Kola Kehinde/
There’s no going back on the establishment of the security outfit codenamed Amotekun which has been launched by Southwest governors to protect the region, Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka declared at a press conference held in Lagos today.
Describing the initiative as a result of collective consciousness by people of the Southwest region, Soyinka said, “Amotekun has come to stay, because Amotekun is a creation of people, and nations are about people and humanity not about legalese.”
Soyinka added, “It’s a fundamental right of people to defend themselves… What are our responsibilities as citizens to ourselves against a prevalent phenomenon which militates against our existence, against our productivity, against our dignity? We have a responsibility as citizens to do whatever we can to defend ourselves, the handicapped, and our children…
“These governors met, looked seriously at events; examined the antecedents; they are elected representatives and they came up with this Amotekun. And now, some people who’ve been sleeping, all these while taking belated actions, watching the citizens of this country being decimated, villages being wiped out; farmers being chased off their lands, not only in the Northeast and Northwest, down south – all the way down to Ogun State, Bayelsa, to Enugu in the East; you’re now coming to tell us that this initiative is illegal and unconstitutional. I think they should go back to sleep.”
He recalled what necessitated the establishment of the Federal Road Safety Corps based on his proposal to the military administrator of the Western Region and Oyo State, Major-Gen David Jemibewon, to reduce the escalating carnage on Nigerian roads and how he had also called the attention of the late National Security Adviser, Gen. Owoeye Azazi in 2012, to the emergence of a new breed of AK47 wielding herdsmen setting up camps and taking over farmlands in the southwest.
Before Amotekun was established by the state governors, Soyinka said he had also discussed the security challenges in the southwest with the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Ogunwusi who visited his home in Abeokuta, years after he had organised a meeting at the Guest House of former Osun State governor, Rauf Aregbesola where he asked some southwest leaders what they were doing to defend the territory.
Soyinka, who spoke alongside Mr Solomon Asemota, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and retired police officer at the Freedom Park on Lagos Island, also stressed the need to go beyond Amotekun and establish Arosikun to take care of the needs of the stomach because hunger is reaching a critical mass in the land and it is fuelling crime.
Describing Abubakar Malami who declared the Amotekun outfit illegal yesterday as a Sharia Attorney General, Asemota who was a cadet inspector in 1959 identified the problem with the forces against Amotekun as those of ideology – the product of Christianity and the product of Islam, as well as a conflict between those who believe in democracy and those who believe in Sharia.
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