Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka has criticized President Bola Tinubu’s broadcast on Sunday for failing to address the crackdown on #EndBadGovernance protesters by security agencies.
In his nationwide address, which was the President’s first since the protests began on August 1, Tinubu urged calm and called for an end to the demonstrations. He maintained that there would be no reversal of the subsidy removal policy, which has been a major point of contention.
The protests, driven by widespread discontent over rising living costs, hardship, and poverty exacerbated by government policies such as the removal of fuel subsidies and the naira’s devaluation, have turned violent in several states, resulting in fatalities.
In his statement, Soyinka expressed frustration with President Tinubu’s response, highlighting that the broadcast did not adequately address the ongoing violence and repression faced by the protesters.
“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.”
