Niyi Akinnaso
When Omoyele Sowore, career activist, publisher of Sahara Reporters, and presidential candidate in the 2019 general elections, was first arrested in July, 2019, I chastised him, not for leading a protest but for the provocative invocation that accompanied his call for a revolution.
Although he used a provocative word-revolution-in the call for protest, it was not the case that he had an army or anything of the sort to topple the government. The word was used only to add colourful emphasis to the need for the government to change its ways in order to make Nigeria work better and for everyone.
Nevertheless, I anticipated the unwarranted interpretation of his statements by English language-challenged security forces and by a government in crisis: It will be recalled that the government was facing court challenges on the election of the President, whose former role as a military dictator puts him on edge on hearing the word revolution. Besides, the government has been confronted with security challenges from various sources and its political party-the All Progressives Congress-was, and still is, in a crisis of its own.
I did not spare the government, either, for its draconian response to Sowore’s call for revolution. His initial arrest was unwarranted not to mention his prolonged detention, even beyond repeated court orders for his release.
Even more unwarranted and downright disgraceful was his re-arrest in open court a day after his release from detention. The exact location and timing of the re-arrest don’t even matter. Viewers of the video-taped recording, which will live in cyberspace forever, are free to make their own judgement. What matters is that the event happened at all and in such a disgraceful scuffle, apparently involving uniformed security agents, fully robed lawyers, and eyewitnesses from Sowore’s family and friends as well as civil society.
The controversy over the rearrest makes matters worse. The Department of State Security’s doublespeak on the matter is below the expected dignity of the Department. So is the claim that Sowore stage-managed his own arrest. If so, why then is he still in custody? And if, as it was claimed, the presidency knows nothing about it, then why not order his immediate release?
It is important to ask the question at this point: Why are the government and the DSS afraid of Sowore-led protest to the point that it was killed before it even took off? After all, no one has been tickled by a pin by Sowore and his followers since the mere announcement of his #Revolution Now protest. Most observers at home and abroad know that his was a peaceful protest, like the long-standing Bring Back Our Girls protest.
Comparisons cannot but be drawn with the violent sympathy protests which followed then Presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari’s electoral loss in the presidential election of 2011. Hundreds of people, including innocent members of the National Youth Service Corps, were killed in the protests and property worth billions of Naira was destroyed. Till today, no one has been held accountable for those protests, despite pre-election boasts by Buhari’s supporters that the country would be made “ungovernable”, were Buhari to lose.
The truth today is that there is a global spread of protests. Rather than continue to live in blissful ignorance of the global scale of protests, it is important to place Sowore’s aborted protest within a global context. This past decade, there have been protests on all continents.
In 2019 alone, protests have occurred in over 50 countries, including the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Australia, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Haiti, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Uganda, Guinea, Sudan, and so on. A common demand across all protests is the call for reform.
What is even more important is that virtually all the known causes of protests across the globe are present in Nigeria today. They include endemic corruption; election fraud; economic decline; growing inequality; tuition increases; climate change; obnoxious laws; infrastructural decay; and calls for political autonomy, personal freedom, and self-fulfillment.
In essence, that’s what Sowore was calling for in a country that has consistently ranked in the bottom pile on major international indices, including the Corruption Perception Index, the Failed States Index, the Human Development Index, and the World Poverty Index.
It is also important that youths, especially students, are in the forefront of most protests across the globe, because it is their future that is at stake. This is particularly so in Nigeria, where the national debt far outstrips the life of the present administration and many more to come, thereby eclipsing the future of Nigerian youths.
It is against these local and global contexts that Sowore’s planned protest must be viewed. Repressing dissent and protests is the beginning of autocracy. It may well be the beginning of the death of democracy.
Sowore may be in detention today, and his protest may have been aborted. The DSS may crack down on any protest as they want. Nevertheless, if Nigeria continues along the present path, protests will happen and they will be leaderless as they will involve everybody: Jobless youths, the elderly without social security, the hungry, the sick, the homeless, and others will fill the streets.
The political class and others cocooned in their wealth may be blind to the plight of the masses. The image of a roadside hawker and his experience comes to mind. As he was rushing to brandish his wares, an SUV drove past mine, overtaking everyone in lane, splashing mud water on the hawker and others by the roadside as the SUV galloped from one pothole to another.
The hawker put down his wares, squeezed water from his shirt, and cursed the owner of the SUV and the driver. Others by the roadside chorused him. Another person railed at the government for not taking care of the roads. These are people who may not hesitate to join future protests to reclaim the future of their country, their future.
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