Nobellaureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has challenged President Muhammadu Buhari to declare killer herdsmen terrorists.
Soyinka, who spoke at the maiden edition
of the Ripples Nigeria Dialogue in Lagos, yesterday, said he was
disturbed that the president was treating the killer herdsmen with
levity, while those who have committed far less crimes were severely
punished.
“We expect the president to have the
courage to declare such monsters as terrorists and enemies of humanity
with the same dispatch in which he declared the far less violent,
albeit, disruptive IPOB terrorists. We expect a culture of
even-handedness.
“I have always refrained from labelling
the herdsmen as Fulani but since they have publicly come out to admit
they are responsible for the killings, we can say they are Fulani
herdsmen.
“An organisation has been rampaging the
nation armed to the teeth and descending on innocent people. Their
spokesman appeared on TV, unrepentant, distorting history, calling on a
state government to rescind their laws and proceeding to defy such laws.
They went ahead and threatened continuation of the same acts of
degradation. The nation has been placed on the defensive simply because
of the failing of governance.“Have you ever encountered a more cynical rendition of the sequence
of events when spokesmen of this same organisation came out to say the
killings were taking place because of the laws which was made to stop
the killings in the first place? I have not heard that the leaders of
that group have been summoned the way those who do far less things would
have been summoned. Nigeria is not the first country to experience
natural disasters but this is not an excuse to take guns to destabilise
other peace-loving people in their communities.
“While addressing the victims of the rampage of Fulani
herdsmen, the minister of defence asked the victims what they wanted the
herdsmen to do when the grazing routes for their cattle were being
blocked and that minister is still in Buhari’s cabinet.
“I get impatient when I hear people say that Buhari failed
to sympathise with victims in Benue and Taraba. Who needs presidential
sympathy? Is it sympathy that will re-order their broken lives? We are
talking about security of lives and property and bringing perpetrators
to book.We expect the government to respond with massive punitive
action when the fundamental security of a people is violated. We expect
the president to immediately show up at the scene of these disasters and
order his troops into action against these arrogant and blood thirsty
people.“When stung by the criticism that the president rather
chose to attend a wedding in Kano instead of being present in Dapchi,
presidential apologists said the wedding was a needed therapy for the
trauma caused by the abduction of the schoolgirls in Dapchi. That
statement is blasphemous. There were so many formula that would have
been adopted to ensure that the couple had their wedding without the
accompanying exhibition of lavishness so soon after a national tragedy.
The nation was in mourning and Buhari would have told the couple that he
was not obliged to be there,” Soyinka said.
However, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) disagreed with Soyinka.
According to APC’s National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji
Abdullahi, it would amount to error of conceptualisation to tag a race
like Fulani as terrorists because of the actions of few atrocious
elements.
“I understand the sentiment behind his suggestions, but we
need to be very careful not to criminalise an entire people just
because of the criminal activities of a few.
“Fulani herdsmen refer to a full tribe or people not an organization
like Boko Haram. So to say that Fulani herdsmen should be proscribed
just the way we proscribed IPOB is to fall into an error of
conceptualisation. Fulani herdsmen do not belong to that organisational
category because they are full tribe of people. It would be wrong to tag
a whole tribe as terrorists. And will he (Soyinka) be happy if, for
example, the Yoruba race is branded as terrorists because of some people
who are committing some atrocities or to tag Igbo people terrorists
because of few Igbo persons committing atrocities?” he quried.
ACF General Secretary, Mr. Anthony Sani, said to declare
everybody in the pastoralist profession terrorists would amount to
criminalisation of a particular occupation which would offend many
people’s sense of justice.
“I believe our inability to fish out the criminals among
herdsmen and farmers engaged in the lingering clashes and prosecute them
is the major challenge of how best we control the menace posed by the
festering clashes. We seem to be aware of the presence of swarm of
locust in the land but we are unable to determine the pests. As a
result, we do not know which are the best herbicides to control the
locust. Professor Soyinka should recommend better way of overcoming the
insecurity posed by the clashes between pastoralists and farmers,” Sani
declared.
But, the National Chairman of Young Progressives Party
(YPP), Bishop Emmanuel Amakri agreed with Soyinka. He argued that
considering the mayhem the herdsmen have unleashed in most communities,
declaring them terrorists was long overdue.
“We need to put in actual perspective what terrorists
means and in this case, I would say that for people or a group of people
who have been unleashing attacks on people in every part of this
country and whose trademark is bloodshed, killing everyday and
slaughtering human beings in the manner of the ISIS terrorist group,
declaring herdsmen as terrorists group is not something people should be
debating.
“Having killed in one community or the other and unleashed
mayhem on people mindlessly, the herdsmen have done enough damage to be
declared terrorists. In fact, it is long overdue,” he said.
SUN