Being on the same award list with abacha is an insult- Soyinka

Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, on Saturday
said he rejected the centenary award to be
conferred on him by the Federal Government
because the late military dictator, Gen. Sani
Abacha, was included in the list of awardees. * Soyinka In a statement entitled, 'The canonisation of terror,'
Soyinka said it was an insult for him to be listed
alongside Abacha for the award, more so when
killings of innocent citizens by the Boko Haram sect
was ongoing in the North-East. Soyinka recalled the state-sponsored
assassinations and abuse of human rights that
occurred during Abacha's reign as military Head of
State, and asked why the Federal Government had
not changed the names of roads, hospitals and
other public facilities that were named after Abacha. He said, "Under that ruler, torture and other forms of
barbarism were enthroned as the norm of
governance. Nine Nigerian citizens, including the
writer and environmentalist, Ken Saro-wiwa, were
hanged after a trial that was stomach-churning even
by the most primitive standards of judicial trial, and in defiance of the intervention of world leadership. "We are speaking of a man who placed this nation
under siege during an unrelenting reign of terror that
is barely different from the current rampage of Boko
Haram. It is this very psychopath that was recently
canonised by the government of Goodluck Jonathan
in commemoration of one hundred years of Nigerian trauma." Soyinka added that by honouring Abacha, President
Goodluck Jonathan's administration had ridiculed
Nigeria in the presence of world leaders by glorifying
"murderers and thieves." "What the government of Goodluck Jonathan has
done is to scoop up a century's accumulated
degeneracy in one preeminent symbol, then place it
on a podium for the nation to admire, emulate and
even - worship. "Such abandonment of moral rigour comes full circle
sooner or later. The survivors of a plague known as
Boko Haram, students in a place of enlightenment
and moral instruction, are taken to a place of healing
dedicated to an individual contagion - a murderer
and thief of no redeeming quality known as Sani Abacha, one whose plunder is still being pursued all
over the world and recovered piecemeal by
international consortiums - at the behest of this
same government which sees fit to place him on the
nation's Roll of Honour

Punch

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