Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate,
says Nigeria is on auto-pilot, and could crash if efforts are not made to
regain control of the country in time.
In a statement titled ‘MAYDAY!
MAYDAY!! MAYDAY!!!’, the scholar likened the security situation in the country
to that of the Aeroflot Flight 593 of September 28, 1994 where all passengers
died because the pilot left the cockpit to the mercy of his family members
while he went to salute the passengers.
Soyinka said he mentioned the
date thrice as a distress call to the continuous killings in various parts of
the country.
“There are certain eerie
parallels in the Nigerian present to a certain MayDay disorder, one in which
that distress call was never heard. Aeroflot Flight 593 of Sept. 28, 1994 was
such an event, a flight in which all occupants of that plane perished,” Soyinka
said.
“The captain was not even in the
pilot’s seat – others were! They were the pilot’s family – mostly his children.
The pilot’s seat had been turned into a family game of musical chairs.
“Where was the Captain? Somewhere
along the aisle, saluting the passengers – all quite proper, and indeed
encouraged by regulations. He had placed the plane on auto-pilot – just as this
nation has been for some time.”
He explained that by the time the
pilot tried to regain control of the aircraft, it was too late to salvage the
situation.
“The ‘black box’ – or flight
recorder – indicates that the pilot never even got round to shouting ‘May Day’
over the radio – he was too busy struggling to restore the plane’s technical
functions, shout instructions, pull the plane out of a nose-dive, and attempt
to right the craft – too late!” he continued.
Still making allusion to the
aircraft, Soyinka said many organisations have been calling on the “Nigerian
captain” to make the distress call but there has been “no sign of willing”.
“Now flash forwards one decade to
our present, and recall the number of desperate organizations calling on the
Nigerian captain to bury his pride and cry ‘MayDay” across all airwaves,” he
said.
“Call out for international help
to rescue a nation on its terminal nose-dive! There has been no sign of
willing, while the screwed-up plane is now in its corkscrew dive.
“Even if this captain regains his
seat before the crash, it is open season whether or not, like SUV Flight 593,
it will not stall, and head straight for Zuma rockface.
“Strangers are in control in the
cockpit. Put simply, the captain is missing.”
He, therefore, advised President
Muhammadu Buhari to take drastic steps in quelling the killings which he
described as “ethnic cleansing”.
He added that “the plane cannot
remain on auto-pilot as hitherto, while the pilot strolls up and down the
aisle, assuring passengers that all is well.”
He said all illegal inhabitants
of lands should be purged and the lands returned to their rightful owners.
“The plain expression is ethnic
cleansing”and we must not beat around the bush. The shade of Rwanda hangs over
the nation,” he said.
“Give a nation-wide order to all
land-usurpers in the affected towns and villages across the nation to quit
those forcefully occupied lands within a forty-eight hours deadline.
“Issue orders to the military and
police that, wherever illegal occupiers are found, they should be meted the
same treatment as are accorded terrorists. Instruct all agencies that, once
cleared of usurpers, the rightful occupants should be escorted back to their
farmsteads and villages and provided maximum protection.
“We must go beyond arresting a
token handful of herders caught with arms – there are still hundreds of them in
the forests. It is not enough to back the anti- open grazing laws, so late in
the day, but we shall leave that for later.
“All available forces should be
deployed to right a hideous, unprecedented wrong that has left the nation
drowning in blood – we simply cannot continue one day longer to endure this
forceful feeding of human blood.”
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