Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has appealed to social media platforms to stop giving publicity to people who peddle fake news, especially the types targeted at creating ethnic tension.
He said this in a statement at the week end, in response to a video circulating on the Internet, urging Ndigo to leave Yoruba land within 48 hours.
In the statement titled, “Identity Thieves on the Rampage,” Soyinka noted that those trying to steal his identity to promote the video clip of an ethnic revanchist calling on Ndigbo to leave Yoruba land “are sick and cowards.”
He said: “It is time also, I believe, to also enter the following admonition: one cannot continue to monitor and respond to the concoctions of these addicts of falsehood, and their assiduous promoters, who have yet to learn to wipe the filth off their tablets.
“The patrons of social platforms should develop the art of discrimination. Some attributions are simply so gross that, to grant them even a moment’s latitude of probability diminishes the civic intelligence of the recipient.
“Undoubtedly in order to promote the video clip of an ethnic revanchist calling on Igbo to leave Yoruba land, this same lunatic fringe has exhumed, and embarked on circulating an ancient fabrication – several years mouldering in the grave – once attributed to me and vigorously denounced.
“That statement impudently expounds, as my utterance, what the Hausa want, what the Yoruba want, and what the Igbo want. Such an attribution – let me once again reiterate – is the work of sick, cowardly minds that are ashamed, or lack the courage, as the saying goes, ‘to answer their fathers’ names. At least, the current ethnic rabble-rouser has the courage of his convictions, not so the sick brigade of identity thieves.”