Former Chief of Army Staff and prominent member of the defunct National Democratic Coalition(NADECO), Gen. Alani Akinrinade (retd.), has said Nigerians have not learnt lessons despite the country’s many troubles.According to Akinrinade, “Saro-Wiwa was murdered but that has not ended agitations in the Niger Delta. There are now armed gangs whose posture is that, ‘If you cannot hear us from the soapbox, then you will hear us from the barrel of the gun.’ We have learnt nothing. Something is missing in the democracy we are running. It is worse than dictatorship. There is little or no hope left for the man on the street.
“That is why I cannot agree with the view that because of a cabal, a leader we voted for cannot put his imprint on governance. Where did we go wrong? We should be courageous to look at these issues. If I had been born an Ijaw man, in the creeks of Niger Delta, I could have died a guerrilla. Do we take joy in parading Nnamdi Kanu in court as often as possible? We don’t even know how Tompolo’s matter is being handled. There are quite a number of ‘generals’ in the riverine areas. If things get worse, we cannot trust that one day, somebody is not going to take up arms again – from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, we have the Niger Delta Avengers.
“We are living very dangerous lives. I am not sure we are going to get rid of all these people making agitations the way we are going about dealing with them. If we like, we can hang Kanu; we have done it before (to other agitators). We can go and hang him – we’ll make a martyr out of him. Then, we would have made his cause more visible. People will then examine what he died for, resulting in Nigeria dealing with something more difficult to contain.”
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