Prof. Soyinka basically said he wants nothing to do with this farce called the Nigerian Centenary awards, which sought to list him as an awardee alongside General Sani Abacha. Read what he had to say about it after the click.
Ibadan — Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, said, yesterday, he rejected his nomination for centenary award by the Federal Government because he could not share the award with the late Head of State, General Sani Abacha, who he described as a “murderer and thief of no redeeming quality”.
“I can’t think of nothing more grotesque and derisive of the lifetime struggle of several of this (Honours) List and their selfless services to humanity”, Soyinka said in a statement entitled, ‘The Canonisation of Terror’.
“I reject my share of this national insult”, he added.
Listing some of the atrocities that took place under Abacha that made the late Nigerian leader of undeserving of the centenary award, the Nobel Laureate said: “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.
Accordingly, 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.
Read the professor’s entire thinkpiece, The Canonization of Terror (where this excerpt was taken), here.
