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| Wole Soyinka |
NOBEL
laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, on Tuesday called for the restructuring of the Federal
Republic of Nigeria and distanced himself from the position of President
Muhammadu Buhari and former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo who had at
different occasions stated that the sovereignty of the nation is non-negotiable.
Soyinka reportedly made this
remarks during a visit to The Punch stating that restricting of the system will
encourage competition among the component parts, and therefore argued that it
was wrong for the leaders to work with a mindset that the existing system is
fixed and infinite...
“I am on the side of those who say
we must do everything to avoid disintegration. That language I understand. I
don’t understand (ex-President Olusegun) Obasanjo’s language. I don’t
understand (President Muhammadu) Buhari’s language and all their predecessors,
saying the sovereignty of this nation is non-negotiable. It’s bloody well
negotiable and we had better negotiate it. We better negotiate it, not even at
meetings, not at conferences, but everyday in our conduct towards one another...
“We had better understand it too
that when people are saying ‘let’s restructure’, they have better things to do.
It’s not an idle cry; it is a perennial demand. The Pro-National Conference
Organisation was about restructuring when this same Obasanjo said it was an act
of treason for people to come together to fashion a new constitution. Those
were fighting words; that you’re saying, ‘I commit treason because I want to
sit with my fellow citizens and negotiate the structures of staying together’
and ask the police to go and break it up and arrest us.
“I remember that policeman, who said if we met, that would be
treason. I wasn’t a member of PRONACO at the time. That’s when I joined
PRONACO. If you’re saying to me, ‘I am a second-class citizen; I cannot sit
down and discuss the articles, the protocols of staying together’ and you’re
trying to bully me, I won’t accept.
“We cannot continue to allow a centralisation policy which makes
the constituent units of this nation resentful; they say monkey dey work,
baboon dey chop. And the idea of centralising revenues, allocation system,
whereby you dole out; the thing is insulting and it is what I call anti-healthy
rivalry. It is against the incentives to make states viable.”
“I know people get nervous about that expression. If you go to a
place like England, you sometimes see two, three, four police (officers) just
walking casually unarmed, but they are observing everything”, Soyinka said.
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