President Bola Tinubu’s broadcast address on Sunday in response to the ongoing nationwide hardship protests tagged: #EndBadGovernanceInNigeria has been given some flaks by some prominent Nigerians.
In the address, the president outlined some proactive measures his administration had taken to address the hardship, highlighted several of his administration’s achievements since he came to office, assured of basic economic reforms and policies to assuage the hardship, sought dialogue to end the protests and violence as well as unity and peace.
But a couple of stakeholders have upbraided the speech, noting that it is laden with some lacuna and failed to address the realities that triggered the protests.
According to them, the speech did not demonstrate the president’s readiness to meet the demands of the protesters and the Nigerian people as it lacks specific ideas on the solutions to the problems.
A Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and foremost human rights lawyer, Chief Mike Ozekhome, who berated the speech, however, urged the president not to blame his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari whose government is an offshoot of his administration.
According to him, the president’s speech didn’t leave anything for innocent protesters to take home.
He stressed that the president should have addressed the demands that the protesters presented before him rather than leaving the space open for nothing to fill in the gap.
He said: ” What will the youth take home after days of rage, tens of deaths, injuries, mental, physical, psychological and psychical lacerations and trauma, hunger, self-denial, brutality and high-handedness by state security agencies? I do not know. Or do you? The government must stop the blame game, and like I advised serially this year alone, go back to the drawing board and think within the box, not merely outside the box.”
“Blaming the Muhammadu Buhari government of which this same APC government is but a mere offshoot and successor is most illogical, indecent and inelegant. It insults our collective intelligence. It is like cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face, it amounts to dipping one’s finger in one’s anus and smelling it (please permit the obscenity and vulgarity),” he added.
“I have carefully listened to and read President Tinub’s national broadcast as regards the ongoing mass national protests. With all respect, the president’s speech appears vacuous, drudgery and full of a litany of government’s alleged interventions, but completely devoid of any concrete answers to the many itemized demands by the traumatised youthful protesters,” Ozekhome said.
He added: “Aside this, he erroneously, as always, picked on imaginary opposition or political opponents who allegedly want to derail Nigeria. No, sir. These are not sponsored protests. They are genuine outpouring of grief, frustration, anger, hunger, melancholy, hopelessness, haplessness and joblessness by the ignored and denied Nigerian youths who appear not to have a tomorrow even after their yesterday and today have already been mindlessly stolen by rapacious elites and state captors who control the levers of power at all different levels of government.
“The rage is not about a mirage or mere supposition; the blind can see; the lame can walk; the numb can feel and the deaf can hear the grinding poverty and abject penury ravaging the land.
“However, in terms of decency of language and an apparent exhibition of understanding of the litany of problems besetting Nigeria and the empathy required by a president to address the urgent demands, President Tinubu appears to get it right,” he noted.
On the choice of words chosen by the president in conveying his message to Nigerians, the SAN said: “He was not abusive, arrogant or grandstanding with the usual rulers’ narcissism and brickmanship, factors that exercebated the recent Kenya protests and uprising. He looked apparently sober and pensive while addressing beleaguered Nigerians as “my fellow Nigerians.”
“However, in terms of measurable panacea and solutions to balm open wounds, assuage bruised egos and dashed hopes or placate angry and protesting Nigerians who are daily suffering and groaning in the midst of government inertia, wastes, big government, big spending, opulent and primitive display of vulgar wealth by government officials, endless borrowing, white elephant projects, yatch, plane, SUVs, endless trips abroad, yawning leakages and official corruption, both apparent, real, visible and palpable, he scores miserably low,” Ozekhome stressed.
“You will not expect to perceive Christian Dior, Gucci, Armani, Hugo, Versace or Chanel fragrances. It insults our collective intelligence.
“President Tinubu still has a chance to save Nigeria of what remains of a groggy, tottering, fumbling, dwadling and near crumbling country on the verge of imminent precipice.
“All hope is still not lost if he employs and deploys the right instruments of statecraft, ” Ozekhome said.
While also assessing the president’s address, Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, described it as retrogressive.
Soyinka, in a statement titled: “The hunger march as universal mandate” which was issued in Abeokuta, Ogun State, berated use of force by security agencies on the protesters. He that the posturing was uncivil and might trigger further unrest.
“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,” Soyinka said.
‘’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 added.
He also expressed worries over the deterioration of protests and poor management, noting that it was “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,” Soyinka said.
While expressing disgust at the security agencies’ reactions against the protesters, he said: “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 are a universal thing, “not peculiar to the Nigerian nation,” the human rights activist said
Soyinka also cited the Yellow Vest protests that rocked France in 2018 and the conduct of security agencies in the country, noting that Nigeria’s security agencies “Cannot pretend unawareness of alternative models for emulation, civilised advances in security intervention.”
“Perhaps it is time to make such (France) scenarios compulsory viewing in 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.’’
Soyinka who also berating the state agencies said: “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, then exercise the will to commence a lasting transformation, inserting a break in the chain of lethal responses against civic society,” he said
Erstwhile Education minister, Dr Obiageli Ezekwesili, also expressed disappointment at the speech, describing it as underwhelming.
“Your speech reads like a page from your party manifesto and terribly failed to connect to what our citizens on the streets are angry and protesting about,” she said.
‘’Your speech is quite a monumental missed opportunity to placate citizens with sound answers and outline of convincing evidence-based actions that you and your @NigeriaGov will immediately take to address the priority #BadGovernance concerns,’’ she posted on x.com
An opposition party too, condemned the broadcast.
The National Publicity Secretary of New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPCL), Ladipo Johnson, also said. “What the speech seemed to have shown is that Mr President and his team seem to have buckled down by giving the notion that there is no going back on their policies. And this is not what Nigerians want to hear. The president would have told the people that he would have a committee look into two or three major programmes that have put the economy into the state it is today.”
The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), however defended the address, insisting that the president deserved commendation and not condemnation for demonstrating the courage to address Nigerians amid the ongoing protests.
The party stressed that the president had done the right thing by addressing the people and showing empathy towards the people.
The National Director of Publicity Bala Ibrahim, expressed disappointment with the criticisms, describing it as “unreasonable” and “an act of ungodliness.”
He said, “Even if we don’t say kudos to the President for what he has done, he doesn’t deserve condemnation. We should appreciate what he has done. When you look at the opening part of his broadcast, the President said he was speaking with a “heavy heart.” I don’t know if the problem is that people don’t understand English or they simply are expecting leaders to play God, Ibrahim said.
“The problems of Nigeria cannot be addressed in 30 minutes. The President’s nationwide broadcast was less than 30 minutes and he talked on so many issues. It is only God who can address the problems of Nigeria in probably less than 30 seconds. No human being can do that.
