1 week Ago By Admin2
Omoyele Sowore, former presidential candidate and human rights activist, in this interview on his recent Take-It-Back protest, berates the police for clamping down on protesters. He also says concerning the Cybercrime Act, leaders are hiding under alleged slander to use police and intimidate Nigerians, among other issues. CHIBUIKE CHUKWU brings the excerpts.
Police said they advised that you and your followers shelve the protest and that it was ill-timed. How do you look at that? Well, what is ill-timed? It’s always been one excuse or the other for people not to exercise their rights to free protest. Either they are saying that the protest is illegal or they are not going to grant permits or that the protest will be hijacked by some unknown persons.
This time around I think they have upgraded their vocabulary to add ill-timed. Protest has no limitation. You can hold a protest in the morning, night or day.
A few people can hold protests and a large gathering can happen. One person can protest. You can protest in different ways.
So this is one of the excuses. Of course, you know the Nigerian Police very well. They have followed the trajectory over the years when it comes to defending the rights of the public.
That’s one area where they are completely outside. They also faulted the Cybercrime Act and that was one of your grouses for protest because you said people are just being picked up indiscriminately. Give an idea of some of the experiences that you have.
Yes, people are picked arbitrarily and indiscriminately. Well, they have targeted mostly young people who are using social media. Before it used to be Twitter, but I think the new social media enemy is TikTok.
So the young people who are active on TikTok were picked up. I always claim that there is a petition, but I think in the whole country, I have been the person who has allegedly been the biggest or number one person targeted by the Cybercrime Act. In 2019 , President Buhari claimed that I cyberbullied him and he got me arrested and kept me in detention for five months.
When I got over that or when they saw the foolishness in that, they withdrew the charges. But a senator got me arrested and also charged me for cybercrime. And then about a month or so ago, the Inspector General of Police, the one I refer to as an illegal IG, also got me arrested and I’m standing trial for cybercrime.
So I understand how they’re applying the law to this free speech in the country. And I know that they plan to do more and they’re going to harass and arrest more people if we don’t stop them now. If the law is not completely repealed, it will be used and abused over and over again to silence a lot of people.
Talking about arrests, I think three people were picked up during the arrest. Do you have any updates on that? Well, there were six people actually. Three of them were arrested by the Civil Defence Corps after they were brutalised.
And three others were arrested by the police at the scene of the protests in front of TransCorp. But everybody has been freed as of last night. I followed up.
I went to both stations, police and Civil Defence, and got them released. Yobe was mentioned, Delta State also. What is the situation in that? All those guys have been released as well.
In other places like Rivers, there were no arrests that we know of, but there were a lot of injuries because the police did attack people during the protests. During the protest, you also talked about economic hardship, hunger, unemployment, inflation. Are you saying that previous protests have not achieved anything? Do you think that these protests are making any inroads, and do you also think that perhaps the government has created a sense of normalisation of these issues, so much so that these protests do not crack a wall? Well, the truth is that they do crack walls.
But what the government has tried to do is to hide where the walls are cracked. But I can tell you, I know what protests do to the psychology of power before, during, and after a protest. If they didn’t crack any walls, the Federal Government wouldn’t have arraigned minors for treason.
It has never happened before in the history of this country, not even during the colonial or military rule that we have such. Not even during the war was a child picked up and arraigned for treason. And we know that they could have done worse but they couldn’t because there were protests.
But our goal is not to just have protests. It’s to continue getting these protests as big as they can until they finally take down the walls. But are these protests really getting the desired result of attracting more freedom from the authorities? If you look at the public consciousness alone and the freedom that people have to organise and discuss more of these issues, you wouldn’t take these things for granted.
We, on our side, have credible intelligence about what the government would be doing to Nigerians at this point if there were enough of the protests that you see coming up once in a while because they fear the Nigerian people. Unfortunately, the Nigerian people don’t understand that the government is afraid of them because the government keeps putting up a face to show, to pretend as if, oh, we’re not afraid of the people, we don’t care about what they say. But trust me, you will see that, like I wanted to say, I’m not interested in crack walls.
