Omoyele Sowore, presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC) in the February 2019 election, openly called for a revolution in Nigeria to unseat the government of President Muhammadu Buhari. The Department of State Services (DSS), the country’s secret police, responded that his call amounted to treason or treasonable felony, arrested and bundled him into detention.
His call for revolution, his subsequent arrest and incarceration by the DSS, have since generated more heat than light in the media, produced more obfuscation than sane and sober analysis. This piece is not to arrive at any particular conclusion, but merely to provide some perspective to the whole controversy. It is not an endorsement or condemnation of #RevolutionNow, or of the DSS response.
As a starting point, I quote Sowore’s own statement concerning his proposed revolution: “I’m not talking of protest. I’m embarking on revolution. 85% of Nigerians are in support. Don’t tell me about legal implications or what a judge will say. I don’t care. We must bundle Buhari out of that place.” He made it clear he wasn’t calling for a protest, contrary to what some of his defenders and apologists want us to believe, but instead for a real revolution.
Nobody, except a drunken fool, would make such incendiary political remarks and not expect to immediately attract the attention of the nation’s security services! And it is not because we are a Third World country, but even in the United States of America, touted as the most developed and freest country in the world, security services cannot but take such statements seriously, especially coming from a high-profile political personality like Sowore, also a publisher of an influential investigative online news medium. Security and intelligence services the world over react reflexively to whatever appears to them like a threat to the nation. They act on their perception of threat.
Sowore is not an unknown quantity: a known student activist in his undergraduate days at the University of Lagos; he is the publisher of a critical online news medium, and most recently the founder and presidential candidate of a political party that contested, and woefully lost, in the 2019 general elections. He is not an ordinary street folk; he has multitudes of followers both as a journalist and politician. His words therefore carry weight, whether they are made casually or seriously, and only a fool would not know that he would appear on the radar screens of the nation’s intelligence and security services.
He ought to be wiser than to imagine that his public statements and writings would go unnoticed. Even those of us who write occasional commentaries on national issues in newspapers, not to talk of the regular columnists, cannot claim that our submissions are not being carefully studied by the ever watchful intelligence and security services. It is always the risks we have to take in order to mould public opinion on national issues. So, how can Sowore’s threat to “bundle Buhari out of that place” not be subjected to more critical scrutiny?
Let us return to Sowore’s outburst: it is undoubtedly inflammatory, provocative, irresponsible and capable of inciting national unrest and chaos. Since it is true that he made that statement then he is truly calling for a revolution in the proper sense of the meaning and understanding of that word.
I wonder if all his defenders, apologists in the media and civil society, political opportunists and sundry do-gooders weeping more than the bereaved, actually digested the actual meanings and implications of the key phrases in the statement… “embarking on revolution”; “I don’t care”; “bundle Buhari out.” These are neither harmless statements nor mere ranting of a drunk; they are clear, precise, well thought out and reflect his state of mind concerning how to address the country’s problems. He truly means that he wants to embark on a revolution. There is no other meaning to be read to it.
A look at what “revolution” actually means both in ordinary English language and in its Political Science usage will help. The Cambridge English Dictionary (online version) defines revolution as “a change in the way a country is governed, usually to a different political system and often using violence or war.” Dictionary.com (also online) reiterates this same meaning, defining revolution as “an overthrow or repudiation of and thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed.”
Also in the same vein, the authoritative Encyclopaedia Britannica explains that revolution, as understood in Social and Political Science, is “a major, sudden, and hence typically violent alteration in government and in related associations and structures.” It goes on to assert that a “revolution constitutes a challenge to the established political order and the eventual establishment of a new order radically different from the preceding one.” It is generally associated with such related terms as coup or coup d’état, insurrection, mutiny, rebellion, revolt, uprising, upheaval, all of them involving violent change of government.
This undoubtedly must have been the way the intelligence and security agencies understood and interpreted Sowore’s #RevolutionNow, i.e., immediate and violent overthrow of existing political order. Isn’t this precisely what Boko Haram and other insurgent groups have been attempting for about a decade now? Only a naïve or outright stupid person would not expect a swift response from the state. World history in the 20th and 21st centuries is replete with such revolutions or revolts that destabilized and violently altered political order – the Cuban and Iranian revolutions, and most recently the Arab Spring.
Since that is the case, then Sowore should have known he was seeking confrontation with the lion in its den, and must have prepared for the consequences. Or did he? I think it is all bluff and bluster, a grandstanding to shore up his sagging activist and political credentials, but the DSS doesn’t see it that way. Who can blame them! Personally I don’t believe that Sowore is capable of a revolution, for revolutions are made of much sterner stuff, but his inflammatory rhetoric can become the pretext for the disgruntled and the disaffected to unleash mayhem and instability on a nation that is already on tenterhooks from myriad internal security challenges. Such reckless utterances can create a political situation that is easily capable of spinning out of control, even though that may not be his intention.
What is to be done? This country needs peace and stability for national political and socio-economic development, and it is important for all hands, including those of Sowore and his fellow “revolutionaries”, to be on the deck. He should contribute his intellect the efforts to find solutions to the problems plaguing our country rather to cause chaos. That is why I think charging him with treason or treasonable felony on account of his inflammatory rhetoric, reckless and irresponsible though they are, is like trying to kill a fly with an elephant gun, unless the DSS has real evidence of planned insurrection that is not yet in the public domain. It therefore shouldn’t be hard for both the DSS and the court to arrive at an amicable resolution in the overall interest of the nation, a nation he loves and aspires to lead.
- Prof Fawole is of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife.
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