Professor Wole Soyinka Blast Jonathan for Insensitivity to Nyanya Blast Victims and Abducted School Girls

Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has chided President Goodluck Jonathan for what he described as the president’s insensitivity to the plight of victims of the Nyanya bombings in which scores of Nigerians lost their lives and the abduction of the students of Government Girls’ Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State.
He expressed the displeasure while delivering the keynote address at the inauguration of Port Harcourt as UNESCO World Book Capital 2014 yesterday.
Soyinka said it smacked of insensitivity for the president to embark on a political rally where he went dancing away just few hours after many Nigerians were mowed to death by the insurgents.
Explaining that the bomb blast in Nyaya, Abuja, and the kidnapping of over 200 school girls call for an urgent attention by the leadership of the country, the Nobel Laureate expressed sadness over the trauma the abducted students were passing through.
He said, “Permit me to impose on the leadership of this nation a simple straightforward exercise in empathy. I want you to imagine yourself in a hospital ward; one among the over thousand victims of so many origins in Nigeria. You remember that the actual and wounded are not the only casualties.
“On that hospital bed, you find yourself playing host to the high and mighty. “You are immobilised, speechless and incapable of motion, except perhaps to your eyelids.
“Local government chairmen, councillors, ministers, senators and the nation’s President, making promises of free medical treatment and rehabilitation among others, then your spirits are uplifted. You no longer feel depressed and abandoned.
“A few hours after the departure of your August visitors, you see your erstwhile visitors participating in a chieftaincy jollification, just a few hundred miles away.
“Again, a few hours later, the same leadership is at a campaign rally, where the chief custodian of the people’s welfare is complaining that someone allegedly diverted campaign funds to unauthorised use. That national leader then rounds off his outing with a dance that would put Michael Jackson to shame.”