Professor Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate, said he rejected Nigeria’s
centenary award bestowed on him because of the inclusion on the honours list of
the late Nigerian tyrant, General Sani Abacha and other known killers and
looters of Nigeria’s treasury.
In a rejection note headlined ”The Canonisation of Terror”, Soyinka observed
that the inclusion of Abacha on the list does not only show a failure of a moral
rigour but it calls into question ”the entire ethical landscape into which this
nation has been forced by insensate leadership”.
He reminded those who have forgotten so soon that General Sani Abacha was a
vicious usurper under whose authority the lives of an elected president and his
wife—M.K.O and Kudirat Abiola— were snuffed out.
It was under Abacha, he said, that assassinations became routine, that
torture and other forms of barbarism were enthroned as the norm of
governance.
”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 of 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
canonised by the government of Goodluck Jonathan in commemoration of one hundred
years of Nigerian trauma”
Soyinka said that the refusal of successive governments to remove the
signposts in the nation’s capital bearing Abacha’s name, the inability ”to
muster the temerity to wipe out the memory of the nation’s tormentor from daily
encounter” demonstrates national self-degradation and a patent lack of political
courage.
Soyinka argued that: ”What the government of Goodluck Jonathan has done is to
scoop up a century’s accumulated degeneracy in one pre-eminent 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 of 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”.
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