Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka on Sunday said the use of bullets and tear gas on Nigerians protesting against economic hardship was an abuse of state power.
He described security operatives’ treatment of protesters has left the country in a “seemingly unbreakable cycle of resentment and reprisals”.
His views in an opinion piece titled: ‘The Hunger March As Universal Mandate’, were a response to President Bola Tinubu’s national broadcast on Sunday.
In the broadcast, Tinubu urged the protesters to shelve the 10-day demonstration, adding that he had heard the youths “loud and clear”.
According to Soyinka, the president’s speech failed to address the “continuing deterioration of the state’s seizure of protest management”.
Noting that hunger protests were not peculiar to Nigeria, he urged security agencies to emulate alternative models and civilised advances in security intervention.
Soyinka said: “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.
“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.”
Nigerians took to the streets on Thursday to protest the rising cost of living and the event has been marred by violence, looting, and destruction of public facilities in some states. Several protesters have been killed.
“The time is long overdue, surely, to abandon, permanently, the anachronistic resort to lethal means by the security agencies of governance,” Soyinka said.
“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.”
