Nigeria’s Nobel laureate in literature Wole Soyinka on Friday slammed poor implementation of the much billed government amnesty exercise for militants in the restive Niger Delta.
Around 20,000 fighters laid down arms by October last after President Umaru Yar’Adua offered an unconditional pardon to the militants fighting for a fairer share of oil revenue to go the locals.
“It was a brave initiative on the part of Yar’Adua but it was ill-organised, ill-thought out,” Soyinka told reporters after talks with Acting President Goodluck Jonathan in Abuja.
“Preparations were not made to accommodate those coming out of the creeks, the militants,” said Soyinka.
The Nigerian celebrity and author was last year named by the main armed group in the Niger Delta the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), as one of their mediators with government.
“What is uppermost on my mind is what is happening in delta region. The issue of the amnesty, the unfinished business, ill-executed programme which was a brilliant idea,” Soyinka said.
Soyinka said his meeting with Jonathan was a follow-up to one he held with Yar’Adua last year shortly before the head of state was taken ill.
Yar’Adua returned to Nigeria on February 24 after spending more than three months in a Saudi Arabian hospital for treatment of a heart disease, but has not been seen in public since yet.
Despite the installation of Jonathan as acting president, critics and militants are saying that the amnesty has lost steam because of Yar’Adua’s protracted illness.
Jonathan is planning face-to-face meeting with the militants, said Soyinka.
“He told me that he will have a comprehensive meeting with the ex-militants,” he said.
On Thursday, Yar’Adua’s advisors met some former militant leaders in the administrative capital, according to presidential sources and local media.
Soyinka said repentant militants should be treated not as subordinates but as equals, adding that “the mentality of the nation has to be reshaped in order to deal properly with an insurrection of this kind.”
“The nation and the government have the responsibility to turn their (ex-militants) minds around and they (should) begin doing that by remedying the conditions that existed which led to their taking up arms in the first place,” he said.
For more than three years, armed groups in the Niger Delta waged violent campaigns against the country’s oil sector, slashing output to around one-third in the world’s eight largest crude exporter.
The former fighters laid down their arms on promises of education, jobs and cash, but many say five months on, the pledges have not been kept.