Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka has expressed his disappointment in the way people are already clamouring for 2019 General elections when the present administration is yet to end.
Prof Soyinka made the remark in Lagos during an event in which he announced 10 Nigerian writers that would be leaving for Lebanon in a cultural exchange programme, ‘The Sail Project’, between The Wole Soyinka Foundation and Cedar Institute, University of Lebanon.
He stated that the current structure of the country is not in favour of what Nigerians actually wants.
“My own position is that people shouldn’t allow themselves be put up by those who try to cheat on the expression, ‘restructuring.’
“It doesn’t matter by what name you call it. We all know that this nation was deconstructed and what we live in right now, as a nation, is not allowing structuring that expresses the true will of Nigerians,” he said.
He also expressed displeasure at those who try to digress from the main issue while claiming that it’s the mind that needs restructuring.
He noted that restructuring cuts across both individual and even religion.
“People go to churches and mosques for their minds to be restructured. Restructuring the mind is not the issue; nobody is saying restructuring the mind should not be undertaken; anybody who is involved in examination already engages in mental and or attitudinal reconstruction.
“So people should not try to substitute one for another. I find it very dishonest and cheap, trivializing the issue when people said it is the mind, which needs to be restructured. Who is denying that? So, why bring it up? We’re talking about the protocol of the association of the constitutive part of the nation. We’re talking about decentralization, that is, another word. This country is over-centralised and that has been the bugbear of development, even of issues like security.
“Even if it is one state, that state has the right to say, listen people, let us restructure this state; the protocols that went into the making of this state are no longer viable or have been distorted along the way or have been abandoned and we want to go back to the original set of protocols that created what we call his national entity. You can say you want to reinvent the wheels completely or you want to go back to the original protocols of association,” he added.
