Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, yesterday, slammed President Muhammadu Buhari, over what he described as his government’s seeming inability to contain the violent activities of herdsmen across the country.
In his address to the National Conference on Culture and Tourism, Soyinka said the President Buhari-led government was yet to come up with an articulate solution to tackle the menace, reports Premium Times. This came as Fulani herdsmen on Monday unleashed terror on Ukpabi Nimbo, a community in Uzo-Uwani Local Government Area of Enugu State, killing dozens of people. The attack came weeks after a similar wave of violence by herdsmen in Agatu in Benue State. Soyinka said: “I have yet to hear this government articulate a firm policy of non-tolerance for the serial massacres that have become the nation’s identification stamp.”
“I have not heard an order given that any cattle herders caught with sophisticated firearms be instantly disarmed, arrested, placed on trial, and his cattle confiscated. The nation is treated to an eighteen-month optimistic plan which, to make matters worse, smacks of abject appeasement and encouragement of violence on innocents.
“Let me repeat, and of course I only ask to be corrected if wrong: I have yet to encounter a terse, rigorous, soldierly and uncompromising language from this leadership, one that threatens a response to this unconscionable blood-letting that would make even Boko Haram repudiate its founding clerics. “When I read a short while ago, the Presidential assurance to this nation that the current homicidal escalation between the cattle prowlers and farming communities would soon be over, I felt mortified.
“He had the solution, he said. Cattle ranches were being set up, and in another 18 months, rustlings, destruction of livelihood and killings from herdsmen would be ‘a thing of the past’. 18 months, he assured the nation. I believe his Minister of Agriculture echoed that later, but with a less dispiriting time schema. “Neither, however, could be considered a message of solace and reassurance for the ordinary Nigerian farmer and the lengthening cast of victims, much less to an intending tourist to the Forest Retreat of Tinana in the Rivers, the Ikogosi Springs or the moslem architectural heritage of the ancient city of Kano. In any case, the external tourists have less hazardous options.”
Jay Z
