The Spokesman of Atiku Abubakar 2019 Presidential Campaign, Segun Showunmi, has described as unfortunate, the failure of the President Muhammadu Buhari’s government to use the opportunities presented by last year’s EndSARS protest to reset the country.
Showunmi opined that a year after the violent EndSARS protest that led to loss of lives and property, the issue of good governance, police reforms and others demanded by the protesters were still unattended to by the Buhari government.
In a statement he made available to journalists on Thursday, the Ogun State indigene maintained that the Nigerian nation should thank its stars that the protest did not snowball into a revolution like that of the Arab Springs of 2010 and the attendant consequences in the Northern African countries.
He, however, stressed that the leadership of the nation must not allow the essence of the protest to be lost or wished away.
The political activist asserted that the only appropriate way to pay obeisance to the memories of all those who suffered, died, got injured or lost valuable property during the protest was to fix all the issues of insecurity, police reforms, philosophy of good governance, the concept of our nation-state and others.
His words: “In all, we must never forget what happened and what could have gone wrong and what lessons we need to learn from a near meltdown, the type of which some other locations would have had gory tales of woes and scars to show for it. In all, as we say here, we thank God.
“We, however, have to tell ourselves the damn truth. We seem not to have moved quickly with the opportunity that the youth agitation presented. When the youth of a nation pick up the courage to organise themselves in such a protest of that magnitude, leaders must answer transparently and deliberately the questions that their protests throw up.
“We are duty-bound to understand that failing to do what we need to do, we will pay very dearly given the youth bulge and the unemployment issues of our country
“As for the civil societies and the professional protesters, it’s time to review and rewrite the playbook, for we must move to a level of decent descent; otherwise, we will destroy all things that we have observed from areas where an unmanaged meltdown in the name of protest had destroyed things that will take a lifetime to build.
“Indeed a great revolution must and is a combination of micro evolutions. Baby steps in the right direction will give us much more than great giant leaps into chaos. May the memories and lessons of the EndSARS protests inspire us to Reset Nigeria.”
