African Action Congress presidential candidate, Omoyele Sowore during this exclusive interview with Hiphop World Magazine explained that he is and experienced politician as he as spent about three decades engaging Nigeria and Nigerians politically. Read excepts from the interview below.
This is your first time coming out as a political aspirant. How has it been so far?
It has been amazing, because it helped me discover Nigeria in its rawest form. It has led me to 34 states including the FCT. It has helped me meet people I never could have thought I would meet normally. It helped me discover Nigeria in the aspect of diversity, creativity and culture. It has made me realize that most Nigerian leaders don’t even understand Nigeria and they do nothing to know the people and the country.
What have been the challenges so far?
It’s to see Nigeria as a small and not integrated nation. It has led me to see Nigeria not as a nation, but as a place run as a business for a few. I will say everything in Nigeria politically is transactional. Everybody wants you to transact a political business and that is why political parties don’t set up structures. They set up outlets to carry out these transactions. Whenever you go out there, it is the fulfillment of these transactions that determines people’s loyalty, commitment and engagement. We have come around to change all that and people are surprised. We are also surprised that people on the sidelines want a different kind of politics. They see that politics is transactional and people are asking for money, but they know that it won’t lead the country anywhere in terms of progress and success. Now that they have seen us bringing ideas, they have embraced us. Those things we used to hear about politics; ethnicity and religion, was swept aside the moment they saw originality. It was quite amazing. Travelling around Nigeria was quite challenging. Explaining to people that ideas rule and not money was also challenging. We met many people in Nigeria that are literates. A lot of people are very educated about politics.
A lot of people say you lack political experience. How is this a disadvantage to you?
A lot of people used to think I was a rookie until they began to see and understand where I was coming from. They realized I have 30 years of experience engaging with Nigerians and Nigeria politically. That I was engaged in every struggle to either establish democracy or deepen and expand the democratic space. Starting from the University of Lagos in 1989 when I was fighting to end military rule. In 1992, we were fighting to end economic policies that led us to where we are today, the structural adjustment program. In 1993,we were fighting to deannul the June 12 election. In 1999, we helped to establish democratic norm. After that, we set up a media platform that enriched a lot of people’s knowledge and elevated their voices all over the country. We helped to deepen the democracy to the extent that we defeated the 3rd term, we defeated the cabal under Yaradua and helped to promote the transfer of power from one political party to the other, which has never happened before. So, most people didn’t know that I was at every juncture where Nigeria took a turn politically. So when you call me a rookie, it is an undeserving categorization with my engagement politically. When people talk about experience, I ask them who an experienced person is. Is it a person who has governed before and didn’t know what he is doing or someone who has got ideas that has been developed over the years and can make the country better. When you talk about experience, you talk about spirit. Ive had a hardened fighting spirit for 30 years. So, it is time to vote for an experienced fighter not experienced thieves.
When I say experience, I mean many people feel you could have started as a local government chairman or something. You know, there is this spirit of graduation in politics.
You see, people of Nigeria usually young people have been beaten down so many times. They have come to a place where they are self-hating and engage in internalization of oppression. They have internalized the fact that they are not good for anything. You can imagine somebody telling Mark Zuckerberg that he should have allowed the Microsoft founder, Bill gates to establish Facebook; after all he has better experience. That is not how it works. The person who would lead a country to glory, progress and prosperity has to be the person who has passion, competence, will, intellect, stamina and ability to communicate, engage and reach out to people. That is why when South Africa was looking for a leader after the apartheid, they did not look for the experienced judges. They looked for a guy who spent 27 years in jail. See the difference. When the US was looking for a president, they didn’t look for and experienced old man of about 90 years old. They looked for Obama, who wasn’t only young, but could have been described as a rookie having been there for the first time, but he was a community organizer. When Canada was looking for a leader, they went for a forty something year old guy. France did the same thing recently. These are the things people look for in leadership, not one gigantic years of experience. If you want to look for experience and you talk about people who fought for the independence of Nigeria, how old were they? Which local government did Awolowo head before he became the premier of the Western region? Which local government did Zik govern before he fought for independence? The same people talking about experience gained their experience from somewhere and they didn’t necessarily go through the tragedy that is being prescribed by this internalized form of oppression that we are seeing today. We need to wake our young people up to understand that you don’t have to be methuselah for you to govern a country and govern it right.
What do you say about people who say you overly criticize political leaders a lot?
I don’t actually do that. I’m doing so based on solutions to the problem. I take them on facts, figures and evidence. If you watched on NTA few days ago when they asked me a question on corruption and I was telling them that as at 2 years ago, there was a publication on Sahara reporters about the chief justice of Nigeria having money he didn’t deserve to have in his account. It was written off. It is even on Twitter. They issued a statement to deny that. Look at where we are now. They are trying to get rid of him because he is politically expedient. I’m not criticizing them. I am just saying this country could be better. We should expose characters that are destroying the country. It’s not criticism, it is love an passion for my country. The money that has been stolen could be utilized for other things like airplanes, classrooms, roads, electricity and others. They rather steal it and invest in other countries. If you go to Dubai, London, New York today, the greatest owners of their real estate are Nigerian leaders. That is why I have no apologies when I go after them and I hope everybody keeps going after them till we can take our country back.
