The sheer weight of indignation and
revulsion of most of Nigerian humanity at the recent Boko Harma atrocity in
Yobe is most likely to have overwhelmed a tiny footnote to that outrage, small
indeed, but of an inversely proportionate significance. This was the name
of the hospital to which the survivors of the massacre were taken. That minute
detail calls into question, in a gruesome but chastening way, the entire
ethical landscape into which this nation has been forced by insensate
leadership. It is an uncanny coincidence, one that I hope the new culture
of ‘religious tourism’, spearheaded by none other than the nation’s president
in his own person, may even come to recognize as a message from unseen forces.
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.
It has been long a-coming. One of
the broadest avenues in the nation’s capital, Abuja, bears the name of General
Sanni Abacha. Successive governments have lacked the political courage to
change this signpost – among several others – of national self
degradation and wipe out the memory of the nation’s tormentor from daily
encounter. Not even Ministers for the Federal Capital territory within whose
portfolios rest such responsibilities, could muster the temerity to initiate
the process and leave the rest to public approbation or repudiation. 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
No comments:
Post a Comment