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’.
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.
“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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