Nigeria’s break-up less likely, says Soyinka

July 3, 2014

Prof. Wole Soyinka

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has said that Nigeria is suffering greater carnage at the hands of the violent Islamic sect, Boko Haram, than it did during the country’s 30-month civil war.

Soyinka, however, said the Boko Haram insurgency had made the country’s break-up less likely.

He said this in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday in Abeokuta, Ogun State.

Soyinka said the horrors inflicted by the Boko Haram insurgents had shown Nigerians across the mostly Muslim north and Christian south that sticking together might be the only way to avoid even greater sectarian slaughter.

Nigeria fought a bloody civil war between 1967 and 1970 to stop the secession attempt by the Igbo of the present South-East zone.

The Nobel laureate said, “We have never been confronted with butchery on this scale, even during the civil war.

“There were atrocities (during Biafra) but we never had such a near predictable level of carnage and this is what is horrifying.”

A million people died during the Biafra war, though mostly through starvation and illness, rather than violence.

Boko Haram’s five-year-old struggle to carve out an Islamic state from its bases in the North-East has become increasingly bloody, with near daily attacks killing many thousands.

The conflict’s growing intensity has led Nigerian commentators to predict it may split the country, 100 years after British colonial rulers cobbled Nigeria together from their northern and southern protectorates.

“I think ironically it’s less likely now. For the first time, a sense of belonging is predominating. It’s either we stick together now or we break up, and we know it would be not in a pleasant way,” Soyinka said.

Boko Haram’s abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls from the Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, on April 14 drew unprecedented international attention to the insurgency and pledges of aid from Western powers, but violence has worsened.

The sect’s fighters frequently massacre whole villages, gunning down fleeing residents and burning their homes.

The insurgents on Sunday returned to the Chibok Local Government Area, attacking churches and worshippers during worship in Kwada, Kautikari and Kanagau communities. On Tuesday, the insurgents bombed a popular market in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, from where the sect started off its campaign of violence in 2009.

Soyinka said fewer people were shrugging off Boko Haram’s menace.

“It’s almost unthinkable to say: ‘well, let’s leave them to their devices.’ Very few people are thinking that way,” he said.

Attacks spreading southwards, including three bombings in the Federal Capital Territory since April, showed it was not a just a northern problem.

Soyinka said, “The (Boko Haram) forces that would like to see this nation break up are the very forces which will not be satisfied having their enclave.

“(We) are confronted with an enemy that will never be satisfied with the space it has.

“When the spectre of Sharia first came up, for political reasons, this was allowed to hold, instead of the president defending the constitution.”

He sees both Christianity and Islam as foreign impositions.

“We cannot ignore the negative impacts which both have had on African society. They are imperialist forces: intervening, arrogant. Modern Africa has been distorted,” he told Reuters.

He added that while the leadership of Boko Haram needed to be “decapitated completely”, little had been done to present an alternative ideological vision to their “deluded” followers, driven largely by economic destitution and despair.