Omoyele Sowore is the presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC) for the 2027 general election. In this interview monitored on Arise Television, he speaks on Nigeria’s need for revolutionary transformation and other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU reports
Congratulations for securing the presidential ticket again but some would say that you’re the one who started the party; that all you had to do was ask for it and it would be given it to you. Is that the situation?
No! AAC is a political party that is run by very positive energy of young people or some old people. And it’s our party, it’s not my party. It’s a party platform for revolutionary change and we’ve never minced words about it.
But revolutions can also create instability and uncertainty. What exactly does revolution mean in practical governance terms and how do you convince Nigerians that it would not plunge the country into deeper chaos?
Well, Nigerians are already seeing a non-revolutionary Nigeria that is in chaos; that is torn apart and unstable and ungovernable. So, we are offering you the direct opposite of what you’re seeing now.
There’s not going to be chaos. There’s going to be order; there’s going to be prosperity, peace and progress but in a very complete way and in a way that you can feel it and those who want to also make it possible would also feel it.
That is why we’re different. Ask yourself; we are not in a revolution and we’re in chaos. Just check and imagine what the situation would be with Nigeria if I were to be in charge.
What your money would be, what your nights would be, what your schools would look like, your trains would look like. This is why the conversation has been about a revolutionary process of change that we can’t wait. We’ve always made it clear that it’s a non-violent revolution.
You’ve contested for president before. You’ve obviously built a passionate activist movement. But electorally, the AAC has struggled to break through nationally. Do you expect it to be any different this time?
The question about electoral integrity is what should bother everybody. You can’t break through using the ballot boxes and papers when they’re not credible; when they’re not available for transparency, they’re not credible, they’re not fair, they’re not just and they’re not open.
That is why we keep talking about the revolution that we have told alternatives to achieve the revolution by ballots. And that means we’ll do everything to ensure that those ballots hold integrity. So, far we haven’t succeeded because the ballots have been hijacked.
What revolutionaries do is to take back the ballot and let the people put in their papers in it and whoever transparently wins, is then acceptable. But in this situation, we are also very clear that without doing this both ways. That is to ensure that we take the ballot boxes and paper back and transparently let people put their paper in it, we must also be at the barricades to ensure that those figures count.
That’s why we’re a revolutionary party and we participate in these elections not because I believe that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) can deliver free and fair elections, but I believe that Nigerian people can consciously be moved to force the change.
You said the same thing in 2023, but obviously you didn’t succeed in convincing them to do that…
Everybody who doubted me in 2023 was shocked that everything I said came to pass, and that is the fact that these guys were planning an election and somebody was eventually selected, even to the chagrin of those who thought they could have done differently.
And that’s why we’re warning people at that time that any path to revolutionary democracy that we want has to have strong people, convinced people, and people who are willing to sacrifice it all for the Nigerian people to have liberation. Our position is liberation, total liberation.
But some would argue that effective opposition in a democracy is about building coalitions capable of taking power but you have spent too much time resisting the political establishment and too little time building the structures needed to defeat that political establishment?
No, we have been building the structure. That’s why I’m still here and I can speak to how far we have gone. Listen, when we started in 2019, there were a bunch of young presidential candidates. I won’t say some of them are entirely young but all of them have more than disappeared under the weight of this chaos we’re talking about. They had ideas; some of them not entirely everybody, but the ideas could not succeed and survive under the conditions that were presented before them.
They were overwhelmed. They tried to overwhelm me because as soon as the 2019 elections ended, I was sent to prison for organising #RevolutionNow. But today, we have come so far that more young people are debating as to why is there no revolution, and we’ve had more people on our side than we see standing.
That is important, and we are standing against all odds with broken bones, torture, denial of fundamental rights, restrictions and denial of our freedom of association. Our party was even taken away from us in 2019 and it took us three years to get it back at the Court of Appeal. So, there’s nothing they haven’t done to us. But we have been standing and we’re getting closer to that period that we’ve been talking about.
Your spirit is something to really speak about. You’ve got an extraordinarily strong, determined spirit and for a lot of people that is something to celebrate. What do you think?
Whereas I would like people to celebrate that spirit, I want them to embrace that spirit and let us use it to liberate ourselves because you can imagine if you have millions and millions of us speaking that way, speaking truth to power, just using our bodies and our spirit and our energy to stand in the way of what has become the albatross of progress in this country. Imagine where we would be.
So, whereas I want people to celebrate the undying and unbreakable spirit that you refer to, we need an unbreakable country, we need a country that works for everybody. And I just want to say humbly that I want to help. I’m presenting myself and I hope people will see that we can help ourselves out of the doldrums.
Since you were announced as the candidate of the AAC, you’ve proposed nationalizing strategic sectors of the economy. How do you avoid turning Nigeria into an economy investors simply run away from?
