Olatunji Ololade
FOR several critics of President Muhammadu Buhari, citizenship pirouettes in polemics. But for Omoyele Sowore, the patience for passionate arguments has fizzled out.
Like a situational hero sculpted of spunk and spittle, he invites the ambling spectator and spiritless wanderer to admire his votive rant against President Buhari’s administration, which he accuses of inefficiency and manipulation of the citizenry.
Having lost his bid for the presidency, Sowore mooted the #RevolutionNow movement and fixed a date for what should be his epic protest. However, on the eve of the protest, operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) invaded his home and arrested him. Ever since, the publisher of Sahara Reporters, an online medium, has engaged in a bitter joust for his freedom.
The DSS seeks to prosecute Sowore quoting his July 25, 2019 statement: “I’m not talking of protest. I’m embarking on revolution… Don’t tell me about legal implications or what a Judge will say. I don’t care.”
Sowore’s plotting of his RevolutionNow took no cognizance of its likely fallout on the fragile peace and stability endured by millions of Nigerians. Would he have stayed back to own the chaos if miscreants and terrorists had seized his protest to foment a bloodbath? Or would he have fled back to his base in America?
Sowore, who was charged with treasonable felony was released a day before his court hearing last week. However, DSS officials stormed the court premises to re-arrest him, sparking nationwide outrage and international criticism against the government.
In Sowore’s defence, civil societies are angry. Even his critics are angry. They jointly condemn the DSS for being overzealous and desecrating Nigeria’s last bastion of justice and hope, the court of law.
The DSS made a mess of things. And trust Sowore to make a fine pudding of the chaos. Whatever his shortcomings, the DSS has lionised Sowore. Its operatives have strengthened his claim to the status of ‘revolutionary hero,’ ‘justice advocate,’ and ‘political martyr.’
The DSS’ re-arrest of Sowore undoubtedly bears strange fruit: Sowore has re-emerged a hero, at least on social media and international circuits, which runs contrary to the security outfit’s labelling of the 48-year-old.
Of particular interest is a trending video in which Sowore’s supporters make a feverish scramble to protect him from the reach of invisible DSS operatives trying to whisk him away from the courtroom.
While the DSS attracts flaks at home and abroad for its perceived misdemeanour, the service in a statement, argues, that, “in actual fact, it was his (Sowore’s) people who seized him…Eye witness and several media accounts have disclosed that the Court had adjourned peacefully without an untoward incident when suddenly the unruly crowd imported into the Courtroom went into frenzy on the mere suspicion that DSS was sighted at the court premises. The eventual re-arrest of Sowore by the DSS was effected outside the courtroom. His lead counsel has affirmed this.”
Now that he has been re-arrested, what does the DSS seek to achieve? The security outfit must understand that prolonged incarceration of Sowore can only bolster his campaign; already, it has earned him a cult following, on and off the social media.
President Buhari must also understand that even if his government succeeds in muzzling Sowore, it wouldn’t deter others from amplifying dissent. Dissent is a key component of every democracy.
It becomes a key component of revolutionary calls when the gap between what people want, and indeed expect, and what they get manifests amid mounting scarcity, declining wages, joblessness, government insensitivity, and assaults on civil liberties. Amid the gloom, it was hardly surprising that the proposed social media bill which initially recommended the steep penalty of capital punishment for hate speech, incited outrage among the nation’s internet savvy youth and professional business class. It was no doubt a move rooted in conceit, intolerance and insensitivity to the people’s plight.
The sudden transition to wealth and obscene living standards enjoyed by the Nigerian ruling class and anyone lucky enough to ascend the political ladder as a public officer equally incites the outrage of millions of Nigerians, youths in particular, who are forced to watch and endure the vulgar display of illegal acquisitions by their elected representatives.
The Buhari government, like previous leadership, has continually skirted the issue of vulgar remuneration and privileges of lawmakers, the executive and the judiciary, thus incurring like previous administrations, an outrageous recurrent expenditure to the detriment of more crucial spending encompassing infrastructure, health, and education sectors.
Although the government makes a spirited show of curtailing executive profligacy, occasionally jailing a convicted high profile treasury looter, this offers little conviction to the anti-Buhari movement.
Nigerians, deprived of humane leadership and truth for too long, need earnest conviction about the selflessness, sensitivity and progressive intent of the incumbent ruling class. They are definitely not getting it thus the sporadic outbursts of temper, criticism and protest against President Buhari.
Internal wranglings within his ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), and the gradual mutation of his wife, Aisha, into an increasingly vocal and relentless critic of his administration further aggravates discontent against his leadership.
Enter Sowore’s #RevolutionNow and his frantic supporters. Amid the din of expletives and propaganda war, it’s difficult to separate the patriots from the anarchists, the wreckers from the builders.
For instance, among them, we have a legal luminary who allegedly mutated from Buhari’s staunch supporter into his sworn enemy simply because Buhari failed to make him Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation. We have journalists and media editors who are embittered by Buhari’s refusal to ply them with pecuniary bribe and luscious contracts like they enjoyed in previous regimes.
We have corrupt oil magnates, power-brokers, lobbyists and bank chiefs, for whom the incumbent government is everything but a bazaar.
We have outright criminals including Yahoo Boys, corrupt bank chiefs, civil servants, political godfathers and hooligans for whom Buhari’s ‘tightfistedness’ and deployment of the EFCC manifests as “bad harvest.”
In time, pro-government and RevolutionNow apologists would find that neither divide boasts saints or deities, just hustlers in familiar flesh.
In the resultant hustle, epiphany is romanticised and personality ritualised. The forces re-enact the trite cult of sentimentality in reckless abandon. Its a prerequisite for wooing educated illiterates and the unthinking hordes of the social media to assimilate incendiary angst.
This writer still hopes that Sowore, at his release, would quietly join brilliant minds and builders from the ill-fated Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT) collective, and commit to a take-it-back styled movement, with greater purpose, maturity and unflagging spirit – within the rule of law.
As the battle intensifies, neither the DSS nor Sowore, or their dedicated herds, emerge as the hero Nigeria deserves.
The true heroes are the soldiers braving extreme heat and cold, sandstorms and landmines among other elements, daily, to repel terrorists we created from intruding the peace and freedoms we take forgranted.
Just recently, a battle-weary army sergeant told me in the northeast theatre of war: “Here, when we read of our people’s bickering and hatred for each other on the social media, we ask ourselves, are these the people we are dying for? Is this the nation we are dying for?”
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