Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has warned that the current spate of insurgency enveloping Northern Nigeria would soon spread to other parts of the country if the Federal Government doesn’t act decisively and employ ‘lateral thinking and new constructs outside orthodox boxes of military engagement’.
The Nobel laureate gave the warning in an address at the launching of the memorial publication on the Late General Ibrahim Attahiru, which was held at Ladi Kwali Hall, Abuja, on Saturday.
He noted that the current spate of insurgency challenging the country spreads at breathtaking speed and is capable of contaminating and breeding mutations in the least expected places in the country.
Soyinka said: “The times are not normal and thus require off-beat, lateral thinking, new constructs outside orthodox boxes of military engagement. Above all, let no one imagine that the ongoing insurgency will forever remain within its present borders. It spreads; it contaminates. It breeds mutations in the least expected places.
“To anticipate, and prepare, is not even military thinking but the urging of common sense – and that, is universal territory”, he explained.
While commenting on the recent lynching of Deborah Samuel, a 200-level student of a College of education in Sokoto State by irate young Muslims, the Nobel laureate contended that the ‘one-sided tolerance culture of the nation and its permissiveness empowers murder through surrogates, instigating killing.
He argued that just like Samuel, many innocent Nigerians have been slaughtered for no just cause, while their killers are roaming the streets in the country unharmed.
Soyinka stressed that while many leading voices in the country never hesitated to condemn Samuel’s killing, ‘a glorified cleric, no less than the Grand Vizier of the iconic Mosque of the nation’s capital, Abuja, Professor Ibrahim Maqari, inserted a dissenting voice.
He said for declaring that Samuel deserved to die, the cleric must be sacked from his position as ‘he has declared himself a Supreme Being with the power of life and death over all the denizens of the world.
