Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, Tuesday, lamented that President Muhammadu Buhari has relapsed into a trance and abandoned the ship of governance.
He said the sooner the President gets out of that trance, the better for the country.
Soyinka, who spoke at a press conference on the damaging consequences of marauding herdsmen activities in the country, said there are several unforced errors going in Nigeria has made the country to drift like a rudderless ship.
With conference titled: “Herdsmen and Nation: Valentine Card or Valedictory Rites?, he gave an analogical tale of a state whose master’s insensitivity allows for the overbearing actions of his subjects.
He lamented that mass destruction of farmlands in the most horrifying manner had become a norm festering with the encouragement of the government’s body language.
He described as appalling the position of the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, that the continuing loss of lives in Benue and consequent increase of internal refugees was simply a communual clash, stressing that little would be achieved in security without the adoption of state policing.
“If the IGP can seat in Abuja and say of an event that is happening under the jurisdiction of a governor in another state is just a communal clash when people are being slaughtered and their villages are being occupied, it shows of complete alienation. Then there is the authority of Governors who have the ultimate authority for security. It is the Governor who is supposed to be the Chief Security Officer. We are now back to authoritative voices saying indeed, state police need to be decentralized. We have been saying it and others have been saying for a long time. We are now getting back to the commonsensical issue that the nation cannot function under a single police command,” he said.
Soyinka also opined that the herdsmen conflict and killings may be sponsored by people with access to ill-gotten money bent on causing anarchy in the country.
“I think the police have a responsibility to look at highly-placed people in whose interest anarchy can be fostered.
“We might end up discovering that some of these people; I don’t care whether they are politicians or civil servants, have an interest in ensuing that there is chaos from Maiduguri to Lagos.
“We sometimes talk about corruption, but we don’t know how far it can destabilise the polity. When we think of the amount that has been stolen in this country…then you know that there is enough illegal funds to destabilise the nation completely,” he said.