Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has criticized President Bola Tinubu’s nationwide address, stating that it failed to address the brutal crackdown on #EndBadGovernance protesters by security agencies.
Amid rising anger, Nigerians took to the streets in major cities to protest the high cost of living, hardship, hunger, and poverty, which many attribute to Federal Government policies like the removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of the naira.
Over the past four days, some lives were lost as the protests turned violent in certain states. Concerned by the escalating situation, President Tinubu delivered his first nationwide speech since the demonstrations began, urging calm and reiterating that there would be no reversal of the subsidy removal.
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In a statement issued on Sunday, Soyinka specifically criticized the President’s actions and responses since the onset of the protests.
“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.
Every citizen has the right to protest, peacefully. Big brains with low security IQ, what do you want mr president to say? It is not necessary to talk when you know you don’t have any reasonable thing to say. If Mr president did all he said in his speech then he deserves and applause. You guys always base and concentrate on the aspect of the security and forgetting the destruction and looting of properties. what is knowledge? The youth supposed to be sensitised on the disadvantages and effects of violent behaviour and protest you will code “highjacked”
If our leaders have failed and we the youths misguided and lead, what will be the faith of our future?
If Mr president needs time to prove to us that what we are suffering today will bring us and happiness in the future, I think we exercise patience, remember the patience eats the best.
To all Nigerians
Do you think that this hardship doesn’t affect the security personnel.
Can you survive without the security agencies?
When you are sleeping they awake patrolling ensuring your safety.
From Mr president down to LG chairmen, including big business men and others, who is not under the protection of Nigeria security personnel? But what can you boast of that security personnel of Nigeria will be proud of you?
1. No good salary (wages)
2. No accommodation for them,
3. No life insurance for them,
4. A very poor welfare, treating them as nothing,
5. No scholarship for their children,
6. After retirement they are discharged with peanut as gratuity.
Yet they serve the country with might and faithfulness.
In summary Nigeria needs to restructured and don’t forget that change is possible and it starts with you.