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Deborah: Soyinka calls for sack, trial of Abuja Mosque Imam

Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, has slammed the Chief Imam of the National Mosque, Abuja, Professor Ibrahim Maqari, and a few others for allegedly justifying the killing of a female student, Deborah Samuel, by a mob in Sokoto State for alleged blasphemy,

Soyinka, who described the killing as the latest example of religious-inspired barbarity in the country, said it was time Nigeria rose above impunity and drew the line against inhumanity.

He said this in Abuja on Saturday at the one-year memorial of the late Chief of Army Staff, General Ibrahim Attahiru, and the unveiling of Gen. Ibrahim Attahiru Foundation (GIAF) and his biography titled, “The man, the soldier, the patriot” written by Niran Adedokun.

General Attahiru died in 2021 in Kaduna when his Nigerian Air Force Beechcraft B300 King Air 350i crashed near the Kaduna International Airport.

“We have already paid, and are still paying too high a price for the culture of Appeasement and Impunity. Let it end now, in Affirmative Action.

“To anyone who cares to listen, Maqari has implicitly directed his followers to take the law into their own hands in the name of religion, and in a nation beset on all sides by wars of ultra-nationalism and religious fanaticism. That is the message of a supposedly holy man to youths, to us, his message to a nation embroiled in madness of multiple insurgencies,” the Nobel Laureate stated.

Soyinka said Maqari should be removed from office and tried “under any existing laws that approximate hate rhetoric, incitement to murder and abuse of office”.

“We have gone beyond theocratic rhetoric that merely pays lip service to civilized norms. Let all pietistic denunciations be backed by affirmative action,” he added.

Soyinka, however, acknowledged the condemnation of the killing by President Muhammadu Buhari, the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar, women organisations, workers’ unions, and professionals from all walks of life.

Speaking on the security challenges bedeviling the country, the Noble Laureate called for what he called off-beat, lateral thinking, new constructs outside orthodox boxes of military engagement.

He said: “Let no one imagine that the ongoing insurgency will forever remain within its present borders. It spreads. It contaminates. It breeds mutations in the least expected places.

“To anticipate, and prepare, is not even military thinking but the urging of common sense – and that, is universal territory.’

“The entirety of national life, lifestyle, priorities, urgently demands re-designing to respond, holistically, to the exigencies of current abnormalities.

“The much-touted, consistently sidelined, willfully misrepresented call for National Restructuring, for instance, as well as proposals for state and community policing, are only alternative and/or partial expressions of this holistic and urgent imperative.

“We continue to ignore it at the peril of total, messy, irreversible disintegration,” Soyinka stated.

The Star