Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has said that using bullets and tear gas on Nigerians protesting economic distress is an abuse of governmental power.
According to Soyinka, the way security personnel treated the demonstrators condemns the country to a “seemingly unbreakable cycle of resentment and reprisals”.
In an opinion piece headlined ‘The Hunger March As Universal Mandate,’ the Nobel laureate claimed that President Bola Tinubu’s speech on Sunday failed to address the “continuing deterioration of the state’s seizure of protest management.”
Soyinka stated that hunger protests are not unique to Nigeria and that security authorities should follow different models and humane improvements 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.”