It is not true. Investors everywhere in the world, real investors, are looking for stable economies and secure societies. They are looking for places where they can put in their investment and reap profits. The investors that come to Nigeria are here to rip Nigerian people apart. We do not need this kind of investment. People who come to the stock market, shortterm investment, crash the stock market, take away their investment, haven’t been given insider information, they are not investors.
They are like people who crash their car so that they can cash out from insurance companies. Those are not investors. And the investors you are talking about are coming here to take our carcass. We had investors who said they were coming to our Ajaokuta Steel Company.
What did they do? They came and stripped Ajaokuta. The guys who took over Nicon Insurance, what did they do? The first thing they did was to sell all the property of Nicon Insurance. Tell me which investors came into Nigeria that didn’t come to reap where they didn’t including the monopolists and the oligarchs in this country. Where did they get their profit from? Companies that we created, the cement companies that were running in this country, were given to somebody as scrap and he became a billionaire out of it, detecting price of cement.
We built it. They decided that it was time to make sure that the work is done, so that they can sell it to them as self-sabotage. It is not conspiracy theory. We know the people who crashed Nigerian Airways. We know the people who destroyed Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). It’s not conspiracy. They have home addresses. We know how they make their wealth.
I understand the point you’re making about the subsequent way that privatisation was handled but there was no question that inefficiency had come in because of the way the government was failing to efficiently run the companies…
It’s not true. What they did was to first and foremost politicise the leadership of those companies. They drove away people who are efficient, people who are uncompromising, and then they put in the incompetent people.
And those ones then opened the way for the companies to crash. They sold them as scrap. So, there’s nothing wrong in saying, we have people who can efficiently run the country. Even in the United States, they don’t give their ports to Arabs even when they have all the money in the world. They don’t allow them to take over their airports.
You say insecurity is rooted in inequality and economic exclusion. A lot of people would agree with that. But banditry, terrorism, kidnapping are also heavily armed criminal enterprises. Do you agree with that and what specifically would you do differently on security?
Let’s take it this way; there are short-term measures that must be taken regarding security. I mentioned that to get these guys out of wherever they’re hiding, make sure that we pursue and eliminate them. We have to have equipment. We have to use technology. We have to have honest leaders and supervisors and officers who are not staying in Abuja fighting over land, but actually fighting.
We need generals who can actually strategize and do what is right; have a police force that can carry out internal security of the country and not escorting people or arresting people for insulting people on the social media. And I have said it, and I’ll repeat it here again, to the utter surprise of everybody, that if I become Nigeria’s president, my Minister of Defence will be a drone.
That’s how much I believe in technology and that drone will fly everywhere. I’m just going to have a control centre, where people will sit down and just track terrorists and eliminate them. But ultimately, you must create a society where people can find jobs, go to school and not be willing to compromise.
It sounds very promising but in order for that to happen, you’ve got to have electability. In other words, you have to be elected. Realistically, can Sowore win a presidential election or are you primarily trying to shape the national conversation?
No, I am not. I’m here to win and I will say this, that if the Nigerian people decide that they want a competent visionary to run this country, they have me and they can take their PVCs and go to election and vote massively.
I have not met many people, even my worst enemies, who say, Sowore doesn’t know what he’s doing. I am not a compromising person because compromising took us to where we are. Compromising took us to poverty. Compromising made us the poverty capital of the world. It made this country one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
When it comes to the practical compromises required in governance, we’re not seeing that in you. Activism rewards purity, but governance requires negotiation. Can Omoyele Sowore truly compromise when necessary?
What am I compromising on? That’s the question. There’s a coalition of your oppressed. There are 93 million registered voters, and out of this, even all the big political parties with all their fake figures can’t boast of 10 per cent of membership of this 93 million. I’m just saying that we have enough people in the pool of voters who can vote right. What we need to be saying, and we must keep pushing, is for them to vote right, and to say, there’s someone who is different.
I was shaking my head, by the way, when you were saying that Bola Tinubu is the best political strategist in the world. It’s strange that we have to be celebrating people who manage to make some regulations. We’re assigned to them titles they don’t deserve. By the way, any time somebody wins an election, don’t let their spokesperson come on your show, let them walk down here and speak for themselves.
What would you say is the single biggest misconception Nigerians have about you?
I think Nigerians are on the conservative spectrum of the political system. If Nigeria were to be in the United States, they would be 90 per cent Republicans and it’s driven by culture, religion, and I think ethnicity as well. A lot of Nigerians still believe in prostrating and believing in people because they wear big clothes and we’re also very superstitious, by the way.
But that is also changing. It’s changing as a new generation of people who have been exposed to the rest of the world via technology, who see things more differently, who spend less time believing in things that don’t work and are taking the promises for a better Nigeria, faster and better than anybody can imagine because they can actually, in real time, check when people are lying and what is possible and what is not possible.
For instance, when I say you can pay N500,000 minimum wage, it is possible, even when chart GPT economists are saying it will cause inflation. What is the reason for inflation? It’s as a result of your removal of subsidy, the people who are traders pass, the prices to the consumers and then that creates inflation, and you don’t have a wage that can deal with it.
