By Dan Amor
Even for the casual observer of the convoluted Nigerian social
system, the news of the murder of Professor Festus Iyayi, a University of Benin
(UNIBEN) Professor, creative writer and human rights activists, was rudely
shocking. The former President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities
(ASUU) was said to have died on Tuesday November 12, 2013 in an accident
involving the convoy of the then Kogi Sate Governor Idris Wada. He was just 66.
This was one inexplicable death too many. Four years after and given the fact
that this was now the second fatal crash involving Wada’s convoy, the Federal
Government is yet to punish the driver of his convoy’s vehicle that hit the bus
in which the lecturers were traveling.
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| *Festus Iyayi |
Like Chima Ubani, another fire-brand activist who was killed in a
similar circumstance a few years back, Iyayi was yet another victim of the
penchant for the Nigerian
State to murder its best
and brightest stars. But I write of him today not only as a committed
intellectual and activist but also as one of the best literary minds to have
emerged in the twentieth century anywhere in the world. For Iyayi, one of
Africa’s shining titans in the literary firmament, there is no more intrinsic
and indivisible quality of art, no better, no other initiation is there into
the craft of creative writing but the most discriminating and appreciative
practice of the literature of engagement. The Nigerian politicians’ betrayal of
national trust and the general apathy of the citizens provoked a fighting
(revolutionary) literature from writers through committed satirization of
society with prophetic dimensions.
