- Following a 30 day ultimatum given to the federal government by the Northern Coalition Groups to set up the Ruga cattle settlements across the entire nation, Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Ogunwusi, and Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, have called on Nigerians to defend their ancestral land.
Following a 30 day ultimatum given to the Federal Government by the Northern Coalition Groups to set up the Ruga cattle settlements across the entire nation, Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Ogunwusi, and Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, have called on Nigerians to defend their ancestral land.
The call was contained in a communique issued yesterday to document the meeting held on Thursday between the monarch and Soyinka at the latter’s home in Idi-Aba, Abeokuta, Ogun State which focused on the state of the nation.
They said it became imperative to tell Nigerians to protect their land against RUGA usage because of the recent outcry by the Southern and Middle Belt Leaders’ Forum that the Federal Government was plotting to repeal the Land Use Act, which conferred the power to control lands in states on governors.
The communiqué read, “In this regard, the recent ultimatum delivered by a sectarian order to the President of this nation to set up the so-called Ruga cattle settlements across the entire nation within a stipulated time, despite the national outcry, should be acknowledged as an entitlement under the bounty of freedom of expression.
“In return, we exercise ours, and call upon Nigerian nationals across state demarcations to defend the sanctity of their ancestral lands. This birthright has never been annulled, not even under colonial occupation.”
The Ooni of Ife Ooni Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi, Ojaja II and Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka, Akogun of Isara, Akinlatun of Egba also said that Nigeria can not survive another civil war.
“The colonial contraption known as Nigeria cannot survive another upheaval in the nature of the Civil War of Biafran secession. All efforts must therefore be made to anticipate and douse socio-political flare-ups that advance the chances of a recurrence of such a conflict, no matter how reduced in scale, its devastating effects on Nigerian humanity and erosion of the prospects of continuance as a cohesive entity.”
‘Among such issues of urgent import are the ongoing insurrectional movements that derive from religious fanaticism and intolerance, exemplified by Boko Haram and allied tendencies, as well as aspects of commercial enterprise, in which some groups consider themselves especially privileged, singular, and above laws and entitlements that are binding on other vectors of commercial and industrial undertaking. We have in mind destructive forms of social transactions that characterize groups such as nomadic cattle herdsmen, and their umbrella groupings in the nature of Myetti Allah.
“We confess ourselves increasingly distressed and appalled, that the hitherto harmonious cohabitation, even routine collaboration, among the productive arms of society that Nigerians have taken for granted even from pre-colonial times, have deteriorated to unprecedented levels of barbarity, contempt for human lives and a defiant trampling on the civic entitlements of other productive vectors, such as farmers, the providers of both food and cash crops. This abhorrent, yet consistent pattern of sectarian, and homicidal arrogance is obviously not merely counter-productive but inhuman, criminal and divisive.”
“We must stress that the present development is not new, nor has it lacked warnings. Numerous times, voices have been raised, and resistance mounted against the evolution of internal heirs to external colonialism, be this manifested by a military elite or by religious or economic groupings which flaunt their scant recognition of, or respect for human dignity, civic rights and sanctity of human life.”
“The state has cultivated the art of looking the other way – until forced to confront reality. ‘We re-affirm out commitment to the rights of every individual, every community, every collectivity of human beings as primary, and pre-eminent over and above all other parameters of human development or formal associations.”
