Omoyele Sowore has hit back at Paul C Nwabuikwu after the communications specialist published a lengthy article questioning why Nigerians do not take Sowore’s presidential candidacy seriously.
Sowore described Nwabuikwu as a longtime communications lieutenant of Ngozi Okonjo Iweala and said the piece should be read in that light. He noted that Nwabuikwu served twice as Special Adviser when Okonjo Iweala was Minister of Finance. Sowore called Okonjo Iweala a Bretton Woods lackey who hates him with passion and who wrote a book containing made up lies about him after he challenged her during her time as a dollar receiving minister under the Olusegun Obasanjo government.
Sowore pointed out that Okonjo Iweala herself recently recalled recruiting Nwabuikwu into her economic team because she needed someone to communicate and sell her reform programme to Nigerians. That history, Sowore argued, matters because Nwabuikwu now presents himself as an impartial examiner of who has substance and who does not. Sowore said Nwabuikwu is entitled to his opinions but Nigerians are equally entitled to examine the political and economic establishment from which those opinions emerge and to ask whether they are informed by genuine analysis or driven by personal vendetta.
Nwabuikwu described Sowore as an eternal student activist, a perennial presidential candidate, a practitioner of SUG theatrics and a noisy fellow whose politics is long on drama and short on substance. Sowore replied that the insults may be entertaining but they are not arguments. He said he was a student activist and is proud of it. At a time when many members of Nigeria’s current establishment were accommodating military dictatorship, some people confronted it. Student activism was not a hobby or some extracurricular adventure. It was a revolutionary endeavour. Nigerians were jailed, expelled from universities, beaten, disappeared and killed fighting for freedoms that commentators comfortably exercise today. If standing up to dictatorship as a student is supposed to be an insult, Sowore said he will gladly wear it as a badge of honour.
Nwabuikwu cited Sowore’s 14608 votes in the 2023 presidential election as evidence that Nigerians do not regard him as a serious candidate. Sowore said Nwabuikwu is free to interpret an election result however he wishes but votes obtained within Nigeria’s profoundly unequal political system do not constitute an intellectual test of a candidate’s ideas. Sowore noted that Nwabuikwu had argued stridently in many posts that the 2023 elections were not credible. Sowore said it is hypocrisy to treat only the votes allotted to him as credible.
If the number of votes secured automatically established the quality of one’s ideas, Sowore continued, then every entrenched political machine would by definition possess better ideas than every challenger. By that logic Nigeria’s political establishment, which has presided over decades of poverty, corruption, insecurity, unemployment and failing public institutions, would have to be regarded as the greatest collection of political thinkers the country has ever produced simply because its members have repeatedly won elections.
Sowore accused Nwabuikwu of carefully avoiding serious engagement with actual proposals. These include a living wage of at least five hundred thousand naira for Nigerian workers, mass public housing, free and qualitative education, fundamental police reform, an end to casualisation, a radically expanded electricity system, modern mass transportation by rail road and water, agricultural value chains, industrialisation and a frontal attack on corruption, waste and monopoly. These propositions can be interrogated, criticised, debated and challenged. Pretending that they do not exist because marijuana produces a more amusing headline is intellectually lazy, Sowore said.
By John James
