[size=14pt]Ex-president's Visit in Bad Taste: Soyinka[/size]

By Yemi Ajayi





QUOTE
“It is known as an ego trip. You do not play ‘statesman’ over the mangled bodies of victims, least of all where their violators insist on the righteousness of their very conduct.”


Fortuitously, Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, came down hard yesterday on former President Olusegun Obasanjo for his visit on Thursday to the Maiduguri family home of the slain leader of the terrorist group, Boko Haram, Mohammed Yusuf.


Soyinka, in a statement, described the visit, on a day the United Nations office in Nigeria was holding a memorial service in honour of the 23 victims who died in the August 26 suicide bombing of its Abuja office that was sponsored by the terrorist group, as ill advised and ill-timed.


In the statement titled, ‘Blessed are the Peacemakers?’ Soyinka wondered why Obasanjo had chosen “that moment of a collective empathy with victims” to visit their killers.


According to him, President Goodluck Jonathan owes Nigerians and the international community an explanation on whether Obasanjo’s visit was state sponsored or not.


Obasanjo, during his visit to Maiduguri , met with some family members of the late Yusuf for about 90 minutes, and urged them to forget the past and give peace a chance, adding, “this is a personal initiative. I urge you to forgive and forget the past. I plead with you; give me the chance to mediate between the family and government.”


The former president, who arrived Maiduguri at 11.40 am, was received by the state deputy governor, Alhaji Zanna Umar Mustapha.
Yusuf was killed while in the custody of the police in Maiduguri after his arrest by soldiers of the Joint Task Force. His killing, extra-judicially, triggered the initial wave of reprisal attacks on security agents and government officials that was unleashed on the nation by his associates.


Soyinka, who could not attend the memorial for the bomb victims due to what he called “excessively short notice,” said inasmuch as he wanted to, he was relieved that he could not make it given the circumstances of Obasanjo’s visit to the late Yusuf’s home.


He said: “My chagrin cannot be measured when I discovered on arrival that at the very moment – or thereabouts – when this nation bowed her head in sorrow and contrition before the whole world, in an attempt to come to terms with her own causative deficiencies in whatever area – and I do not imply simply security - a former head of state of this very nation appropriated that moment of a collective empathy with victims to pay a visit to the home of one who, albeit dead, was the acknowledged head of the murder organisation, Boko Haram, an organisation that blithely accepted, as usual, responsibility for this unconscionable act, one among equally heinous and yet ongoing atrocities.

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