Soyinka kicks against return of the rejected water bill, condemns killing of IPOB members

Professor Wole Soyinka has kicked against supposed attempts by President Muhammadu Buhari-led government and the National Assembly to return the National Water Resources Bill rejected by the public in 2018.

The playwright’s position on the bill followed a recent report that the House of Representatives had referred the National Water Resources Bill 2020 to a “committee of the whole,” for third reading and passage.

In a statement on Thursday, which he entitled “MLK’s mighty stream of righteousness,” Soyinka said: “A roundly condemned project blasted out of sight by public outrage one or two years ago, is being exhumed and sneaked back into service by none other than a failed government, and with the consent of a body of people supposedly elected to serve as custodians of the rights, freedoms, and existential exigencies of millions.

“This bill – Bill on National Water resources 2020 – is designed to hand Aso Rock absolute control over the nation’s entire water resources, both over and underground.

“The basic facilitator of human existence, water – forget for now all about streams of righteousness! – is to become exclusive to one centralized authority. It will be doled out, allocated through power directives from a decentralized rockery that cannot even boast of the water divining wand of the prophet Moses. If the current presiding genius–and this applies equally to all his predecessors without exception – had a structured vision of Nigerian basic entitlements, Nigerians would by now, be able to boast the means of fulfilling even that minimalist item of COVID-19 protocols that call for washing one’s hands under running water! As for potable water, for drinking and cooking, let us not even begin to address such extra-terrestrial undertaking!

“What next for the exclusive list? The rains? I declare myself in full agreement with virtually every pronouncement of alarm, outrage, opprobrium, and repudiation that has been heaped upon this bill and its parentage, both at its first outing and since this recent re-emergence. It is time to move beyond denunciations however and embark on practical responses for its formal deactivation and permanent internment. Let all retain in their minds that, from the same source that preached the ‘streams of righteousness’ are encountered the promise of ‘no more floods, the fire next time.’

Soyinka also condemned the killing of some members of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) by officials of the Department of State Security (DSS) in Enugu on Sunday.

The Nobel laureate, harping on the ‘Black Lives Matter’ the movement provoked by the racial killing of a black man by a United States cop and Martin Luther King’s speech to discard racism, said in the past few days he had mulled over the watershed episode and was compelled to rephrase: Do Nigerian lives matter? Do farmers’ lives matter? Do IPOB lives matter? Do innocent lives matter? And most disturbingly: Do future lives matter?

“One passage in Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” has leaped to the forefront as a warning that relates to that final interrogatory – do future lives matter? And it does so in a most literal manner, one that MLK could never have envisioned! It persists in echoing through the mind, reinforced by the recent killings of innocent humanity – mostly youths — in Enugu, by state forces, under the pretext – shall we presume? – of preventing secessionist agitations?”

He added that the promulgators of the obscenity, high and low, should understand that the placid waters they think to control unjustly and grotesquely, would turn to be Martin Luther King’s “mighty stream of righteousness” that would overwhelm and sweep them off their complacent and increasingly loathsome sectarian and conspiratorial heights.

“One polluted stream of human existence compounds the next. A violation here joins forces with its tributary of resentment their yonder, all seemingly unconnected. Martin Luther King’s streams of righteousness turn into a mighty torrent of repulse that overwhelms the perpetrators but, alas, takes down much else as collateral, irreparable damage. That is the only cause for regret and – restraint. Hence our duty to position that anguished question frontally, and call the world to witness our open propagation of that challenge: Do future lives matter?

“Let Buhari and his myrmidons ponder that question in the deepest recesses of their hearts and minds. They should not bequeath to future generations the harvest of The Grapes of Wrath!” he said.