Gumsu Sani Abacha, one of the daughters of late Nigerian dictator Gen. Sani Abacha, has lashed out at Prof. Wole Soyinka following the Nobel laureate’s statement about her father.
Giving reasons for rejecting Centenary Award from the Federal Government, the Nobel laureate, on Saturday said sharing the award with the late military dictator was an insult.
He said it was because the late military dictator, Gen. Sani Abacha, was included in the list of awardees.
Gumsu took to her Facebook page and posted the following:
In a statement entitled, ‘The canonisation of terror,’ Soyinka said it was an insult for him to be listed alongside Abacha for the award, more so when killings of innocent citizens by the Boko Haram sect was ongoing in the North-East.
Soyinka recalled the state-sponsored assassinations and abuse of human rights that occurred during Abacha’s reign as military Head of State, and asked why the Federal Government had not changed the names of roads, hospitals and other public facilities that were named after Abacha.
He said, “Under that ruler, torture and other forms of barbarism were enthroned as the norm of governance. Nine Nigerian citizens, including the writer and environmentalist, Ken Saro-wiwa, were hanged after a trial that was stomach-churning even by the most primitive standards of judicial trial, and in defiance of the intervention of world leadership.
“We are speaking of a man who placed this nation under siege during an unrelenting reign of terror that is barely different from the current rampage of Boko Haram. It is this very psychopath that was recently canonised by the government of Goodluck Jonathan in commemoration of one hundred years of Nigerian trauma.”
Soyinka added that by honouring Abacha, President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration had ridiculed Nigeria in the presence of world leaders by glorifying “murderers and thieves.”
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