WHAT could have led the publisher and editor-in-chief of the online muckraking journal, saharareporters, and most recently a candidate in the March 2019 presidential election to call on Nigerians to embark on a revolution to supplant the existing order well before the newly elected governments at the centre and in the states had taken office?
Despair that nothing would change, and that muddling through could take Nigeria no farther? Ambition, as in seeking to obtain by revolutionary force the power he had failed signally to win at the ballot, having scored only 34,000 votes of the more than 36 million votes cast in the presidential election?
Desperation – that time was running out and that a revolution to turn things around could no longer wait? Idealism, a genuine belief that revolution, revolution now, was precisely what Nigerians needed?
Most likely all of the above.
There was certainly something quixotic about it all. But it was not more quixotic than Sowore running for president, or embarking on operating an online newspaper based in New York with little more than gritty determination to make it work. To be sure, Quixotism has its limits. But overall, it has taken Sowore much farther than his growing up in riverine Ondo State could have promised.
A motely crowd of protesters here, Sowore’s placard-carrying supporters and the police engaged in a not-so-friendly chatter there, or in a skirmish yonder: On the whole, the response to Sowore’s summons to revolution was less than enthusiastic. It would not be unkind to call it desultory. It certainly cannot even be called a preface to revolution.
Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss it as a non-event. That a political activist of Sowore’s modest financial and organisational resources could put so many men and women on the streets at short notice is an indication that there is considerable anger in the land and that the issues he and many others thoughtful critics have raised should be addressed forthrightly and urgently.
It would also be a mistake to treat Sowore and his comrades as common criminals. Prolonged detention without trial can only strengthen their following and win them new supporters.
The Federal Government showed respect for the law by seeking a court order to hold him without trial for 90 days. The court granted an order to hold him for 45 days, an indication that it did not share the government’s harsh view of the matter.
Sowore should be brought to trial within that period if not earlier, or charged with any number of offences an inventive prosecutor can connect. But not sedition, please.
As the Court of Appeal held in the 1985 case of Arthur Nwankwo v The State, the law of sedition, the principal instrument with which the colonial administration sought to suppress political discussion and debate, made sense only in a colonial setting and has no place in Nigeria’s 1979 Republican Constitution.
And since the Supreme Court of Nigeria, the final judicial authority, has not pronounced on the matter, the best legal authorities are persuaded that the ruling on Nwankwo stands as the controlling law.
In summoning his compatriots to revolution, Sowore fell back to a strategy that goes back to the colonial times, the most famous instance of which the veteran journalist and statesman, Prince Tony Momoh, reminded us the other day, following Sowore’s arrest.
It centered on a public lecture organised by the Zikist Movement and presented on October 27, 1948, at Tom Jones Hall, in Idumota, in the central business district of Lagos, and was titled: A Call for Revolution, and was delivered by Osita Agwuna, the movement’s deputy president.
Determined to quicken the march toward freedom from colonial rule, the movement’s Central Committee decided to embark on a plan calculated to plunge the country into turmoil. The lecture was to serve only as a preface. Their calculation was that, following the lecture over which Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, the NCNC leader and movement icon would preside, the colonial authorities would arrest Azikiwe on the spot.
The arrest would set off a national uprising and lead the masses to engage in “positive action.” The jails would overflow with political prisoners. The country would be rendered ungovernable. In the event, the colonial authorities would be forced to cede more powers to Nigerians and fast-track Nigeria’s advance to statehood.
That, at any rate, was the calculation of the Zikists.
And the manifesto outlined in the lecture was so exorbitant even the most accommodating colonial overlord would have seen it as nothing less than a frontal challenge to its authority and indeed its very existence.
Adherents of this new approach should see “nothing good” in cooperating with British rule, which was to be brought down through a boycott of foreign goods. They should not enlist in the police and the army. They should pay their taxes to the NCNC as the “new People’s Provisional Government. Those of them going abroad to study should take courses in “military science.” The employed among them should embark on a general strike.
Zikist President Raji Abdallah had set the tone for the event with this declaration: “I hate the Union Jack with all my heart because it divides people wherever it goes … It is a symbol of persecution, of domination, a symbol of exploitation, of brutality …”
Strong stuff, indeed.
Ominously, Zik, who was to have chaired the occasion, was conspicuously absent. He would explain later that he was too tired to attend, having led an NCNC mission to Ijebu-Ode earlier that day. Anthony Enahoro, who had already made a reputation as a crusading newspaper editor, fiery platform orator and pamphleteer, was drafted to chair the occasion, although he was not a Zikist.
The lecture took place all right. The colonial authorities did not pre-empt it, for that would have gone against their understanding of freedom of the press and of speech as explicated by the great English jurist, Sir William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England.
Lay down no previous restraint. Let the agitators publish whatever they desire, Blackstone wrote; then, punish them for their temerity.
That was exactly what the colonial authorities did. They rounded up the organisers of the lecture and indeed anyone who could be shown to have played any part in it, however tangential, charged them with sedition and, on conviction, despatched them to various prisons across Nigeria.
The Zikists never recovered fully from The Tom Jones Hall outing. If those of them who escaped imprisonment did not feel betrayed, they were profoundly disillusioned that their idol, the object of their worship, disowned, then dismissed them as “fissiparous lieutenants and cantankerous followers.”
I wonder how they had reacted on hearing Zik declaim as governor-general of Nigeria more than a decade later when Nigeria was granted independence from Britain “on a platter of gold.”
They say the inconstant Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami (SAN), who curiously survived the recent cabinet shuffle, has been busy combing the archives with a view to using the 1948 case as a playbook for prosecuting Sowore and his followers.
That would be a futile endeavour. The 1986 case of Arthur Nwankwo v The State should serve him as a better guide.
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