The events of one night will be etched forever in the memory of Omoyele Sowore, the Nigerian pro-democracy activist now better known as the publisher of the Sahara Reporters news website.
That was the night in 1980 when the police raided his sleepy Apoi-Ijaw village of Kiribo, in the backwaters of Ondo state bordering the Atlantic Ocean, in the wee hours of the morning. The raid had been triggered by some marketplace dispute.
Gunshots rent the air, people who had time fled before police jackboots and sledgehammers brought down their fragile doors. The senior Sowore, who couldn’t get away in time, hid in the ceiling while his family cowered in a corner.
“My father was hiding in the ceiling. He was sweating so bad we could feel his sweat falling through our thatched ceiling and hearing cries of young girls that were being raped,” Sowore recalls. “I was asking myself why is this happening? This is the police that is supposed to protect us, why are they doing this?”
While the family survived it all eventually, it left the 9-year-old Sowore wondering what gave the police so much power that they scared the hell out of a father that seemed so powerful to his young mind. It was a defining moment of his life from which he began asking critical questions that led him into activism.
His entry into the University of Lagos in 1989 to study Geography and Regional Planning, marked another phase. Sowore was always at the frontline of student protests demanding better conditions or challenging the hardships caused by mismanagement under the country’s then military rulers. His consistency in articulating the viewpoint of the students saw him win the election to become student union president.
It was also a tumultuous time as he almost lost his life after he was attacked and injected with an unknown substance by people suspected at the time to be members of a student confraternity, but later identified as undercover state agents. He was hospitalized at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital for five day, during which suspected state agents continued seeking for him.
Omoyele Sowore, Picture Credit: PLAC
Eventually he was wheeled out of his hospital bed as a dead person and taken toward the morgue, from where he escaped. “They then officially declared me wanted,” he said.
As the military rulers sought to muzzle all opposition and critical voices, Sowore was among key people that led the student union movement into forging an informal alliance of shared objectives with human rights groups such as the Civil Liberties Organization and the Campaign for Democracy coalition. It was an alliance that proved formidable in the years of Ibrahim Babangida and his cohort and successor, Sani Abacha. It was to last all the way from the time of Babangida’s annulment of 1993 general elections, through Abacha’s five-year regime, to the emergence of civilian rule in 1999.
Sowore left Nigeria in 1999, relocating to the U.S., where he got even better medical attention and eventually sought political asylum.
“I left for two reasons: My body had been subjected to a lot of wear and tear. There were fears at that time that what I was injected with was interfering with my physical health. I went to meet late Chima Ubani and late Innocent Chukwuma and Abdul Oroh at CLO and asked if I could get some recommendation.”
Exile afforded Sowore not just the opportunity to undergo much-needed medical treatment, but also the chance to go for a masters degree at Columbia University and start a family as well. Yet the urge to return to activism persisted.
A temporary outlet emerged when he observed the beginnings of the anti-WTO protests in New York and how they were covered online despite a media blackout by the mainstream media.
“I thought, would this be possible in Nigeria? And I began to research from around 2003,” said Sowore.
Eventually, he registered the domain saharareporters.com in 2005. Prior to going live with the website, Sowore had a brief stint with another news website called elendu.com before going on his own.
In line with his precedents, Sowore wasn’t a traditional publisher who sold news to readers and served adverts, ever cautious not to offend the sensibilities of patrons. Sowore’s approach has been that of an activist publisher, championing exposes on corruption, abuse of power and human rights violations. Not surprisingly, there’s a string of litigants seeking their day against the publication in the in courts.
Not satisfied with being an activist publisher, Sowore, who was 50 in February, joined the presidential race in 2019 to challenge President Muhammadu Buhari’s re-election. Many critics see Sahara Reporters and Sowore as being partly instrumental to Buhari’s emergence in 2015 and see him as culpable for the president’s perceived failings.
Sowore denies this vehemently, insisting that the online publication’s criticism of then President Goodluck Jonathan was misconstrued as support for Buhari. He points out that the publication was equally critical of their predecessors as well as the current incumbent.
Indeed, his decision to run in 2019 was due to his frustration with Nigeria’s serial failings. “I thought we can’t continue to perpetually have incompetent people rule this this country,” Sowore said. “So, I’m going to make a try at the presidency.”
With the country now stuck with Buhari for the foreseeable future, Sowore thinks the option is for the citizens to engage in mass protests to show the government it had lost legitimacy with the people and give way for more competent hands.
There’s need for urgent reforms, for “#Revolution Now” to arrest Nigeria’s fast-spiraling economic, political and security misfortunes. This is because, in his words: “Nigeria might be running out of luck.”
Main Image credit: Premium Times