Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has said that hunger marches are not only peculiar to the Nigerian nation.
Soyinka, in a statement on Sunday, August 04, 2024, while reacting to President Bola Tinubu’s address to the nation said a hard approach to the protests could lead to “more desperate upheavals”.
“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.
“They serve as summons to governance that a breaking point has been reached and, thus, a testing ground for governance awareness of public desperation,” he said.
He also called on security agents to be tactical in the handling of the ongoing protests, to avoid fatalities.
The Nobel laureate cautioned against unprofessional conduct that could hurt protesters “who are merely asking for bread”.
His words, “Even tear gas remains questionable in most circumstances; using it is certainly an abuse in situations of clearly peaceful protest.”
Soyinka said the tragic response to the hunger marches in parts of the country constituted a retrogression that took the nation backwards.
“It took us 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 said.
He said that the nation’s security agencies should explore alternative models for security intervention.
Soyinka said that time was long overdue to abandon, permanently, what he called the “anachronistic resort to lethal means”.