We want to take down the walls of Jericho. We want to take down these walls of Jericho in this country if I’m allowed to use that religious terminology. And we’ll just keep going around it until it crashes to the ground.
So basically it’s not just a case of getting the government to respond, it’s also moving more Nigerians to the barricades so that they can solve this problem by putting more feet on the ground. I drew a parallel with the US this last Saturday. There were protests in 1,000 cities in the US.
And you could almost say that, oh, well, the president of the US hasn’t responded. But trust me, they understand that the people are pushing back and they can’t continue doing things the way they are going about it. You’ll see results.
But the irony is that in 1,000 cities of almost 10 million people protesting in the US this last weekend, nobody was tear-gassed, nobody was roughened up. Nobody was beaten up. The police in every situation, every instance accompanying the protesters, they treated them with respect and courtesy.
In some places, they provided them with water and snacks, as they like to call them. We have to believe that the people are their enemies. Even in circumstances where we fight for the police, they still come after us.
Since December last year up till now, I have been fighting for the police. In fact, I heard over a thousand policemen got promoted because I got detained, talking about their senior officers having rigged their service records against them. So a lot of them got promoted.
They are in new positions, but they are not looking back in terms of their conduct and their ways. They’re still the same people who were tear-gassing and beating us up yesterday. One of the three persons who were taken, a guy named Flag Boy, said he was put in a drainage pit and teargassed, and then they were beating him up with a two-by-two plank throughout the time that he was under their custody.
And then eventually they detained them with guys who were protesters from Shiites last week. And he said the majority of those kids are minors as well, those Shiite protesters. All of them are languishing at a place they call Abattoir Police Station, a very notorious police station here in the Asokoro area of Abuja.
You’ve made it categorically clear that you’re not against the Cybercrime Act itself, but certain provisions that are being breached. I want to take it that that’s your stand. Well, what we know now is that the act was established or promulgated to cut human rights in the country.
And we would love to see the entire act repealed. That name itself is notorious enough to negate whatever good in the Cybercrime Act. In fact, we have no information whatsoever that any other part of the act has been applied in the country.
It’s only when it comes to human rights and censoring, and repressing free speech that the Cybercrime Act has ever been applied. So we’re asking for a repeal of the law. If they want to make a new one, change its name, they are at liberty to do that.
The House Minority Whip, Isa Ali, came out to say that the take back protest and its members are all social media clowns. And one of the things he said was that he continues to criticise the trend of online accusations, calling them falsehood and slanders that should not be allowed to thrive under the guise of free speech. Now, where do we draw the line? We know there are people who probably, you know, patronise falsehood, but on social media, do you think that it is enough? I think he called me from Saudi Arabia and said that he regretted some of his actions.
Yes. And so if he’s saying this, I think he’s just double speaking. He even agreed that he would withdraw his charges when he returns.
Maybe he was saying that in Saudi Arabia, maybe when he returns to the unholy land here, he might change his mind. But he is entitled to say whatever he wants to say. What we have made very clear to people in public offices is that if someone slanders you, go to court and insist on a civil proceeding, which can be handled; the judge might even award damages to you.
That’s how it is done in democracies. Anybody who has adopted democracy as a form of government must understand that it comes with a burden, and one of it is free speech and the right to choose whomever you want. You cannot have democracy on one side and say people cannot talk.
And on the other side, the military has said it over time that they do not come to take power until the civilians give them, like, a green light, and that they are also very, very afraid of free speech. That’s one of the reasons they create all these decrees. But what I can imagine now is that these guys that are controlling Nigeria’s democracy, if you can call it democracy, have done worse than what the military people did to us.
And I’m speaking as someone who was active during the military era. I was arrested, but there was never a time that the court granted me bail, that the military did not release me. But under the Buhari regime, I was granted bail.
