Amid a plethora of multi-faceted national issues troubling Nigeria professor Wole Soyinka has only found his voice to speak on the relevance of Pyrate Confraternity widely believed to be the forerunner and incubator of secret cults in Nigerian higher institutions.
A hitherto known social critic and torn in the flesh of previous governments has suddenly lost his voice and gone deaf, dumb, blind and senile on various national maladies bedeviling the country like killings, abductions and kidnapping, hunger, high cost of fuel, out of hand inflation, looting of treasury and so on.
Rather than speaking on the above pressing national issues Soyinka now dismissed public stereotyping of the National Association of Seadogs a.k.a Pyrates Confraternity, as a secret cult.
He said the negative perception has persisted despite what he described as decades of public service, advocacy and enlightenment campaigns.
“The larger society still finds it difficult to accept the obvious, that this is not a secret cult,” Soyinka said during the foundation-laying ceremony of the group’s new national secretariat in Abuja.
He said of the Nigerian public: “When they get hold of a negative idea, it is very difficult to win them away from that idea”.
On the association’s new secretariat, he said it would help to expand the organisation’s humanitarian and advocacy programmes nationwide.
The Capoon of the National Association of Seadogs (NAS) Dr. Joseph Oteri who also spoke at the event, said it reinforces the group’s commitment to justice and human dignity.
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