Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has criticised President Bola Tinubu’s Sunday’s broadcast for not addressing the crackdown on the #EndBadGovernance protesters by security agencies.
Angry Nigerians had taken to major cities across the country to protest the high cost of living, hardship, hunger, and poverty blamed on policies of the Federal Government, such as the removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of the naira.
Some protesters have been killed in the past four days as the protests turned violent in some states of the Federation.
LEADERSHIP reported that President Tinubu addressed Nigerians on Sunday in his first nationwide speech since the protest commenced on Thursday, August 1.
The President called for calm in the broadcast while also calling for end to the protest, insisting that there was no going back on the subsidy removal.
However, in a statement on Sunday, Soyinka specifically criticized the steps reeled out by the President since the protests started.
“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 in which the presidential address fell conspicuously short,” Soyinka said.
Soyinka stressed that the “nation’s security agencies cannot pretend unawareness of alternative models for emulation, civilized advances in security intervention”.
He added, “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 indeed 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.”
