By 
Abiodun OBA
The Federal Government has been called upon to seek help and stop improvising with human lives.
The Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, reiterated the public outcry while reacting to the killing of three of the abducted students of the Greenfield University, Kaduna whose bodies were dumped close to the institution.
In a statement titled: ‘The Endless Martyrdom of Youth,’ Soyinka said,
“To this government we repeat the public cry: Seek Help. Stop Improvising with Human Lives. Youth – that is, the future – should not serve as Ritual Offering on the altar of a failing State.
“I grieve with the bereaved, but mourn even more for our youth so routinely sacrificed, burdened with uncertainty and traumatized beyond youth’s capacity to cope.
“Not for the first time, what many hoped was a Natural Law of Limitations has been contemptuously, defiantly breached. We need to remind ourselves of hideous precedents.
“We must remember Chibok and Dapchi. And numerous antecedents and after, unpublicised, or soon relegated to the sump of collective amnesia. The wages of impunity never diminish, on the contrary, they distend,” he said.
Soyinka noted that those who have been proven weak and incapable should learn to swallow their vain pride and seek help.
According to the Nobel Laureate, “This is no new counseling. But of course, the dog that will get lost no longer heeds the hunter’s whistle.”
He further noted that the dogs of war “stopped merely baying years ago. Again and again they have sunk their fangs into the jugular of this nation.”
Soyinka, a renowned octogenarian playwright and poet, said with their killing, the already over-stretched sinews of moral restraint had been snapped off the casing of nation being, and that nothing was left but the collective wails of impotence.
Soyinka said Abukakar Atiku had summed up the nation’s feeling, when he said, “This most recent savagery against our youth is heartbreaking.
“More than the heart is broken, however, more than millions of individual hearts that still lay claim to bonds in a common humanity,” the Nobel laureate said with grief.
Soyinka pointed out that one’s greatest fear, with this latest feat of cowardly savagery, “is that the nation must brace itself for a Beslan scenario, yet strive to avoid Nigeria become Africa’s Chechnya.
“I envy no one the task ahead, terminating the toxic harvest of past derelictions. Blame laying is for later. Right now is the question of – what needs to be done, and done urgently.
“We keep avoiding the inevitable, but that very unthinkable now hammers brutishly on our gates, the blood ransom arrogantly insatiable.
“This nation is at war, yet, we continue to pretend that these are mere birth-pangs of a glorious entity. They are death throes. Vultures and undertakers hover patiently but with full confidence,” he declared.
Recall, Nigerians on Friday were heart broken when news of the killing of three of the students of Greenfield University, Kaduna kidnapped by bandits on Tuesday from the school broke out.
The Kaduna State Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, Samuel Aruwan, had in a statement, announced that the bandits shot dead three of the abducted students, quoting Governor Nasir El-Rufai describing and condemning the killing as “sheer wickedness, inhumanity and an outright desecration of human lives by vile entities.”and the armed bandits representing “the worst of humankind and must be fought at all cost for the violent wickedness they represent.”
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