Soyinka condemns Jonathan on subsidy removal

NOBEL Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has declared that the removal of oil subsidy by the Federal Government is a demonstration of the fact that the Goodluck Jonathan administration has alienated itself from the people it is meant to serve.

Soyinka, who made this known in a statement dated January 6, 2012, a copy of which was made available to the Nigerian Tribune on Sunday, also said that the palliative measures put in place by the president were a step too late, noting that they ought to have been done before the removal of the subsidy.

Describing the measures as “medicine after death,” he said, “A serious government would have emplaced the ‘palliatives’ first, worked assiduously to ensure that they were effectively enforced, with, at the very least, a guaranteed stabilisation of the existing level of Nigerian subsistence.”

He also condemned the Federal Government for seeking an injunction from the National Industrial Court (NIC) restraining the labour unions from embarking upon strike in protest against the fuel subsidy removal.

Stating that it was an irony of history for the government to have sought the court’s intervention to stop the labour unions, “seeing how little consideration the same government paid to the judiciary as an institutional bulwark in the case of Justice (Ayo) Salami.

“If labour, therefore, chooses to ignore the order, it has impeccable precedents - it is merely the chickens coming home to roost. While Jonathan’s predecessor, Olusegun Obasanjo, repeatedly pummeled the judiciary into a state of coma, Goodluck Jonathan has driven an iron stake through its heart.

He also bemoaned the fate of the masses in the increasing downward trend in the national economy, declaring that the people had been, for a long time, placed at the mercy of the market forces.

“Equally impaled is the Nigerian civic polity, the barbed stake of economic incontinence – and electoral prodigality - through its productive sinews. The people are placed once again at the mercy of rampaging market forces.

“That patient beast of burden called the Nigerian citizen is overloaded; its knees are buckled; only its spirit refuses to be crushed. No wonder the gasp that emerges from its constricted throat is that cry of historic desperation: enough is enough!,” he said.

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