Nobel laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka, has lamented the spate of insecurity in the country, noting that the President, Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd), was not in charge of government.
He said the recent “abduction once again of the nation’s children” in “Buhari’s terrain” is “a slap across the face of the Commander-in-Chief”.
He spoke on the backdrop of late Friday’s abduction of pupils in an all-boys Government Secondary in Katsina State; hometown of Buhari.
Soyinka condemned the security challenges confronting in the country in a statement on Tuesday titled “INFRADIG–A presidential comeuppance.”
He added that when the President was summoned by the National Assembly to appear before it amid the rising insecurity in the country, he (Buhari) didn’t initially consider the summon as below the standard of behaviour.
He stated that the President considered the invitation as a polite invitation to preserve the “tattered remains of his ‘Born-Again’ democratic camouflage.”
“That, to come to the present, constituted General Buhari’s response to the National Assembly’s invitation to drop in for a chat. He did not consider it infradig at the beginning. He responded to the polite invitation to rub minds urgently over a people’s security anxieties as one who still struggled to preserve the tattered remains of his ‘Born-Again’ democratic camouflage.
“However, his reversal of consent raised yet again the frightening situation report I have fervently posed: Buhari is not in charge. Whoever is, that segment of the cabalistic control obviously cornered him on the way to the lawmakers’ chambers and urged: Don’t! Their invitation is infradig! He succumbed.
“Beneath the dignity of a Commander-in-Chief! Well. The opportunistic homicidal respondents -Bandits/Boko Haram or whoever – thereupon picked up the gauntlet and provided a response in their own language: abduction once again of the nation’s children. They handed him a slap across the face, on his home terrain, taunting: See if that is more suited to your dignity, ” he stated.
He noted that he joined other people in using the word “Infra dignitatem” to any situation indicating assailing his dignity or statement unworthy of response.
He said, “Once, the word featured prominently in the repertory of Nigerian shorthand diction. Indeed, I grew up thinking that it was only one word, not two, and assumed also that it was English, not Latin: infra dignitatem!
