Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate, has asked the Federal Government to seek foreign assistance in tackling insecurity in the country.
The Nobel laureate said this in a statement he issued on Sunday.
Referring to the killing of three students abducted from Greenfield University in Kaduna by gunmen on Friday, Soyinka said youths should not be allowed to “serve as ritual offering on the altar of a failing state”.
Soyinka said, “One’s greatest fear, with this latest feat of cowardly savagery is that the nation must brace itself for a Beslan scenario, yet strive to avoid Nigeria becoming Africa’s Cherchnya. Those who have been proven weak and incapable must learn to swallow their vain pride and seek help. Again, this is no new counselling, but of course the dog that will get lost no longer heeds the hunter’s whistle. I envy no one the task ahead, terminating the toxic harvest of past derelictions. Blame laying is for later.’’
According to him, former vice-president Abukakar Atiku has summed up the nation’s feeling, by saying most recent savagery against our youth is heartbreaking.
Soyinka added, “More than the heart is broken however, more than millions of individual hearts that still lay claim to bonds in a common humanity. The already overstretched sinews of moral restraint have been snapped off the casing of nation being, and nothing is left but the collective wails of impotence. Not for the first time, what many hoped was a Natural Law of Limitations has been contemptuously, defiantly breached.’’
“Right now is the question of–what needs to be done, and done urgently. We keep avoiding the inevitable, but that very unthinkable now hammers brutishly on our gates, the blood ransom arrogantly insatiable. This nation is at war, yet we continue to pretend that these are mere birth-pangs of a glorious entity. They are death throes. Vultures and undertakers hover patiently but with full confidence.
He stated, “To this government we repeat the public cry: Seek Help. Stop improvising with human lives. Youth–that is, the future – should not serve as ritual offering on the altar of a failing state.’’
