Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka and Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Ogunwusi, Ojaja II, have called on Nigerians to defend the sanctity of their ancestral land.

They urged the people to recognise that the internal colonisation project is ever recurrent, as there are backward, primitive, undeveloped minds that have failed to overcome delusion belief in sectarian domination as the key to social existence.

In a communiqué jointly issued and made available to The Guardian yesterday after the visit of the Ooni to Soyinka’s home in Abeokuta on July 4, 2019, the duo asserted that the country deteriorated to unprecedented levels of barbarity, contempt for human lives and a defiant trampling on civic entitlements.

“The colonial contraption known as Nigeria cannot survive another upheaval in the nature of the civil war of Biafran secession. All efforts must therefore be made to anticipate and douse socio-political flare-ups that advance the chances of a recurrence of such a conflict, no matter how reduced in scale, its devastating effects on Nigerian humanity, and erosion of the prospects of continuance as a cohesive entity.

“We must stress that the present development is not new. Numerous times, voices have been raised, and resistance mounted against the evolution of internal heirs to external colonialism,” the communiqué stated.

They, however, charged Nigerians to convoke a series of frank encounters, across various interests and concerns, to debate and determine in full freedom the future structure of their nation, most especially with a view to attaining a genuine, decentralised functional governance arrangement, adding: “We propose a structure that enables the constitutive parts to progress at their own pace, determine their own priorities, and encourage creative exploitation of their resources for the benefit of their peoples. Such encounters will simultaneously address the numerous anomalies that plague the nation. (The Guardian)