Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has verbalized that Nigeria is suffering more preponderant carnage at the hands of the truculent Islamic sect, Boko Haram, than it did during the country’s 30-month civil war.
Soyinka, however, verbalized the Boko Haram insurgency had made the country’s break-up less likely.
He verbally expressed this in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday in Abeokuta, Ogun State.
Soyinka verbally expressed the horrors inflicted by the Boko Haram insurgents had shown Nigerians across the mostly Muslim north and Christian south that cohering might be the only way to eschew even more preponderant sectarian slaughter.
Nigeria fought a bloody civil war between 1967 and 1970 to stop the secession endeavor by the Igbo of the present South-East zone.
The Nobel laureate verbalized, “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 prognosticable 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 presage it may split the country, 100 years after British colonial rulers cobbled Nigeria together from their northern and southern protectorates.
“I cerebrate ironically it’s less likely now. For the first time, a sense of belonging is predominating. It’s either we cohere now or we break up, and we ken it would be not in a congenial way,” Soyinka verbalized.
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 avail from Western potencies, 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, assailing 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 commenced off its campaign of violence in 2009.
Soyinka verbalized fewer people were shrugging off Boko Haram’s menace.
“It’s virtually unthinkable to verbalize: ‘well, let’s leave them to their contrivances.’ Very few people are cerebrating that way,” he verbally expressed.
Attacks spreading southwards, including three bombings in the Federal Capital Territory since April, showed it was not a just a northern quandary.
Soyinka verbally expressed, “The (Boko Haram) forces that would relish to visually perceive this nation break up are the very forces which will not be satiated having their enclave.
“(We) are confronted with an enemy that will never be gratified with the space it has.
“When the spectre of Sharia first came up, for political reasons, this was sanctioned to hold, in lieu of the president forfending the constitution.”
He visually perceives both Christianity and Islam as peregrine 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 integrated 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” adherents, driven largely by economic destitution and despair.
