Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka says President Muhammadu Buhari is handling the recent killings by suspected herdsmen with kid gloves. Recall that suspected herdsmen killed scores of people on New Year’s Day in Benue state, North Central Nigeria.
And Soyinka noted in a lengthy article he wrote on Wednesday that Buhari was towing the line of former President Goodluck Jonathan, who was believed to have treated Boko Haram insurgents with levity.
"A hideous massacre” perpetrated by the herdsmen in 2016, a security meeting was called and the cattle rearers attended the meeting according to reports with AK47s and other weapons of mass intimidation visible under their garments,” Soyinka said.
"They were neither disarmed nor turned back. They freely admitted the killings but justified them by claims that they had lost their cattle to the host community. He added that, "Such are the monstrous beginnings of the culture of impunity. We are reaping, yet again, the consequences of such tolerance of the intolerable. Yes, there indeed the government is culpable, definitely guilty of looking the other way. Indeed, it must be held complicit.”
"I am not aware that IPOB came anywhere close to this homicidal propensity and will to dominance before it was declared a terrorist organization.“The international community rightly refused to go along with such an absurdity. The conduct of that movement, even at its most extreme, could by no means be reckoned as terrorism. By contrast, how do we categorize Myeti?”
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