SOYINKA'S LETTER TO NIGERIAN PARLIAMENT: IS IT NOW COOL TO KILL? – An Anguished Letter to Nigerian Lawmakers - By Wole Soyinka
My dear Honourables,
I hope you will excuse
me for distracting you from your onerous duties, but I am a current sufferer –
and I am not alone – from a persistent nightmare. That affliction has been
induced by your most recent approach to addressing an acknowledged problem that
affects, not only Nigerians, but the entire global community. The nightmare
consists of the fear of waking up one morning to discover that one’s name has
been cited among those helpless victims on behalf of whom a repellent
legislation is about to be enacted.
The likelihood in my
case is especially acute... Yes, indeed, it is no Fake News that I have
denounced the purveyors of public lies and hate material as the very scum of
the earth. I have called them names that come close to enrolling me among the
very reprobates we all so fervently denounce. From Abuja, through Paris,
London, Sochi, Dar es Salaam, Chandrigah, etc. etc., I have utilised every
available platform to highlight their perverse mentality and call for concerted
action against their hyper-activism against humanity in general. I have singled
out the Nigerian species of this criminal pursuit as an especially virulent
breed, as a subhuman aberration without conscience, incapable of remorse,
sustained by abnormal reserves of sadism. I have closed down dozens of fake
sites instituted over my name, and set in motion mechanisms for the pursuit of
those who steal my identity, even where the content is quite harmless, even
positive. Only recently, in Paris, I proposed that judicial mitigation under
the recognition of crime passionnelshould be considered for victims
of Fake News who ‘lose control’ on physically encountering their violators. As
you may have discerned so far, I again, and unapologetically, exploit this very
development to reiterate my detestation and contempt for such pestilences that
plague our humanity.
However, dear
legislators, consider more deeply the path on which you have chosen to embark.
I invite you to reflect quite objectively on the company into which you are
about to throw yourselves, and the consequences for the very nation you
represent – including its social psyche. You are about to corrupt youthful
impression, to join the brigade of closet psychopaths for whom the only
solution to any social malaise, from the trite to the profoundly affective is –
Kill! Is this what humanity and society are all about?
You are psyching up
your ranks to pronounce yourselves affiliates of inhuman aberrations such as
Boko Haram, Isis (Da’esh), al Shabbab, nomadic cow herders etc. etc. for whom
killing is the only response for real or imagined wrongs, perceptions of
enti-tlement and/or deprivation, sense of righteousness and generally – concept
of a thoroughly sanitised community of mortals. You are sending out
applications to join the ranks of those inadequate males who believe that the
only cure for adultery is to bury a woman up to her neck in earth and reduce
her head to a pulp under a rain of stones. You affirm yourselves – not for the
first time, alas! – allies of those who believe that death is the appropriate
cure for that physiological conditioning which, through no fault of theirs,
attract them to others of the same sex. You pronounce yourselves clones of
demented rulers like Yahayah Jahmeh of Gambia who preached that we all cut off
the heads of homosexuals and poison alleged witches – and so on and on down a
dismal list of silent, instinctive killers who have somehow managed to
manipulate themselves into the corridors of ‘legitimatised’ – or illicit
recesses of – Power and Force.
By the way, are you
aware that a school of thought passionately believes that thieves such as
Yahayah Jahmeh, formerly of Gambia, Omar Bashir of the Sudan etc., in company
of numerous members of African leadership elite, including this very Nigerian
society, deserve no less than the death penalty for pilfering public resources,
and on a scale that continues to stagger even the most inured in this nation?
Do you really, as presumably analytical minds, believe that a facile and final
recourse to the gallows or a fusillade of bullets at the stake, is the sole
remedy to the phenomenon of the diffuse clas-sifications possible under the
abuse of communication and the sowing of hate among people? How precise is the
definition of ‘hate’ when it becomes a yardstick for the extinction of even one
human life? Haunting, hopefully, our collective conscience as a nation, even
till today, is recollection of a clique of social army reformers who
instituted, and carried out the execution of citizens under a retroactive law.
