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Soyinka Demands Annual Holiday For Traditional Religions, Wants Cases Of Religious K!ll!ngs Reopened
Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka has urged the Nigerian government to create a national annual holiday for traditional religions like their Muslim and Christian counterparts.
Soyinka, who made the call on Sunday as part of his 89th birthday celebrations, also asked the government and security agencies across the country to reopen all the unresolved cases of religious killings.
According to him, the demands were aimed at “all the security agencies in this country and of the governance itself, right from the President to the lowest individual in this country,” Channels Television reports.
Soyinka lamented the failure of security officials to prosecute the perpetrators of extrajudicial religious killings in the country as his appeal was underpinned by the case of Deborah Samuel, a 200-level student of the Shehu Shagari College of Education in Sokoto State who was killed on May 12, 2022, over allegations of blasphemy.
He asked that the files “be opened — beginning with Deborah — on all those who have killed extrajudicially in the name of religion.”
Soyinka also noted that it is not enough for the international community to place travel restrictions on perpetrators of electoral violence in the 2023 general elections and therefore asked that visa bans be extended to religious bigots.
Decrying what he described as the neglect faced by traditionalists in the country, Soyinka said that “we’ve had enough”.
“It’s about time we demanded, on behalf of traditional religions, an annual holiday like Islam and Christianity. We’ve had enough.
— SaharaReporters