For the name of that hospital, it is reported, is none other than
that of General Sanni Abacha, a vicious usurper under whose authority
the lives of an elected president and his wife were snuffed out.
Assassinations – including through bombs cynically ascribed to the
opposition – became routine. Under that ruler, torture and other forms
of barbarism were enthroned as the norm of governance. To round up,
nine Nigerian citizens, including the writer and environmentalist Ken
Saro-wiwa, were hanged after a trial that was stomach churning even by
the most primitive standards of judicial trial, and in defiance of the
intervention of world leadership. We are speaking here of a man who
placed this nation under siege during an unrelenting reign of terror
that is barely different from the current rampage of Boko Haram. It is
this very psychopath that was recently canonized by the government of
Goodluck Jonathan in commemoration of one hundred years of Nigerian
trauma.
...I urged the need of this purge on one such minister, and at least one
Head of State. That minister promised, but that boast went the way of
Nigerian electoral boast. The Head of State murmured something about
the fear of offending ‘sensibilities’. All evasions amounted to moral
cowardice and a doubling of victim trauma. When you proudly display
certificates of a nation’s admission to the club of global pariahs, it
is only a matter of time before you move to beatify them as saints and
other paragons of human perfection. What the government of Goodluck
Jonathan has done is to scoop up a century’s accumulated degeneracy in
one preeminent symbol, then place it on a podium for the nation to
admire, emulate and even – worship.
There is a deplorable message for coming generations in this governance
aberration that the entire world has been summoned to witness and
indeed, to celebrate. The insertion of an embodiment of ‘governance by
terror’ into the company of committed democrats, professionals,
humanists and human rights advocates in their own right, is a sordid
effort to grant a certificate of health to a communicable disease that
common sense demands should be isolated. It is a confidence trick that
speaks volumes of the perpetrators of such a fraud. We shall pass over –
for instance – the slave mentality that concocts loose formulas for an
Honours List that automatically elevate any violent bird of passage to
the status of nation builders who may, or may not be demonstrably
motivated by genuine love of nation. According generalized but false
attributes to known killers and treasury robbers is a disservice to
history and a desecration of memory. It also compromises the future.
This failure to discriminate, to assess, and thereby make it possible to
grudgingly concede that even out of a ‘doctrine of necessity’ – such as
military dictatorship - some demonstrable governance virtue may
emerge, reveals nothing but national self-glorification in a moral void,
the breeding grounds of future cankerworm in the nation’s edifice.
Such abandonment of moral rigour comes full circle sooner or later. The
survivors of a plague known as Boko Haram, students in a place of
enlightenment and moral instruction, are taken to a place of healing
dedicated to an individual contagion – a murderer and thief of no
redeeming quality known as Sanni Abacha, one whose plunder is still
being pursued all over the world and recovered piecemeal by
international consortiums – at the behest of this same government which
sees fit to place him on the nation’s Roll of Honour! I can think of
nothing more grotesque and derisive of the lifetime struggle of several
on this list, and their selfless services to humanity. It all fits. In
this nation of portent readers, the coincidence should not be too
difficult to decipher.
I reject my share of this national insult.
Wole SOYINKA
Wole SOYINKA
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