Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka has lamented the lack of justice for Deborah Samuel Yakubu about two years after she was brutally killed and burnt by a mob in Sokoto for alleged blasphemy.
On May 12, 2022, Deborah, a second-year Christian college student, was stoned to death by a mob of Muslim students in Sokoto, northwest Nigeria, after being accused of blasphemy against Islam.
Soyinka who was the Guest Speaker at the PUNCH 50th Anniversary Public Lecture on Thursday, during his lecture with the theme, ‘Recovering The Narrative,’ described as sad that none of Deborah’s killers had been brought to justice.
Earlier this month, a Federal High Court in Abuja ordered the Nigerian government to reopen an investigation into the murder of a renowned journalist, Dele Giwa nearly 40 years ago.
Mr Giwa was 39 years old when he was killed by a parcel bomb at his residence in Lagos, Southwest Nigeria in October 1986.
Soyinka said, “Now, the death of Dele Giwa is close to 50 years (40 years). If last week, a judge still found it possible, logical and constitutional to order the Attorney General of the nation to bring Dele Giwa’s killers to justice, then what happened in the case of Deborah Samuel?
“Just what happened there? Why? Is that case merely forgotten already? It went beyond that. It was not just that Deborah Samuel was killed and that the suspects were set free, we discovered months later, just recently that there was another woman, who had been in prison for daring to make a video condemning the lynching of Deborah Samuel. She was released eventually I think after spending 13 months in jail as a result of the work of human rights and some Christian associations.
“The insult goes even further. Turn to social media, you will see that till today one of the killers posing and holding up a box of matches, saying in effect, this is the instrument with which I committed a final act, which was setting Deborah Samuel’s body on fire.
“He has not been arrested, he has not been charged for inciting hate.”