Nobel laureate, Professor Wole
Soyinka, has faulted the nationwide address by President Bola Tinubu, saying it
failed to address the brutal crackdown of #EndBadGovernance protesters by
security agencies.
Angry Nigerians had taken to
major cities across the country to lament the high cost of living, hardship,
hunger, and poverty blamed on policies of the Federal Government like the
removal of fuel subsidy and the floating of the naira.
In the past four days, some
persons were killed as the protests turned violent in some states. Worried by
the situation, President Tinubu addressed Nigerians in his first nationwide
speech after the demonstrations. The President called for calm, insisting that
there was no going back on the subsidy removal.
But in a statement on Sunday,
Soyinka specifically criticised 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.
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 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,” he said.
See
the full statement below:
The
Hunger March As Universal Mandate
I set my alarm clock for this
morning to ensure that I did not miss President Bola Tinubu’s impatiently
awaited address to the nation on the current unrest across the nation. His
outline of 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.
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 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.
The nation’s security agencies
cannot pretend unawareness of alternative models for emulation, civilized
advances in security intervention. Need we recall the nationwide 2022/23
editions of what is generally known as the YELLOW VEST movement in France?
Perhaps it is time to make such scenarios compulsory viewing in policing
curriculum. In all of the coverage that I watched, I did not catch one single
instance of a gun leveled at protesters, much less fired at them even during
direct physical confrontations. The serving of bullets where bread is pleaded
is ominous retrogression, and we know what that eventually proves – a prelude
to far more desperate upheavals, not excluding revolutions.
The time is long overdue,
surely, to abandon, permanently, the anachronistic resort to lethal means by
the security agencies of governance. No nation is so under-developed,
materially impoverished, or simply internally insecure as to lack the will to
set an example. All it takes is to recall its own history, then exercise the
will to commence a lasting transformation, inserting a break in the chain of
lethal responses against civic society. Today’s marchers may wish to consider
adopting the key songs of Hubert Ogunde’s BREAD AND BULLETS, if only to inculcate
a sense of shame in the continuing failure to transcend the lure of colonial
inheritance where we all were at the receiving end. One way or the other, this
vicious cycle must be broken.
Wole
SOYINKA
A.R,I.
Abeokuta
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