Protest: Soyinka condemns Tinubu’s speech encouraging police brutality, warns of potential revolution

Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka has criticised President Bola Tinubu over failure to condemn shooting of protesters 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.