By Kayode Sanni-Arewa
An elderly woman participating in the nationwide #EndHunger protests in Sango, Ogun, has criticised President Bola Tinubu for plunging millions of Nigerians into hardship and poverty, praying for deliverance.
“I came from Owode to join the protest. Is it acceptable for we elderly to be begging for alms to survive? We beg for alms to survive. I and my children are starving,” the woman lamented in a viral video recorded at the protest ground.
The woman decried unemployment among youths and bad roads.
“Our children don’t have jobs. Men and woman in Sango are unemployed. No jobs. All the roads are bad. (God) Deliver us from this government,” she stated. “Deliver us from Tinubu. What he promised to do are not what he is doing. He is suffering us. Deliver us from his government. Rice is unaffordable. Garri is unaffordable.”
Meanwhile, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has warned Mr Tinubu of a potential revolution over his security forces’ high-handedness.
“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,” Mr Soyinka warned.
The president’s longtime ally added, “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 SOS, not peculiar to the Nigerian nation.”