Prof. Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate, has said that the killings perpetrated by suspected herdsmen is worse than the activities of the Indigenous People of Biara, IPOB, led by Nnamdi Kanu, which the government declared a terrorist group.
In
a statement on Wednesday, Soyinka said he is not ‘aware that IPOB came
anywhere close to this homicidal propensity and will to dominance before
it was declared a terrorist organization’.
“The
international community rightly refused to go along with such an
absurdity. The conduct of that movement, even at its most extreme, could
by no means be reckoned as terrorism. By contrast, how do we categorize
Myeti?”
Soyinka
wondered in the release why the Federal Government had not given
consideration to some of the stakeholders’ recommendations on how to
resolve the problem.
He
recalled that after “a hideous massacre” perpetrated by the herdsmen in
2016, a security meeting was called and the cattle rearers “attended
the meeting – according to reports – with AK47s and other weapons of
mass intimidation visible under their garments”.
“They
were neither disarmed nor turned back. They freely admitted the
killings but justified them by claims that they had lost their cattle to
the host community,” he said.
“Such
are the monstrous beginnings of the culture of impunity. We are
reaping, yet again, the consequences of such tolerance of the
intolerable. Yes, there indeed the government is culpable, definitely
guilty of ‘looking the other way’. Indeed, it must be held complicit.”
Reacting
to the comments credited to the herdsmen that the killings were in
defence of their stolen cows, the nobel laureate, wondered: “How do we
assess a mental state that cannot distinguish between a stolen cow –
which is always recoverable – and human life, which is not.
“Villages
have been depopulated far wider than those outside their operational
zones can conceive. They swoop on sleeping settlements, kill and strut.
They glory in their seeming supremacy.”
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