NOBEL laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has raised concerns over the perennial insurgency and killings in Northern part of the Nigeria.
He asserted that other relatively peaceful parts of the country will start grappling with the menace in no distant future if nothing drastic is done by the federal government to address the issue.
Soyinka, who apoke at the launching of the memorial publication on the late General Ibrahim Attahiru held at Ladi Kwale Hall, Abuja during the weekend said the Federal Government needs to adopt the ‘lateral thinking and new constructs outside orthodox boxes of military engagement’ in tackling insurgency.
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 least expected places.
“To anticipate, and prepare, is not even military thinking but the urging of common sense – and that, is universal territory. However, let me explain that this implicit call for total mobilization is not meant to expand the military as a career but to induce its social integration as a calling. The entirety of national life, lifestyle, priorities, urgently demands re-designing to respond, holistically, to the exigencies of current abnormalities,” he explained.
The poet further stated that “The much touted, consistently sidelined, willfully misrepresented call for national restructuring, for instance, as well as proposals for state and community policing, are only alternative and/or partial expressions of this holistic and urgent imperative. We continue to ignore it at the peril of total, messy, irreversible disintegration.”
While commenting on the recent lynching Deborah Samuel, a 200-level student of a College of education in Sokoto State by irate young Muslims, the Nobel laureate contended that the ‘onesided tolerance culture of the nation and its permissiveness empowers murder through surrogates, instigating killing sprees at will.’