Yet others wiped out entire communities as collective punishment for the loss
of members of their elite class, the military. And surely it is too soon to
dismiss memory of the mass decimation of a religious group, the Shi’ites, for
obstructing the passage of a motorcade of that same elite class. These are
classic instances of murder, albeit under the immunity of power legitimation.
Your motivations are
also spectacularly dubious. Silencing the voices of criticism is a perennial
preoccupation of power, but we know that a far more penetrative form of death,
spelling the end of social vitality and relevance is incurred when human voices
are silenced. Try and imagine how many “deserved” executions would be taking
place in this nation right now – beginning with nearly all of you in the
exalted homes of legislation – if Boko Haram had succeeded in subjugating this
nation under its creed. Well, do not even bother with imagination, which is not
as common a faculty as we tend to assume – simply check with neighbouring Mali
how many, convicted of crimes against faith, Mr. Answar Dine eliminated during
his brief sway in northern Mali. Or remain within this nation itself – check
the statistics of death inflicted from indiscriminate bombings of the thriving
concourses of humanity – schools, markets, motor parks, media houses, churches,
mosques, shrines by believers in the doctrine of death as divine solution to
the very crime of existence outside their narrow and perverted set of beliefs.
Consider the fate of Uganda if Joseph Kony had indeed succeeded in his mission
of converting Ugandans to his doctrine of – Salvation or Death!
These are not
imaginary scenarios. That quick but facile option – killing – has become the
current emblem of this very nation, effectively replacing the green-white-green!
Something has collapsed. The carefully calibrated structures of fellow feeling,
supposedly inculcated from infancy, lie in ruins. Life is now held cheap,
casual, and trite. Students kill for the thrill of it, and for assertion of
cultic supremacy. Kidnappers collect ransom yet kill. They kill even
intermediary couriers. Fetishists kill in pursuit of illusions of instant
wealth. Others, highly placed, kill for political office, and yet others to
cover up criminalities by the deployment of killers. You cannot claim ignorance
that there have been identified, over the past few decades, consortiums of
killers who actually advertise their trade in select circles and canvass for
clients. Your businessmen – and women – have used them. So have politicians.
And now, you wish to
add, to this culture of rampaging morbidity, the state empowered deaths of
those dregs of society who titillate themselves with corrosive narratives from
diseased minds, and boost their meaningless lives with the degradation of others?
Are they even worth the cost of the hangman’s noose? No. True, governance has a
responsibility to protect its citizens, but social malefactors must be fought
and neutralised through far more painstaking methods. Reformed if possible,
exposed and publicly humiliated, punished and compelled to make restitution
where their actions have caused pain, anguish and destruction. That option, we
know, is the more arduous path, but then, where did you obtain the notion that
you were elected to occupy cushy, stress-free armchairs?
When a section of this
national community wanted to execute a lady called Safiyat for alleged adultery
some years ago – and through the singularly revolting means of stoning to death
– the nation rose above religious partisanship in repudiation of this barbaric
trivialisation of human life. We continue to rail against the solution of death
as penalty against those whose sexual orientation is different from ours, and
thereby offends the sensibilities of others. I await persuasion, offered through
objective, not emotive arguments, that this new extension of the homicidal
imperative is fundamentally different from those other globally repudiated
candidates for the killing route to social sanitation.
For now, may I
passionately plead with you to consider that the coarsening and debasement of
youth sensibility – already too far gone – through the trivialisation of life –
is a spectre that may return to haunt you if coming generations are taught that
it is “cool to kill”. Remember that example, especially by leadership, is a
hundred times more explicit and enduring than the mere propagation of any
counter-doctrine. Do not embrace the awful responsibility of impressing
homicide as a way of life on the ethical template of coming generations. The
chickens have a way of coming home to roost. I may be wrong of course, but
their droppings already foul the common air we all breathe. Just take a deep
breath, look around you, and re-consider.
Wole Soyinka, thethe first Black
Nobel Laureate in Literature, is convener of Citizens Forum.
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