Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, on Sunday faulted President Bola Tinubu’s national broadcast for not addressing the violent crackdown by security forces on #EndBadGovernance protesters.
Soyinka, in a statement expressed concern over the
president’s omission of this critical issue.
He said: “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.”
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