Nobel Laureate says Buhari hasn’t given strong response to Fulani herdsmen attacks

Prof Soyinka made the comment on Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in an address to the National Conference on Culture and Tourism, PM News reports.

“I have yet to hear this government articulate a firm policy of non-tolerance for the serial massacres have become the nation’s identification stamp. I have not heard an order given that any cattle herders caught with sophisticated firearms be instantly disarmed, arrested, placed on trial, and his cattle confiscated,” he said.

“The nation is treated to an eighteen-month optimistic plan which, to make matters worse, smacks of abject appeasement and encouragement of violence on innocents.

“Let me repeat, and of course I only ask to be corrected if wrong: I have yet to encounter a terse, rigorous, soldierly and uncompromising language from this leadership, one that threatens a response to this unconscionable blood-letting that would make even Boko Haram repudiate its founding clerics.

“It is now close to a year since I attempted to utilize the Open Forum platform of the Centre for Culture and International Understanding, Oshogbo, to launch a national debate on the topic – SACRED COWS OR SACRED RIGHTS.

“The signs were already clear and the rampage of impunity was already manifesting a cultic intensity of alarming proportions. For reasons which are too distasteful to go into here, the forum did not take place.

“We were already agreed that General Buhari be invited to give a keynote address, based on his long experience in such matters as former head of state, and as a cattle rearer himself who might be able to penetrate the mentality of this ‘post-Boko Haram’ pestilence’,” Soyinka added.

Meanwhile, former aviation minister, Femi Fani-Kayode has accused Buhari of silently endorsing the attacks.

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