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Soyinka likens Leah Sharibu to Mandela

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Soyinka to Buhari: Seek help

…”We must celebrate the exception who said, ‘No’”

Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has likened Leah Sharibu, the Nigerian Christian girl in the den of the terrorist group, Boko Haram, to South African late icon Nelson Mandela.

Soyinka, who spoke at Georgetown University, Washington, paid glowing tributes to Leah who turns 16, today, in an ode to Leah and Chibok girls. He lambasted the United States for the delay in designating Boko Haram a terror group.

“We must celebrate the exception who said ‘no’, as it reminded me of Mandela who refused conditional release,” Soyinka said.

Leah Sharibu and President Buhari

Reciting the ode, entitled Mandela comes to Leah, Soyinka said: “Faith is not of compulsion…her torch undimmed in the den of zealots.”

Professor Soyinka said he could only recite excerpts from the ode because he broke down, the last time he had tried to read it, even as he did an epic takedown of a Georgetown professor’s claim that poverty and desperation were behind Boko Haram.

According to Soyinka, it was rather ideological, bordering on the meta-physical and “we should not underestimate it.”

“We’re dealing with something much deeper,” he said and recalled the son of a former Chief Justice of Nigeria who was upper middle class, but who disappeared with his family to join ISIS abroad.

According to him, “there’s a will to deny the possibility of horror and evil. We have reached a point where we have to go beyond the material analysis of this phenomenon. It goes beyond poverty and marginalisation. The ideology of sheer morbidity.”

Soyinka deplored the 20 American intellectuals who wrote, protesting the proposal to designate Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO) pointing out it would interfere with their “scholarly research”.

“It took my breath away. Some were my friends, (but) there they were in all seriousness simply because they had a very wrong analytical approach to this problem.

“We must simply jettison the language of political correctness. Political correctness is turning African continent into the graveyard of freedom and liberty if we don’t call things by their proper names.

“We’re dealing now with the toxin of power which barely manifests itself under the cloak of religion.”

Also, on the panel with Soyinka was the ambassador who belatedly announced Obama’s decision to designate Boko Haram as an FTO as then top US diplomat for Africa, Assistant Secretary of State, Linda Greenfield. (RS/VANGUARD)

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