Soyinka slams Tinubu for ignoring shooting of protesters, says he’s encouraging impunity

Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka has criticised President Bola Ahmed Tinubu over failure to condemn shooting of protesters in the address he delivered in his national broadcast on the ongoing #EndBadGovernance, saying he’s encouraging impunity among security operatives.

Soyinka made the observation in a statement on Sunday following Tinubu’s address to the nation.

The #EndBadGovernance protests continued on Sunday, marking their fourth day, as demonstrators voiced their frustrations over the country’s deepening economic hardship, escalating poverty, and ineffective governance.

Some reports indicated that more than 14 Nigerians were killed by security agencies as the protests turned violent in some states.

Soyinka noted that while Tinubu outlined the action being taken by his administration to tackle some of the challenges in the country, he failed to speak on how the security operatives have mismanaged the protests.

“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,” he said.

“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.

Soyinka added that hunger marches constitute a universal S.O.S, not peculiar to the Nigerian nation and serve as summons to governance that a breaking point has been reached and thus, a testing ground for governance awareness of public desperation.

He therefore described the tragic response to the protests as “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 urged security operatives in Nigeria to seek alternative models of response to civic protests, citing the recent example in France.

“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 underdeveloped, 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.”

Similarly, The publisher of Ovation Magazine, Dele Momodu, has said he was left shocked by President Bola Tinubu’s broadcast to the nation on Sunday morning.

In a post on X, Momodu said the President failed to address the demands of ongoing protesters across the country.

Momodu said; “After the long-awaited speech of President Bola Tinubu eventually came this morning, I’m sure most of you would be as stupefied as me.

“I must confess that I had little hope of Tinubu granting some concessions to the aggrieved Nigerians. As a man who has held an iron grip on Lagos State for the last 25 years, it would be difficult for him to change a winning formula that has worked for him ever since.

“Also, what did we expect his advisers to be telling him when most of them have been his most fanatical cronies from Lagos who have learnt never to challenge the master?

“So it was merely wishful thinking on the part of incurable optimists like me to think he was going to have mercy on hapless and seemingly helpless Nigerians.”