Talking about Sahara reporters, how do you do it? We find the most efficient investigative journalism in Sahara reporters. Are you not scared of being threatened?
Of course I get threatened and even sued more than any other journalist with libel directly or indirectly. They have done stuff to me that I can’t even begin to say now. It comes with the territory. You can’t want to change society and not expect people who are comfortable with the way things are going not to threaten you. This is their feeding bottle. Each time you expose them, you are taking it away from them and they fight very hard to retain it. Most times I don’t think it is fair to sleep when your country men and women can’t sleep either. I think we should all stay awake till we can get proper change and not the chicken change that is being elevated to the next fraudulent level.
There is this talk by the ruling party that Nigeria is not a place you can just change within four years. And it is not easy to make the change visible. How true is that?
I’ll start with power. Egypt built 14000 megawatts of electricity with 7.2billion dollars within 2 and half years. That was from generation to transmission and distribution to 40million homes. Siemens acted in conjuction with an Egyptian state owned company to deliver it. The PDP government spent 16 billion dollars to generate darkness in Nigeria. It is possible to settle power issues in other countries, so it is definitely possible to do the same in Nigeria. We can even do it for cheaper here because we have cheaper labor, we have sunshine, we have technology. We don’t have the kind of government they have in other countries; the government that has the exposure, the experience, not our own type of experience, not the fraudulent experience. If we had the right connection across the world, if we had integrity, because integrity matters for us to find international partners to work with us to deliver those promises, we will solve the problem of electricity. The same thing goes for security. If we are fighting the right and just cause, we can defeat Boko Haram, but Boko Haram is there because they are business for the Army General. Money has been released to them, about 1 billion dollars, but we can’t even find a drone anywhere. Corruption is all over the place. Incompetence is destroying them. On top of that, we have people whose ages are so old, their ideas are antiquated. Their ages are terrible, their ideas are even worse. We don’t even mind if we have old people who can embrace new ideas, but these guys can’t. They have zero megabytes in terms of memory to deal with our needs.
Why were you absent from the presidential debate?
I was excluded because they knew I was coming out to say things most of them don’t want to hear. It was the Nigerian election debate group that carried out that fraud. We took them to court. When we were on the verge of exposing them, we couldn’t get a court judgment. They were clearly afraid of the fact that I was going on national Tv to point directly at the failure of the government to collar the news of the people that were destroying the country. I was going to call names and most importantly to bring my ideas as to how Nigeria will change and they knew that the moment was done, they would be in trouble with people. They did everything they could to exclude me. We won an online poll. We had the 3rd position, but they said they were using other methodologies. I wasn’t at the debate, but I was there. Everybody kept asking where I was and we started trending even on twitter immediately and a few days later, we were on nta. I now changed the whole conversation. Then people realized why they were afraid for me to be at the debate. They asked me if I have foreign influence. I told them the people who have foreign influence are the people who bought visa for over a million naira just to go to America for two days. I was referring to Atiku. They cut it out. When I started talking about Buhari’s failures, they cut it out. At the end of the day, the people got the message and that is what is most important. That was why I was excluded. It was a deliberate exclusion so I won’t embarrass their principles.
What are you bringing to the table in terms of developing Nigerian entertainment in Nigeria?
If it weren’t for entertainment, Nigeria won’t be on the map today. If we rely on these archaic leaders, nobody will know about Nigeria anymore. Entertain in terms of movies and music has made it possible for Nigeria to stay up there glowing. That is why we must do everything to sustain it. But entertainment is not just about piracy. It is about allowing ideas to freely gain currency in expression, that is why one of the things I will do is to get rid of the committee that sanctions music; NBC. I’ll remove their roles from interfering with music, because the kind of expression we need that would even earn us more is there in people’s brains, but when archaic people start interfering with it, telling you what and what not to sing, you are killing not only the spirit, but the brain and business. In terms of piracy, it’s a matter of enforcement. It’s not just about policemen running after people and destroying cds. It’s also for us to start migrating to digital platforms that will help piracy become a thing of the past. I buy music from iTunes. You can’t pirate it that way. I encourage more people to migrate or even create their own platforms where the ideas can find profit, currency and genuinty and this is what needs to be done. Government must create the opportunity for more and more people to have access to the ideas that are coming out of entertainment. For example, the northern part of the country, most people don’t know about the very good musicians there because the integration is not there. We need to open up the country. Why is it that Psquare is more popular in Zimbabwe and Rwanda but people don’t listen to their music in Kano because of these archaic ideas that is running the country, so we need to open the country so entertainment will rule. If I were to choose between a country with these kind of leaders and a country with musicians, I will choose Nigeria with musicians without leaders. It is these musicians that are keeping body and soul together. I’m fully for entertainment and for very creative entertainment, I give it to Nigerian entertainers. Though, they are not using their entertainment powers to promote freedom in the country, which us very important. They should not just entertain for the purpose of entertainment, but for the purpose of freedom.
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