EDProfessor Wole Soyinka has said Nigeria may not celebrate another Democracy Day if the system is not decentralized.
The Nobel Laureate said this during an Interview with Arise News which focused on the Democracy Day celebration. Soyinka in his interview, said that the country is on a slide, and he advised the President to listen and take the right actions to fight the challenges which are causing the people to demonstrate.
He said; “And that is what is happening to people on the streets. That’s why they are moving, that’s why they are demonstrating; that’s why they are defying even threats from the police and the Government. ‘If you demonstrate, we will do this, if you do this, we will deal with you, we will talk to you in language which you understand’ it does not wash with anybody any longer. Because if a nation is on a suicide slide, the people who feel that they do not deserve that kind of sucidal plunge have a right to say they are getting off this plane before it nosedives.”
When the Professor was asked if Nigeria can continue as one, he replied, “Not if it continues this way. Not if it fails to decentralise. If Nigeria fails to decentralise, and I mean to decentralise as fast as possible, manifestly and not as rhetoric, then Nigeria cannot stay together.
“It is not Wole Soyinka saying this. Everybody has said it: ex-heads of State have said it; politicians have said it; analysts have said it; economists have said it, and sometimes we get tired.
“I am saying this whole nation is about to self-destruct and I am not the only one saying it, except Buhari and his government listens and take action, we would not celebrate another Democracy Day next year.
TVR Correspondent also gathers from the Professor’s interview that the President is not listening to what the people are saying, neither is he listening to what the government representing them is saying. He is only giving instructions, which is not entirely new. It was just hoped that the government had transcended from that kind of partisan thinking.
“Take for instance the position of the Southern governors on ooen grazing, at least 50 percent of a nation are saying that within this democratic dispensation we are operating, we do not want open grazing anymore and then somebody sits in Aso Rock and says to them, I am instructing my Attorney-General to dig up some kind of colonial law, which arbitrated between farmers and herders.”
Favour Anthonia Adeniyi.
Reporter.
ED
