CANDIDATE SOWORE: REVOLUTION, MARIJUANA AND OTHER STORIES

PAUL C NWABUIKWU contends that though popular, Omoyele Sowore is not viewed by the electorate as a serious candidate

Omoyele Sowore, eternal student activist and perennial presidential candidate, has been busy lately. Or maybe, a better way to put it is that he has been busier than usual because Sowore is always busy somewhere doing something controversial and headline grabbing. But as the elections approach, his frenetic pace is up by many notches. There is a sense that he may be approaching a crescendo, as he gets set for a third presidential run following his previous colourful but unimpressive efforts in 2019 and 2023.

In June, following a missed court appearance for a cybercrime case (Sowore was being prosecuted for calling President Tinubu a “criminal” among other choice words in online posts), Judge Muhammad Umar of the Federal High Court ordered him remanded in Kuje prison. But the ruling didn’t last. Sowore was released after loud protests led by his many friends and allies in civil society and the media.

In July, Sowore’s legal team fought to get the director-general of the Department of State Services (DSS) into the dock to answer questions on DSS’s demand for a retraction of his online posts against the president. Subsequent developments suggest that the agency may be having second thoughts about proceeding with the case, as their lawyers have been instructed to pause the prosecution of the cybercrime case.

It was not exactly an unexpected development. Sowore has made a career out of taking on the Nigerian state and emerging triumphant after a dramatic public battle. As many government bodies have found out over the years, battling the revolutionary one-man riot squad is not a tea party. His version of activist journalism (or journalistic activism) is a contact sport in which he participates with all the enthusiasm of a veteran WWE wrestling champion operating in a familiar ring.

He knows the terrain thoroughly and whether the opponent is the federal or state government, a security agency or a Big Man or Big Woman “oppressor”, Sowore can be counted on to inflict painful body slams, drop kicks and headlocks with his weapons of choice: controversial statements, robust allegations, contemptuous put-downs and articles in Sahara Reporters that bristle with that mix of populist posturing and in your face courage that define his public brand.

The locus of Sowore’s public interventions is shifting in the direction of the political as the election gets closer. But the strategy remains the same: find a popular cause, identify the oppressor responsible and scream his lungs out. All is fair in love and politics. So any opponent who can be attacked for political advantage is fair game.

Abubakar Atiku has been a recurring target recently. Sowore has repeatedly attacked the former vice president as a spent force who has nothing to offer the country. “Nigeria does not need another recycling of the same political elite” he says. But that didn’t stop Sowore from trying to steal Atiku’s thunder at the recent Nigerian Bar Association conference in Port Harcourt. After the former vice president’s declaration that he would end the current form of subsidy and implement a “targeted” version if elected president started gaining traction, Sowore accused Atiku of attempting to take credit for his idea and jumping on the anti-subsidy bandwagon that he (Sowore) has championed since 1989. Atiku, the government and the entire political establishment, he thundered, are all discredited beneficiaries of the corrupt system and totally lacking in credibility.

Peter Obi and his former running mate, Datti-Ahmed also received the Sowore treatment. He has dismissed them as “military apologists”, adding for good measure that Obi was an “Abacha boy”. For some reason, Sowore reserves some of his most scathing words for Obi. Perhaps the reason is that Obi has managed to achieve what Sowore’s revolutionary strategy has not managed to deliver for him over two electoral cycles: a dedicated base of mostly youthful supporters and a strong performance in the last presidential elections which saw Obi, then Labour Party candidate coming a strong third with over six million votes.

Curiously, Sowore has also dismissed Abia governor Alex Otti whose outstanding performance in office has earned him a nationwide profile as the MVP of governance at the state level as lacking in tangible achievements. Apparently, Abia people whose love for their governor has made an Otti victory in 2027 virtually a foregone conclusion are under a spell that only Sowore can see. It seems Sowore’s brand of radicalism, in true aluta tradition, is often an end in itself, deployed for applause and the adrenaline rush that comes from shaking the system, not changing it.

No doubt, Sowore has done some good bringing injustices to light and championing the rights of many poor Nigerians in a system in which the rule of law is often defined by its absence. But his story is a bit more complicated than a straightforward tale of a knight in shining armour waging a principled battle on behalf of the suffering masses. Some critics of his interventions in the public space have accused him of being an official agent with an unofficial mandate of taking the edge out of public anger by providing strategic distraction with his colourful and loquacious interventions. But this is a difficult case to sustain. Sowore has had more than his fair share of harassment and detentions by various security agencies in the course of his public advocacy over the years. It seems a rather steep price to pay if he really is an official operative hiding in plain sight.

Personally, I find the theory a difficult one to swallow despite longstanding misgivings about Sowore’s motives and mode of operation. And the idea that part of the disguise is for Sowore to insult the president regularly sounds quite far farfetched. Or perhaps my bandwidth for paranoia and conspiracy theorizing is simply not wide and deep enough.

But there’s something that is not in doubt: based on his electoral performance, Sowore, has been spectacularly unsuccessful in selling his RevolutionNow message to the Nigerian electorate. In 2023, his efforts were rewarded with a measly 14,608 votes across the nation. Some analysts, including Prof Farooq Kperogi have posited that Sowore is a victim of the structural gaps and many dysfunctionalities in the Nigerian political system. In his popular column last week, Kperogi argued that Sowore is disadvantaged on many fronts. First, as an outsider in Nigeria’s conservative, he lacks “symbolic capital”. Second, Sowore does not have a strong “primordial constituency” – religious, regional or ethnic – backing him. Finally, the respected media scholar identified a third factor hobbling Sowore’s ambition: his reputation for incorruptibility and his independent spirit.

I don’t know enough about Sowore to speak authoritatively about his outside-the-headline qualities but I suspect that Kperogi is being far too kind. There is, I believe, a far more banal and more accurate explanation for Sowore’s failure to make a dent on the electorate: his populist message may be superficially attractive but voters, including Sowore’s beloved masses, don’t consider him enough of a serious candidate to commit their votes to him. Voters are a lot more perceptive than many analysts give them credit for. The fact is that being an outsider is not enough. The electorate needs to know that you have something deeper and with more practical value beyond loud headlines and SUG theatrics.

Some of Sowore’s policy positions reflect this preoccupation with drama at the expense of substance. In 2019 he advocated for the country to legalize and export marijuana, starting with “Ondo weed” as a major source of revenue for economic transformation. Given the many other available economic assets and resources that the country has which remain unexplored, the “marijuana strategy” is not exactly a priority that should be taken seriously.

More recently in May this year, Sowore declared “If I become Nigeria’s president tomorrow, my minister of defence will be a drone”, adding that he would stop buying conventional fighter jets and invest in increasing the nation’s arsenal of unmanned aerial vehicles. It was a typical Sowore gambit – long on shock and short of practical value.

It is no surprise that Sowore’s popularity and his electability seem to have an inverse relationship. When loud style trumps substance, voters enjoy the entertainment but they can see through the act.

Nwabuikwu is a member of THISDAY Editorial Board