Soyinka condemns video asking Ndigbo to vacate Yorubaland

Renowned playwright and Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has denounced a video calling on Igbo indigenes to vacate Yorubaland.

One Grandson Adeyinka, a UK-based Nigerian, in a video circulating on social media, gave people from Igboland 48 hours to leave South-West states or be dealt with.

“This is a warning to the Igbo people in Yorubaland. We are giving you a 48-hour ultimatum from today, Friday 23rd October, 2020 until Sunday, 25th of October, 2020 to leave Yorubaland.

“From Monday 26th of October, we will close the roads, stop all the vehicles across Yorubaland and every Igbo national will be dealt with accordingly,” Adeyinka said in the video.

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But in a statement he titled ‘Identity thieves on the rampage,’ and released on Saturday, Soyinka urged the public to be wary of identity thieves using falsehood to legitimise their antics.

He said, “Undoubtedly in order to promote the video clip of an ethnic revanchist calling on Igbo to leave Yorubaland, this same lunatic fringe has exhumed, and embarked on circulating an ancient fabrication – several years mouldering in the grave – once attributed to me and vigorously denounced.

“That statement impudently expounds, as my utterance, what the Hausa want, what the Yoruba want, and what the Igbo want. Such an attribution– let me once again reiterate – is the work of sick, cowardly minds that are ashamed, or lack the courage, as the saying goes, ‘to answer their fathers’ names.’ At least the current ethnic rabble-rouser has the courage of his convictions, not so the sick brigade of identity thieves.”

Soyinka went further to say, “Normally, one should totally ignore the social dregs. However, in the present atmosphere where fake news is so easily swallowed and acted upon without reflection, I feel once again obliged to denounce this recurrent obscenity. As for our brother and sister Igbo, I hope they have learnt to ignore the toxic bilge under which some Nigerian imbeciles seek to drown the nation.

“It is time also, I believe, to also enter the following admonition: one cannot continue to monitor and respond to the concoctions of these addicts of falsehood, and their assiduous promoters who have yet to learn to wipe the filth off their tablets. The patrons of social platforms should develop the art of discrimination. Some attributions are simply so gross that, to grant them even a moment’s latitude of probability diminishes the civic intelligence of the recipient.”

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