Post-poll killings planned: Nobel laureate

Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has said killings in the country’s north amid widespread rioting following presidential elections were pre-planned, local media reported on Friday.
Several Nigerian newspapers quoted Soyinka, Africa’s first Nobel literature laureate, speaking of pre-planned violence and implicitly criticising opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari, who lost to incumbent Goodluck Jonathan.
According to one version of his comments in ThisDay newspaper, Soyinka told journalists that “anybody who said they were not planned beforehand was a very naive individual.”
“These killings were carried out on the basis of lies,” the paper quoted him as saying, apparently referring to allegations of rigging. “In my view, they were planned well beforehand.”
The April 16 election won by Jonathan, a southern Christian, led to an explosion of rioting across the mainly Muslim north, the home region of ex-military ruler Buhari.
A local rights groups says more than 500 people were killed.
Soyinka, a longtime critic of Nigeria’s corrupt elite who has also harshly criticised Buhari over allegations of rights abuses during his rule in the 1980s, said the results giving Jonathan victory seemed credible.
He implicitly criticised Buhari, who disassociated himself from the violence in interviews but never appeared publicly to strongly denounce it, as well as others, but did not name names.
“I did not detect any vestige of remorse from the expressions of these leaders,” he reportedly said.
A spokesman for a political party started by Soyinka contacted by AFP said the writer did not want to comment further.
There have been accusations that some of the rioting was instigated by politicians, though election observers say they appear to have started for a variety of reasons.
Soyinka, a dramatist and essayist, became Africa’s first Nobel laureate in literature when he won the prize in 1986.
His book “The Man Died” recounts his time in jail after being imprisoned following his attempt to broker talks during Nigeria’s 1967-1970 civil war.

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