President Tinubu’s Speech Didn’t Address Brutal Crackdown On Protesters – Wole Soyinka
Professor Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate has criticized President Bola Tinubu’s nationwide address, stating it failed to address the brutal crackdown on #EndBadGovernance protesters by security agencies.
Nigerians took to the streets in major cities to protest the high cost of living, hardship, hunger, and poverty, blaming the Federal Government’s policies, such as the removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of the naira. Over the past four days, some protests turned violent, resulting in deaths. President Tinubu addressed the nation in response, urging calm and reiterating that the subsidy removal was irreversible.
In a statement on Sunday, Soyinka specifically criticized the measures outlined by the President since the protests began. “His outline of the government’s remedial action since inception, aimed at warding off just such an outbreak, will undoubtedly receive expert and sustained attention both for effectiveness and in content analysis. My primary concern, quite predictably, is the continuing deterioration of the state’s seizure of protest management, an area where the presidential address fell conspicuously short,” Soyinka said.
To Soyinka, the “nation’s security agencies cannot pretend unawareness of alternative models for emulation, civilized advances in security intervention”.
“Such short-changing of civic deserving, regrettably, goes to arm the security forces in the exercise of impunity and condemns the nation to a seemingly unbreakable cycle of resentment and reprisals.
“Live bullets as a state response to civic protest – that becomes the core issue. Even tear gas remains questionable in most circumstances, certainly an abuse in situations of clearly peaceful protest. Hunger marches constitute a universal S.O.S., not peculiar to the Nigerian nation. They belong in a class of their own, never mind the collateral claims emblazoned on posters.
“They serve as summons to governance that a breaking point has been reached and thus, a testing ground for governance awareness of public desperation. The tragic response to the ongoing hunger marches in parts of the nation, and for which notice was served, constitutes a retrogression that takes the nation even further back than the deadly culmination of the watershed ENDSARS protests.
“It evokes pre-independence – that is, colonial – acts of disdain, a passage that induced the late stage pioneer Hubert Ogunde’s folk opera BREAD AND BULLETS, earning that nationalist serial persecution and proscription by the colonial government,” he said.
