Wole Soyinka: why I don't want to be one of the 100 great Nigerians

Nobel-winning author writes open letter rejecting government honour in protest against inclusion of former military dictator

The sheer weight of indignation and revulsion of most of Nigerian humanity at the recent Boko Haram atrocity in Yobe is most likely to have overwhelmed a tiny footnote to that outrage, small indeed, but of an inversely proportionate significance. 

This was the name of the hospital to which the survivors of the massacre were taken.

That minute detail calls into question, in a gruesome but chastening way, the entire ethical landscape into which this nation has been forced by insensate leadership. 

It is an uncanny coincidence, one that I hope the new culture of “religious tourism”, spearheaded by none other than the nation’s president in his own person, may even come to recognise as a message from unseen forces.

For the name of that hospital, it is reported, is none other than that of General Sani Abacha, a vicious usurper under whose authority the lives of an elected president and his wife were snuffed out. 

Assassinations – including through bombs cynically ascribed to the opposition – became routine. Under that ruler, torture and other forms of barbarism were enthroned as the norm of governance.

To round up, nine Nigerian citizens, including the writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-wiwa, were hanged after a trial that was stomach churning even by the most primitive standards of judicial trial, and in defiance of the intervention of world leadership. 

We are speaking here of a man who placed this nation under siege during an unrelenting reign of terror that is barely different from the current rampage of Boko Haram. 

It is this very psychopath that was recently canonised by the government of Goodluck Jonathan in commemoration of 100 years of Nigerian trauma.

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