Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka has described the threat by a UK-based Nigerian Adeyinka Grandson on Igbo indigenes to leave Yorubaland within 48 hours as the “work of sick, cowardly minds”.
Soyinka stated this in a release on Saturday in response to the viral video of Grandson’s threat.
“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. What happened at Ore in Ondo state in August 1967 are just highlights of what we are going to do from Monday, 26th October, 2020,” Grandson had said.
In his statement, Soyinka said: “Undoubtedly in order to promote the video clip of an ethnic revanchist calling on Igbo to leave Yoruba land, 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.
“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.”
In August 2019, Grandson was arrested in London for allegedly “stirring racial discrimination” against the Igbo and Fulani ethnic groups and also “encouraging terrorism”.
