Nigerian youths are not ritual offerings, seek help – Soyinka tells Buhari govt

Following the killing of Greeenfield University, Kaduna students and a high level of insecurity in Nigeria, Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka has urged the President Muhammadu Buhari-led government to seek help and stop playing with human lives in the country.

Soyinka stated this in a statement released on Saturday, titled: “The endless Martyrdom of youth.”

He warned the government to stop playing with the lives of youths , adding that they are the future of Nigeria not ‘Ritual offering’

Soyinka expressing his condolences to those bereaved said he mourns for ‘Nigerian youth so routinely sacrificed, burdened with uncertainty and traumatized beyond their capacity to cope.’

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.

“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.”

“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 must remember Chibok, Dapchi and numerous antecedents.

“One’s greatest fear, with this latest feat of cowardly savagery is that Nigeria must brace itself for a Beslan scenario, yet strive to avoid Nigeria become Africa’s Chechnya.

“Those who have been proven weak and incapable must learn to swallow their vain pride and seek help.

“Again, this is no new counselling, but of course the dog that will get lost no longer heeds the hunter’s whistle. I envy no one the task ahead, terminating the toxic harvest of past derelictions. Blame laying is for later. Right now is the question of what needs to be done, and done urgently.

“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-19 has met its match on the earth of some nation space once known as Nigeria,” the statement added.