NOBEL Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has decried the protests by some Ile Ife indigenes over the appointment of Prof. Adebayo Bamire as Vice Chancellor of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU).
He lambasted the protesters, saying Ile Ife people ought to have denounced the protesters for such “crazy” agitation.
Some protesters had expressed anger that an indigene of Ile-Ife was not appointed OAU VC.
Traditional religious worshippers, dressed in white attire with other paraphernalia on Monday carried out fetish sacrifices at the OAU campus over the appointment of a non-indigene.
Soyinka spoke at a lecture titled: ‘The Politics of Black Intellection and Creativity’, at the University of Pennsylvania, United States on Tuesday.
His lecture was the first of the newly inaugurated Distinguished Lecture in African Studies.
The playwright, who also said he had been “under a state of shock for a couple of decades” over the spate of killings, kidnappings and other forms of violent crimes in Nigeria, added that those behind the protest in OAU should be “ruthlessly” dealt with.He said: “Why should there be an Ife VC anywhere? An Ife person wrote me and said, ‘look at these people disgracing us.’ I told him go there and disgrace them. You are an Ife person. You should be in the frontline.
“The Ife people should say those people don’t belong to us; we don’t know where they came from. And they should be dealt with ruthlessly.
“I just don’t understand what they put in the water these days. It is crazy,”
Fielding questions from Prof. Wale Adebamwi of the Africana Studies, Department of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania on killings and kidnappings in Nigeria, the Nobel Laureate said he was alarmed by the magnitude of the incidents,
He blamed both the government and the people who, he said, had not shown enough will to stem them.
“I have been under a state of shock for a couple of decades. So it was time I took my revenge and hopefully shock our own people just for exchange,” he told the audience.
