Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka has criticised President Bola Tinubu’s nationwide address, saying it failed to address the brutal crackdown on #EndBadGovernance protesters by security agencies.

Angry Nigerians had taken to major cities across the country to lament the high cost of living, hardship, hunger, and poverty blamed on Federal Government policies, such as the removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of the naira.

In the past four days, some individuals were killed as the protests turned violent in certain states. Concerned by the situation, President Tinubu addressed Nigerians in his first nationwide speech since the demonstrations began. The President called for calm, insisting that there was no going back on the subsidy removal.

However, in a statement on Sunday, Soyinka specifically criticised the steps outlined by the President since the protests started.

“His outline of the government’s remedial actions since inception, aimed at warding off just such an outbreak, will undoubtedly receive expert and sustained attention for both effectiveness and content analysis. My primary concern, quite predictably, is the continuing deterioration in the state’s handling of protest management, an area in which the presidential address fell conspicuously short,” Soyinka said.

According to Soyinka, the “nation’s security agencies cannot pretend ignorance of alternative models for emulation, civilized advances in security intervention”.

“Such short-changing of civic deserving, regrettably, empowers the security forces to exercise 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 the use of tear gas remains questionable in most circumstances and is certainly an abuse in situations of clearly peaceful protest. Hunger marches constitute a universal SOS, not unique to the Nigerian nation. They serve as a summons to governance, indicating that a breaking point has been reached and providing a testing ground for the government’s awareness of public desperation. The tragic response to the ongoing hunger marches in parts of the nation, despite prior notice, constitutes a retrogression that takes the nation back even further than the deadly culmination of the watershed ENDSARS protests.

“It evokes pre-independence – that is, colonial – acts of disdain, a passage that inspired the late stage pioneer Hubert Ogunde’s folk opera Bread and Bullets, earning that nationalist serial persecution and proscription by the colonial government,” he said.