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Folks, The day is getting near, when we shall sing the song of freedom. Let us continue to focus and pray, Biafra will be actualized without any shot fired.
NIGERIA ON BRINK OF IMPLOSION SOYINKA
Nigeria is heading for a violent implosion that would dwarf the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region, Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has said.
A wave of mass killings in May this year, according to Soyinka, was just a precursor to the balkanisation of Nigeria.
"I consider that Nigeria is on the verge, on the brink of a massive implosion that will make what's happening in the Sudan child's play,” the playwright said in an interview with Reuters on Thursday in Abeokuta.
"We know there are movements for secession in this country. We know that everybody is preparing for the contingency of breaking up. International organisations are also studying the situation," Soyinka, who will celebrate his 70th birthday next week added.
More than 1,500 people were killed in a month of tit-for-tat fighting in May by heavily armed militia in Benue Delta and Rivers States.
Soyinka said the complexity of the ethnic clashes in Nigeria was more difficult to understand than the “massive, undirectional violence” in Dafur where more than one million people have been driven from their homes by militias.
The United Nations has called the situation in Darfur the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
The recurring massacres around Nigeria, Soyinka said, were "violent monologues" reflecting a deep imbalance in its make-up that could only be resolved in a fundamental rethink by the country's ethnic groups in a Sovereign National Conference.
"The Sovereign National Conference would throw all the pieces of this country in a basket and try to bring a discernible feature out of it," he said.
"This nation state was cobbled together by the British. Was it in the interest of the people who inhabited this space, or was it in the British interests?" Soyinka asked.
"We are heading that way already," said Soyinka. "This is already a divided country."
The Punch, Friday July 09, 2004
NIGERIA IN BRINK OF EXPLOSION WOLE SOYINKAPosts: 524 | From: USA | Registered: Apr 2001
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