Kidnapping: They’ve failed us — Wole Soyinka slams Buhari

Nigerian playwright, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has said Niger, Zamfara and other states where school children are kidnapped should shut down.

The Nobel laureate, who stated this on Saturday while speaking after an award lecture and public presentation of his new book, ‘Chronicles of the happiest people on Earth,’ in Abeokuta, Ogun State, said states where mass abduction of school children takes palace should shutdown in protest against the act.

IDOMA VOICE reports that hundreds of school children were kidnapped in Niger and Zamfara states by armed bandits.
While the kidnapped Niger students had been released a week after, the abducted Zamfara schoolgirls are still being held by their abductors.

Soyinka called on the relevant authorities to ensure “drastic, meaningful measures” are taken to forestall future occurrence and also the release of the children already in captivity.

“I think we are reaching the point where, in any state, where any child is kidnapped, that state should shut down completely. And other states, in solidarity, should at least shut down some of their activities. It sounds extreme but, we don’t know what else one can propose at this particular time.Yes, life must go on but even those activities will generate and enhance our very existence,” the Professor said.

“I think we have to take on a tonality of regrets, of the unacceptable, protestation and mobilisation on whatever level it is possible as a community of human beings.

‘‘We shouldn’t wait for an enemy, faceless, airborne, unpredictable enemy like COVID to make us shut down. In protest and as a statement of the unacceptable, we are shutting ourselves down until this situation is resolved.”

He added, “The abduction of our children, when will it end, how will it end? I don’t think any of us can tell. But it is important that we continue to stress and to remind ourselves that, not only are these abnormal times, but it seems to be, to me anyway, times of the shirking of responsibility in very key areas.

“We cannot permit ourselves – we just cannot – continue in this fashion. Something drastic, meaningful has to take place, and it has to be collective.

“This is no longer the responsibility of those at the top who are supposed to be in charge of security, in charge of governance; they have clearly failed the populace. They’ve failed us. There is no point in trying to reason it out, to find excuses, to lay blame. The important thing is that we are very close to accepting a culture of the unacceptable.”