Students’ Killing: Presidency must seek help — Soyinka

Following series of killings, especially the youth, and a high level of insecurity, Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka has urged President Muhammadu Buhari led administration to seek help and stop playing with human lives in the country.

Soyinka stated this in a statement released on Saturday, April 24, 2021. The statement read in part: “Abubakar Atiku has summed up the nation’s feeling – this most recent savagery against our youth is heartbreaking. More than the heart is broken, however, more than millions of individual hearts still lay claim to bonds in common humanity.

The already over-stretched sinews of moral restraint have been snapped off the casing of nation being, and nothing is left but the collective wails of impotence. Not for the first time, what many hoped was a Natural Law of Limitations has been contemptuously, defiantly breached. We need to remind ourselves of hideous precedents.

We keep avoiding the inevitable, but that very unthinkable now hammers brutishly on our gates, the blood ransom arrogantly insatiable. This nation is at war, yet we continue to pretend that these are mere birth-pangs of a glorious entity. They are death throes. Vultures and undertakers hover patiently but with full confidence. The dogs of war stopped merely baying years ago. Again and again, they have sunk their fangs into the jugular of this nation.

The plague called COVID has met its match on the earth of some nation space once known as Nigeria. I grieve with the bereaved, but mourn even more for our youth so routinely sacrificed, burdened with uncertainty and traumatized beyond youth’s capacity to cope. To this government, we repeat the public cry: Seek Help. Stop Improvising with human lives. Youth-that is, the future – should not serve as Ritual Offering on the altar of a failing State.”