Tinubu’s Speech Didn’t Address Brutal Crackdown On Protesters – Wole Soyinka
Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka has criticised President Bola Tinubu’s national address, claiming it failed to mention the security agencies’ violent suppression of the #EndBadGovernance demonstrators.
Furious Nigerians had taken to the nation’s largest cities to protest the high cost of living, suffering, starvation, and poverty, which they attributed to Federal Government policies including the removal of gasoline subsidies and the floating of the naira.
Over the course of the last four days, several people have died as a result of violent protests in certain locations. President Tinubu gave his first statement to the entire country following the protests, expressing concern about the state of affairs. The President urged everyone to remain calm, stating that the reduction of subsidies could not be reversed.
However, Soyinka expressly denounced the President’s actions since the protests began in a statement released on Sunday.
“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 act as a warning to the authorities that something has broken, and as a means of gauging their awareness of the desperate state of the populace. The terrible response to the nationwide hunger marches that are still going on in some areas and for which notice has been served is a regress that pulls the country even further back than the fatal conclusion of the historic ENDSARS protests.
The late stage pioneer Hubert Ogunde’s folk opera BREAD AND BULLETS earned that nationalist serial persecution and proscription by the colonial authority, he said, because it “evokes pre-independence – that is, colonial – acts of disdain.”
