OAU VC: Soyinka berates Ife indigenes over ‘crazy’ protests

Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has condemned Ile Ife indigenes over their “crazy” protests and agitation over the appointment of Prof. Adebayo Bamire as Vice-Chancellor of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU).

While speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, the United States on Tuesday, Soyinka queried the call for an Ile-Ife VC, saying such shouldn’t exist anywhere.

He further noted that the people of Ile Ife ought to have denounced the protesters for making such calls for an OAU VC.

Soyinka who spoke on “The Politics of Black Intellection and Creativity,” which was the first of the newly inaugurated Distinguished Lecture in African Studies added that those behind the OAU protests should be “ruthlessly” dealt with.

“Why should there be an Ife VC anywhere? An Ife person wrote me and said, ‘look at these people disgracing us.’ I told him to go there and disgrace them. You are an Ife person. You should be in the frontline.

“The Ife people should say those people don’t belong to us; we don’t know where they came from. And they should be dealt with ruthlessly.

“I just don’t understand what they put in the water these days. It is crazy,” Soyinka said.

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The playwright also decried the rising spate of killings across the country, saying he was shocked by the lackadaisical response of the government to the killings.

While fielding questions from Prof. Wale Adebamwi of the Africana Studies, Department of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Soyinka said: “I have been under a state of shock for a couple of decades. So it was time I took my revenge and hopefully shock our own people just for exchange.

“Things have been happening I never thought I would witness. Take for instance the kidnapping of those children under the guise of religion. More than 300 school pupils were kidnapped from a school, where we put them there to take their examination, going about our business, raise their school fees and they disappeared completely.

“People saw them going. They saw them being kidnapped. The lackadaisical response of the government at the time was a shocker. But it wasn’t just Boko Haram alone. It isn’t just ISWAP. It is what has been happening just among the generality of people – killing for ritual purposes.

“You wake up, somebody has disappeared, the body is found, the vital organs removed. People kidnapping for ransom every day. Pick up the papers. This has been going on for decades. So, It’s been going on for a very long time. And we are pretending that this is not happening.

“I stated one time that anytime anybody is kidnapped in any state, let us shut down that state immediately until that person is recovered. It has reached that point that abnormal measures are absolutely imperative. It is no longer a choice. And yet the government continues to roll on.”