They refused to release me. When I went to court, they came and abducted me before a judge. I mean, I don’t know what to call that kind of government.
So I want to refer back to Mr. Ali that, look, you cannot use the instrument of the police to repress your constituents just because you are in that office. That is our problem with them.
If you go to court and file civil proceedings and say to someone, you lied against me or you slandered me, we have no problem with that. We might provide the person with legal support, but we are not going to say that you have no right to defend your integrity in public. But the other thing to know about them is that the moment you are filling up for public revenue, funds, and you are riding on their goodwill, your rights are also limited as to how you can challenge what they say to you.
That’s why they say if you don’t like heat, don’t enter the kitchen. So what I hear here is the fact that when you look at or you take a fill of the social media, those in government sometimes, you know, rather than face accountability, hide under the guise of slander. T hat’s always a problem.
They don’t want you to challenge them. They don’t want you to speak about their shenanigans and they have found a perfect hiding place under this cybercrime law to use the police. What will interest you is that none of them, since they started this cybercrime law, has been able to prosecute and sentence anybody to prison.
What they do, which is the tactic, is to connive with the police, and in some cases, the judges, and charge you. In my case, they charged me, gave me very tedious, laborious bail conditions and then seized my passport. Going back to court, the judge may not show up.
And if he shows up, he gives you a longer adjournment. So you have served the punishment without trial. That is the strategy.
Still talking about the Cybercrime Act, some would say control, some would say advisory, some would say guide. But in terms of expression of free speech, where do you think that perhaps management and cautionary measures can apply? You can’t manage free speech. You see, it’s like I said at the beginning.
It’s just like you go and buy a car, you know, they give you a spare tyre. You can remove the spare tyre, because you don’t need it. But if you don’t have it, when you have a punctured tyre in the middle of nowhere, then you appreciate the value of the spare tyre.
But you have a problem if you decide to remove one of the four tyres. And one of the four tyres is what they call the tenets of democracy. One of it is free speech.
That is why the place that we imported it from, the U.S., has made it very clear.
In tabloids in the U.K., you go to supermarkets, they line them up.
The headlines are screaming at you, you know, the prime minister fell through the cracks last night. You know, he was drunk. They will put fake pictures.
The prime minister is not going to wake up in the morning and start swearing at everybody. If you swear at everybody, you have nothing else to do than go from one court to the other. Even at that, the U.
K. is seen as one of the places where you have some of the worst information laws because they will drain you financially and they could put you in trouble. But the U.
S. has a different attitude towards it. I have been sued for libel, I think, seven different times in the U.
S. by Nigerians from here, mostly from here. The last one being a former ambassador who sued me in Texas, wanting to use a story written by a SaharaReporter to get asylum.
So she lost because the question will be that they will ask you as a public officer, did you do this? Did you do that? By the time we start asking for the evidence of what they did in the public office, they will say, no, we don’t want to do it again. Are you getting my point? So the standards are very clear that democracy comes with free speech. You can’t want to have democracy and say people cannot talk .
That defeats the essence of democracy because democracy is about people. And it’s not just about talking, it’s about acting. How can you respond to the fact that some people have said the take back protest is diversionary, perhaps being footed by unseen hands, to maybe activate some level of restlessness to test the government and to show citizens what may happen to them if they continue and if they deploy to having protests consistently? You know, one of the things I’ve lived for my entire life is to have people freely express themselves the way they want.
And so in the process, there are people who come with conspiracy theories so that they just test hypotheses. And social media is a place where you can try all kinds of things. You know, the truth is that if you believe that a protest is not the type you want, you have a right to organise the one that has the kind of potency you think you deserve because nobody has a copyright over protests.
Nobody has the monopoly of protests. So if you see a protest not meeting your standards, what you simply do is organise your own that meets your own standard, you know, in terms of capacity, in terms of volume, in terms of impact. But if you’re sitting back and saying that these protests are designed to distract and you don’t do anything about it, I think you’re the one distracting the public.
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