President Bola Tinubu has said that the N200 billion Consumer Credit Corporation established by his administration would make life easier for millions of households. The President said this in a national broadcast on Sunday on the ongoing nationwide protest just as Professor Wole Soyinka has picked hole in the address. Prof. Wole Soyinka, a Nobel Laureate condemned the use of live bullets and tear gas on protesters by the men of Nigeria Police Force. Soyinka made the condemnation against the backdrop of reports and footages showing open use of firearms by policemen on protesters in the ongoing nationwide protests. Soyinka said the use of firearms to quell civic protests amounted to mismanagement of the crisis and were bound to lead to violence.
He wrote: “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 “Live bullets as a state response to civic protest – that becomes the core issue. Even tear gas remains questionable in most circumstances,“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 a summons to governance that a breaking point has been reached and, thus, a testing ground for governance awareness of public desperation. 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.”
However President Tinubu said the aim of the Consumer credit scheme was to help Nigerians acquire essential products without immediate cash payments. This, he said, would consequently reduce corruption and eliminate cash and opaque transactions. “This week, I ordered the release of an additional N50 billion each for NELFUND – the student loan, and Credit Corporation from the proceeds of crime recovered by the EFCC. Additionally, we have secured 620 million dollars under the Digital and Creative Enterprises (IDiCE) – a programme to empower our young people, creating millions of IT and technical jobs that will make them globally competitive.
“These programmes include the 3 million Technical Talents scheme. Unfortunately, one of the digital centres was vandalised during the protests in Kano. What a shame!” he said. In addition, he said the government had introduced the Skill-Up Artisans Programme (SUPA); the Nigerian Youth Academy (NIYA); and the National Youth Talent Export Programme (NATEP). He also said more than N570 billion had been released to the 36 states to expand livelihood support to their citizens, while 600,000 nano-businesses had benefitted from nano-grants. He stated that an additional 400,000 nano-businesses were expected to benefit from the programme. “Furthermore, 75,000 beneficiaries have been processed to receive our N1 million Micro and Small Business single-digit interest loans, starting this month. “We have also built 10 MSME hubs within the past year, created 240,000 jobs through them and five more hubs are in progress, which will be ready by October this year,” he said. According to Tinubu, payments of N1 billion each are also being made to large manufacturers under single-digit loans to boost manufacturing output and stimulate growth.
Soyinka also said “Need we recall the nationwide 2022/23 editions of what is generally known as the YELLOW VEST movement in France? Perhaps it is time to make such 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. “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, and then exercise the will to commence a lasting transformation, inserting a break in the chain of lethal responses against civic society.“Today’s marchers may wish to consider adopting the key songs of Hubert Ogunde’s BREAD AND BULLETS if only to inculcate a sense of shame in the continuing failure to transcend the lure of colonial inheritance where we all were at the receiving end. One way or the other, this vicious cycle must be broken.”
Tinubu says N200bn consumer credit will make life easier for Nigerians as Soyinka picks hole in President address
