Hunger Protest: Wole Soyinka condemns attack on protesters by security agencies

Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka has condemned the attacks on #EndBadGovernanceInNigeria protesters and journalists by security agencies in Abuja.

Soyinka, in a statement on Sunday, raised concerns over the Federal Government’s continuing mismanagement of protests.

He criticised the use of live bullets and tear gas by the Nigeria Police Force to manage civic protests, saying that such actions would lead to violence.

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 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.

“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 indeed belong in a class of their own, never mind the collateral claims emblazoned on posters.

“They serve as a 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.”

Soyinka called on security agencies to employ alternative methods of addressing civic protests and shun lethal means of dispersing protesters.

He added, “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 the policing curriculum. In all of the coverage that I watched, I did not catch one single instance of a gun levelled 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 and 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.”