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
utilized 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 ofsadism. 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 passionnel should 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 entitlement and/or
deprivation, sense of righteousness and generally – concept of a thoroughly
sanitized 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 ‘legitimatized’ – 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
classifications 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 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 neutralized 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 arm-chairs?
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 trivialization 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 trivialization 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.
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You have said it all, sir
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