By Professor 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 of sadism. 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.