•Deplores Abacha’s listing
Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, yesterday lashed out at the Federal Government for including the late General Sani Abacha among those honoured to mark Nigeria’s Centenary celebration.
He called the action of government as a disservice to the nation and a failure of a moral rigour that calls into question “the entire ethical landscape into which this nation has been forced by insensate leadership.”
In a statement entitled The Canonisation of Terror, the Nobel laureate said, “According generalized but false attributes to known killers and treasury robbers is a disservice to history and a desecration of memory. It also compromises the future.”
Soyinka, who was also listed as one of the awardees, added in statement to explain why he declined to accept his own award saying, “I reject my share of this national insult.”
The playwright said it was the same Abacha 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.”
He said it was also under the authority of the late Abacha, whom he called “a vicious usurper” that ” the lives of an elected president and his wife were snuffed out. Assassinations – including through bombs cynically ascribed to the opposition – became routine. Under that ruler, torture and other forms of barbarism were enthroned as the norm of governance. To round up, 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.”
The Nobel laureate wondered why successive administrations have not had the courage to “wipe out” Abacha’s memory from Nigeria.
He observed: “One of the broadest avenues in the nation’s capital, Abuja, bears the name of General Sani Abacha. Successive governments have lacked the political courage to change this signpost – among several others – of national self degradation and wipe out the memory of the nation’s tormentor from daily encounter.
“Not even Ministers for the Federal Capital territory within whose portfolios rest such responsibilities, could muster the temerity to initiate the process and leave the rest to public approbation or repudiation. I urged the need of this purge on one such minister, and at least one Head of State. That minister promised, but that boast went the way of Nigerian electoral boast. The Head of State murmured something about the fear of offending ‘sensibilities’.”
He is of the view that the lack of will to do what is right tantamount to “moral cowardice and a doubling of victim trauma. When you proudly display certificates of a nation’s admission to the club of global pariahs, it is only a matter of time before you move to beatify them as saints and other paragons of human perfection. 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.”
He said he, like many Nigerians, he found it disgusting that the hospital to which victims of the recent attack on a school in Yobe by Boko Haram were rushed for treatment was named after Abacha.
His words: “The sheer weight of indignation and revulsion of most of Nigerian humanity at the recent Boko Haram atrocity in Yobe is most likely to have overwhelmed a tiny footnote to that outrage, small indeed, but of an inversely proportionate significance.
“This was the name of the hospital to which the survivors of the massacre were taken. That minute detail calls into question, in a gruesome but chastening way, the entire ethical landscape into which this nation has been forced by insensate leadership.
“It is an uncanny coincidence, one that I hope the new culture of ‘religious tourism’, spearheaded by none other than the nation’s president in his own person, may even come to recognize as a message from unseen forces.”
He added: “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!
“I can think of nothing more grotesque and derisive of the lifetime struggle of several on this list, and their selfless services to humanity. It all fits. In this nation of portent readers, the coincidence should not be too difficult to decipher.”
But the Federal Government in the brochure at the awards ceremony said it decided to honour Gen Abacha for his unprecedented economic achievements.
Abacha, government claimed, oversaw an increase in the country’s foreign exchange reserves from $494 million in 1993 to $9.6 billion by the middle of 1997, reduced the external debt of Nigeria from $36 billion in 1993 to $27 billion in 1997.
It also credited him with ending all the controversial privatisation programmes of the Babangida administration, reducing the inflation rate of 54 per cent inherited from Babangida to 8.5 per cent between 1993 and 1998, while the nation’s primary commodity, oil was at an average of $9 per barrel.
Besides, he was said to have created the most comprehensive and realistic blueprint for Nigeria’s development through Vision 2010 committee chaired by his predecessor, Chief Ernest Shonekan.
Abacha’s widow, Maryam received the award.
Also present to receive their awards were former Presidents/Heads of State Olusegun Obasanjo, Yakubu Gowon, Shehu Shagari, Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida, Shonekan and Abusalami Abubakar
The past leaders received award for outstanding promoters of unity, patriotism and National Development.
Posthumously awards were given to the former Heads of State/ Presidents including Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, General Aguiyi Ironsi, Murtala Muhammed, General Abacha and Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.
Representatives also received awards for the late Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Chief Anthony Enahoro and former Labour leader, Pa Michael Imoudu.
Presenting a book “The reforms that have transformed Nigeria, 2010-2013” at the occasion, President Jonathan said it would not be fair not to apologise to Nigerians about the selection of Nigerians for the award.
He explained that it was difficult to select 100 people, saying that about 500 people are qualified for the award and that the government would look for a way to recognise them in future national occasions.
The families of the late Bashorun M.K.O.Abiola, the late Lagos lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi and the late music icon, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti also rejected the posthumous awards earmarked for them.
Mr. Kola Abiola, eldest son of the late Chief Abiola said the award was ‘inappropriate’ while, Mr. Mohammed Fawehinmi said it would be morally wrong for the family to stand on the same podium with General Babangida to receive an award.
Babangida’s government, he alleged, serially subjected the Fawehinmi to torture and that it was during one of such ‘illegal and inhuman detentions’ that “our late father’s cell was sprayed with toxic substances while in Gashua prison in 1987. The cumulative effect of that dastardly action led to our father, a non- smoker, contracting lung cancer which eventually led to his death on September 5, 2009.”
The Anikulapo-Kuti family blamed government for destroying Fela’s ‘Kalakuta Republic’ and subjecting his late mother, Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti to inhuman treatment, which led to her death.
