Some residents in Ota, Ogun state on Thursday, February 15, staged a protest over the prevailing economic hardship.
The protesters marched across the streets carrying different placards with inscriptions expressing their pain.
Watch a video from the protest below…
On 30 December 30 last year, Lagosians pelted Tinubu with cries of “Ebi n pa wa” We are hungry, they chanted as the president’s long motorcade waltzed its way through the crowd in downtown Lagos.
On this in his article Vox Populi, Vox Dei? Bolanle Bolawole had this to say: “Revolutionary France will happen upon Nigeria if care is not taken! The objective conditions for a revolution are everywhere prevalent in Nigeria. Only the subjective conditions remain to be seen. And in the last few weeks we have seen food protests in Nigeria, which were similar to what happened in France when the peasants thronged the streets in their numbers chanting: ‘We are hungry, give us bread!’ An arrogant Queen Marie-Antoinette had mocked the French peasants, saying: “Let them eat cake”! The starving people that could not afford cheap bread were the ones the queen teased with expensive cake!
“Compare Marie-Antoinette’s obliviousness to the abject conditions and daily life of deprivation and penury of the French masses to the Nigerian Senate President, Godswill Akpabio’s insensitive and irresponsible “Let them breathe” response to the cry of Nigerians to their presumed representatives to take notice of the suffering in the land and act accordingly!
“Ongoing food protests – were they spontaneous or sponsored? Even if they were sponsored, the prevailing conditions made that possible. No one can deny that the situation of things in the country has become unbearable, even for the middle class Nigerians, not to talk of the poor and the multidimensionally or desperately poor. If, on the other hand, the protests are spontaneous, then, it means Nigerians, ever so docile, are now stirring. And that is a warning signal for the government to act fast.”
