Nobel Laureate Prof Wole Soyinka on Monday stated his belief in the rightness of the call for a discussion on the structure of the nation.
The eminent writer said the nation needs to be decentralised and opined that a people have the right to discuss their co-existence if they feel the status quo is not working for them anymore, even at the state level.
He said this in Lagos after the announcement of the 10 Nigerian writers, who would be leaving for Lebanon in a cultural exchange programme, The Sail Project, between The Wole Soyinka Foundation and Cedar Institute, University of Lebanon.
Soyinka said “My own position is that people shouldn’t allow themselves be put up by those who try to cheat on the expression, ‘restructuring.’ It doesn’t matter by what name you call it. We all know that this nation was deconstructed and what we live in right now, as a nation, is not allowing structuring that expresses the true will of Nigerians,” he said.
According to him, irrespective of what name it is called, the desire to reformulate the protocols of association must not be ignored if it is the pervasive desire of the people.
It must be entertained and a way forward charted.
“So people should not try to substitute one for another. I find it very dishonest and cheap, trivialising the issue when people said it is the mind, which needs to be restructured. Who is denying that? So, why bring it up? We’re talking about the protocol of the association of the constitutive part of the nation. We’re talking about decentralisation, that is, another word. This country is over-centralised and that has been the bugbear of development, even of issues like security.
“Even if it is one state, that state has the right to say, listen people, let us restructure this state; the protocols that went into the making of this state are no longer viable or have been distorted along the way or have been abandoned and we want to go back to the original set of protocols that created what we call his national entity. You can say you want to reinvent the wheels completely or you want to go back to the original protocols of association,” he added.
On the issue of state police, he said this has become necessary in the current clime where the crime rate is ballooning. He pointed out that such a call is itself a form of restructuring of the articles of association.
