Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka has reacted to the current fuel scarcity bedeviling Nigerians.
He wonders why successive governments find it difficult to fix challenges facing the country.
He is particularly disturbed by the blame passing by those charged with the responsibility of making the country work.
Soyinka, in a statement yesterday on the state of the nation, could not understand why the generality of Nigerians are being exposed to unnecessary hardship caused by the fuel scarcity.
He recalled government’s promise to deal with the situation during a similar fuel crisis in 1977.
He attached to his statement which he entitled BLAME PASSING – The New Year Gift to a Nation, the bromide of the June 7, 1977 edition of the Daily Times in which President Muhammadu Buhari, who was Petroleum minister at the time said the fuel crisis ‘may be over next year.”
He said in the statement: “In the accustomed tradition, I wish the nation less misery in the coming year. A genuine Happy New Year Greeting is probably too extravagant a wish.
“The accompanying news clipping from June 1977 came into my hands quite fortuitously. It is forty years old. It captures the unenviable enigma that is the Nigerian nation. It is however a masterful end-of-year image to take into the coming year, not only for the individual now at the helm of government, General Buhari, but for a people surely credited with the most astounding degree of patience and forbearance on the African continent – except of course among themselves, when they turn into predatory fiends. When many of us are blissfully departed, an updated rendition of this same clipping – with a change of cast here and there – will undoubtedly be reproduced in the media, with the same alibis, the same in-built panacea of blame passing.
“Let this be called to our collective memory. Even before the current edition of the fuel crisis, other challenges, requiring immediate fix, had begun to monopolize national attention, relegating to the sidelines the outcry for a fundamental and holistic approach to the wearisome cycle of citizen trauma. “This has been expressed most recently, and near universally in the word “Restructuring”, defined straightforwardly as a drastic overhaul of Nigerian articles of co-existence in a more rational, equitable and decentralized manner.
“Such an overhaul, the re-positioning of the relationship between the parts and the whole offers, it has been strongly argued, prospects of a closer governance awareness of, and responsiveness to citizen entitlement. An overhaul that will near totally eliminate the frequent spasms of systemic malfunctioning that are in-built into the present protocols of national association. Read Wole Soyinka’s full article here