission to the club of global
pariahs, it is only a matter of time before you move to beatify them as saints
and other paragons of human perfection. What the government of Goodluck
Jonathan has done is to scoop up a century’s accumulated degeneracy in one
preeminent symbol, then place it on a podium for the nation to admire, emulate
and even – worship.
There is a
deplorable message for coming generations in this governance aberration that
the entire world has been summoned to witness and indeed, to celebrate. The
insertion of an embodiment of ‘governance
by terror’ into the company of committed democrats, professionals, humanists
and human rights advocates in their own right, is a sordid effort to grant a
certificate of health to a communicable disease that common sense demands
should be isolated. It is a confidence trick that speaks volumes of the
perpetrators of such a fraud. We shall pass over - for instance - the slave
mentality that concocts loose formulas for an Honours List that automatically
elevate any violent bird of passage to the status of nation builders who may,
or may not be demonstrably motivated by genuine love of nation. According generalized but false attributes to
known killers and treasury robbers is a disservice to history and a desecration
of memory. It also compromises the future.
This failure to discriminate, to assess, and thereby make it possible to
grudgingly concede that even out of a ‘doctrine of necessity’ – such as
military dictatorship - some
demonstrable governance virtue may emerge, reveals nothing but national self-glorification
in a moral void, the breeding grounds of future cankerworm in the nation’s
edifice.
Such
abandonment of moral rigour comes full circle sooner or later. The survivors of
a plague known as Boko Haram, students in a place of enlightenment and moral
instruction, are taken to a place of healing dedicated to an individual
contagion – a murderer and thief of no redeeming quality known as Sanni Abacha,
one whose plunder is still being pursued all over the world and recovered
piecemeal by international consortiums – at the behest of this same government
which sees fit to place him on the nation’s Roll of Honour! I can think of
nothing more grotesque and derisive of the lifetime struggle of several on this
list, and their selfless services to humanity. It all fits. In this nation of
portent readers, the coincidence should not be too difficult to decipher.
I reject my
share of this national insult.
Wole
SOYINKA
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