Why Sowore is detained for his own good

The ever considerate and benevolent President Muhammadu Buhari has sought and obtained a warrant to detain Revolution exponent and Sahara Reporters Chief executive, Omoyele Sowore, for 45 days in the first instance. Before fellow revolutionaries start shouting a luta continua; victoria ascerta, let it be known that Sowore is detained for his own good.

We should be grateful that Buhari is a converted democrat. In 1984, General Buhari would have drafted an overnight decree exclusively for Sowore’s brand of sedition and backdated it before throwing him into Kirikiri or Gasua. Anyone disagreeing with such Supreme Military wisdom could have been fixed. I am not saying that the 9th Sinnate of failed rulers would have denied their political grandfather a wish for accelerated hearing of a bill to that effect, but there are judges willing to do democrat Buhari’s bidding.

Our hard working Irrational Assembly is on a well-deserved recess, having screened 43 ministers in waiting. They are pretty tired that they need the break. It was not until my gym instructor asked me to raise and drop my arms ten times that I realized how tedious it is to clear a ministerial list in record time while distributing committee leadership. It takes 34 muscles to lift an arm, imagine the number of times (Dr.) Lawan dropped the gavel before the deed was done. These loyal legislators need more pay.

People berate the condition known as ‘bow and go’. But it takes about 100 muscles to make sounds. Animation students know how hard it is to make pictures move. Let us pray that our indolent politricians return with sufficient energy to deliver Nẹs Lẹbù.

Sowore and his fellow revolutionaries may not understand how lucky they are to be so benevolently detained. It is unsafe walking lawfully around Naija. Such natural actions happen after binding and losing. Buhari is a saviour. He has saved Sowore from sudden death. People in the habroad think that America is safe. Sowore’s DSS detention saved him from being the target of two deranged Americans who went on the rampage in El Paso and Dayton, killing 22 human beings. Yes, Sowore operates from New York city, he could have been shopping at Walmart last weekend. Let us thank Sai Baba for taking his freedom but sparing his life. Nobody ever got killed in El Paso who was in DSS detention kí a má rí!

Habroad people slave for dollars, binge on burgers only to buy tickets to visit home to say life is valued in America. We knew what happened to Trayvon Martin. Although America is not at war, this year alone, there have been nearly 300 mass shootings in Trumpcountry leading to as many deaths. They count it with gusto. We don’t count our misfortunes here. That would have made the witches happy and scare willing investors.

If Naija people know how dangerous it is to live in the habroad, they’ll never queue at any foreign embassy for a visa to sudden death when it is cheaper to die and be buried at home. Dying in the habroad is a luxury reserved for those with the capacity to return home stowed in an ornamented box stowed in the belly of a plane.

Our Ministry of Funny Affairs should issue a travel advisory to all patriots who have heeded General Buhari’s charge to Andrew not to check out but to ‘stay here and salvage it together.’ It would read like the fake one circulating on social media with little amendments.

In view of the unsavoury incidents in Europe and the Americas; the proactive government of General Buhari, ever conscious of its duty to bury its citizens home and abroad, issues this travel advisory.

That anybody who chooses to travel to any part of Europe or Trumpcountry do so at their own risk. There are high risks of being mauled on the streets of New York, shot in El Paso or gunned down in Dayton. Gun-loving Trumpians like Naija herdsmen are very likely to pull the trigger without provocation but there are more guns in America than there are people. Trump’s nuclear arsenal are enough to blow up the world five times and nobody is sure if in a moment of sheer delirium he would not press the button believing that white people are immune to nukes just because they made it.

You are warned that going to Europe is not a good idea seeing that Britain, the Queen’s land has been locked in a battle to opt out. Europeans caused two world wars and they could do it again when Britain exits.

By the way, why leave Naija where death is cheap, at homes, on the road, in the streets and everywhere and cemeteries are fresh and yearning to go and die in the habroad? Stay home and die here. Those who flagrantly discountenance this travel advisory are warned that no planes would be dispatched for their evacuation. The one that Buhari’s minister launched is a mere horse on paper, it does not fly.

To be forewarned is to forearmed.

The participation of the vast majority of Nigerians is restricted only to the ritual of voting during the election cycle where the political class engage in all sorts of untoward political activities that discourages and prevents the electorate from making their democratic choices freely. Increasingly even this marginal freedom is becoming irrelevant as the political class contrives to subvert the real choice of the people through all kinds of underhand political activities.

With the notable exception of the 1999 elections all subsequent elections have been highly contentious. The 2015 elections was shaping to be the stage for the climactic implosion of democracy in Nigeria under the weight of all these contradictions had foreign interests not intervened.

Providing a perspective to that, Adamu Adamu the former Minister of Education and a close confidant of President Buhari had remarked in one of his last write ups for the Daily Trust that Nigeria was saved from what would have been a revolution had the outcome of the elections of 2015 been different.

But since coming to power has President Buhari, the beneficiary of this political mandate by the people of Nigeria, acted to stem the slide towards the revolution that seemed imminent in 2015 when he was first elected?

Objectively the answer to this question weighs heavily on the side of the naysayers. In the four years it had been in power, Nigerians have seen the Buhari administration regress from one of hope to despair. On its much touted pledge to fight corruption, the administration has raised the white flag of surrender and had wooed into its fold those it had been pursuing on allegations of corruption. Similarly the administration has been overwhelmed by the security challenges that have morphed from the insurgency in the Northeast to all hues of criminalities all over the country.

But what must rank as the greatest disappointment so far, is the continuation in the acts of malfeasance of democracy that occurred during the last elections which Nigerians did not expect to have happen under the administration of one who himself was a beneficiary of the democratic vigilance exhibited by the people in 2015. It was appalling to say the least for Nigerians to see that in an attempt to prevail in the 2019 elections, the Buhari administration allowed itself the latitude to engage in acts that are inimical to democratic principles. That singular act finally tipped the scales of trust and confidence that the people had in President Buhari as the harbinger of the new order of political and social morality that he claimed to be and under which auspices he sought and got elected.

With the disappointing performance of the Buhari administration, a growing number of Nigerians have come to resign themselves to the fact that at the end of his second and last term, President Buhari would not have lifted the country out of its debilitating challenges.

It is these issues that Sowore is seeking to expose and to agitate against.

For the dysfunctioning Buhari administration, with regards to the Sowore debacle, the genie has already left the bottle. Although he may be in detention now and may probably come under some sanction eventually, Sowore has done enough to put the government on the back foot. Thenceforth, every predictable failure of the Buhari administration would compel Nigerians to remember and fall back on Sowore’s politics. And in detention and the attention he will constantly attract from the administration’s agencies and defenders, Sowore will prove to be around its neck.

Between now and 2023 when the next election cycle comes Sowore’s politics will undoubtedly dog the political landscape. And depending on what happens political observers will come to say that it all started with one quixotic act of political idealism by one small boy from Arogbo Ijaw area of Ondo State.

Gadu can be reached at: [email protected]

08035355706 (sms only)