Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has said that he does not like the sound of a Yoruba nation any more than he like the sound of a Tv nation, Igbo nation.
The Nobel laureate made this known in an interview with BBC Pidgin on Monday saying that when you talk you talked about the Yoruba nation are you talking about the Yoruba nation within Nigeria only or across the colonial boarders into Cotonou the Republic of Benin and much more?.
He also went to say that Nigeria is basket case that its contents are shrilling, disintegrating all over the place because the constitution of the country which according to him is not working and that it was imposed on Nigerians by ”internal new colonial force called the military”
He said: ‘I do not like the sound of a Yoruba nation any more than I like the sound of a Tv nation, Igbo nation, no the reason is this there certain pejorative overtone… chauvinistic overtone attached to it that is not the issue.
‘When you talked about Yoruba nation are we talking about the creation of a Yoruba nation within Nigeria only or across the colonial boarders into Cotonou the Republic of Benin, where you know the Yoruba exits moving on to Togo, even when you get to Ivory coast you still see community of Yoruba .
‘When you talked about Yoruba nation I have to understand exactly what you mean do we even talk abut the Yoruba in the diaspora or not so it a question which is not for me to answer.
What Sunday Igboho stands for is not too dissimilar to what Kanu stand for – Soyinka
Soyinka further said that on a sentimental level he wants Nigerian to remain but gave condition for this saying that Nigeria must decentralize
He said: ‘All I know is this on a sentimental level and that is different from objective reasoning Yes I will prefer us to try and manage what we have under certain rigorous condition and that is decentralization we have to move away completely from this constitution which was imposed on us by an internal new colonial force called the military.
‘If it were working my position might be different very from pragmatism .. why don’t we go along with the pragmatic way.
‘So my condition are very none negotiable we got to get away from the present political arrangement because it not working they are creating internal overlord, skewed lopsided revenue share system, rubbing this arraignment rubbing Peter to pay Paul. So we have not reached that point of answering that question yet because we can go on a transitory way and say let us take all the anomaly and see weather people’s position change or not.
‘But right now what we have is not a nation but a basket case real basket of case which shrilling, disintegrating all over the place and all its contents are spilling over the basket , and all we are trying to to do is say hold there grab it there cover that leak a nation can not continue like this
On the rearrests on Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu Soyinka, said that there will be a “huge squawk” if the truth is known about how Kanu was arrested by government.
He said, “It’s not for me to tell the president to prepare itself because it’s going to be a huge squawk when the truth about how Kanu was arrested comes out. People are alleging this or that. That is one phase whether Nigeria has acted outside international law.
“The second issue, however, has to do with Kanu’s conduct outside the nation. There’s been a level of hate rhetoric which has been unfortunate, from Kanu. Hate rhetoric is an issue that can only be judged by the laws of any nation.
“Was it right ‘to have been kidnapped?’ You can say intercepted as much as you want but I think Kanu was kidnapped. That is wrong internationally and morally.
“The government can not wash itself clean on what seems to be a kind of comparative energy in pursuing the destabilised forces in the nation,” he said.
If we take ourselves back, once when I threw a challenge to Buhari, what I expect from a true leader is to issue an order, give a deadline that any illegal occupant of any villages, farms is given 48hours to quit after which the mighty forces of the nation will be unleashed on them. It was ignored.
“Years later, he came to say ‘we will respond to these people in the language they understand’. This is what I expected him to have said years ago, at the beginning of the insurgency.
