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Sowore’s Detention: It’s The Great Controversy Of Good Versus Evil By Bayo Oluwasanmi

August 5, 2019

We must resolve to unleash our raw energy in organising not agonising, in demanding what is legitimately due to us, in challenging and fighting the oppressive political system that is ruining our lives.

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Ahead of the #RevolutionNow nationwide protest which rocked Nigeria on Monday, August 5, 2019, Omoyele Sowore, leader of the movement, was arrested by operatives of the Department of State Security in his hotel room. For almost 59 years, Nigerians with their own approval and applause have subjected themselves to self-inflicted apathy, cultivated timidity, paranoid fear, and criminal complacency to the gloating of their oppressors. But times are changing. 

Nigerians are known for their traditional despair fuelled by divide and rule tactics of their oppressors. The condemnation of Sowore on social media by the traitors among the oppressed reminds me of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, who sold his soul to the devil for pittance.

History of resistance, protests, agitation, and rebellion against injustice, neglect, oppression, cruelty, and tyranny are well documented in the history of political oppression.

Cataclysmic events of history produced beneficent change – change of ideas, values, consciousness, liberty, and freedom. The time is now for oppressed Nigerians to defy despots of any stripe, shape or size and free themselves from poverty, oppression, insecurity, fear, want, disease, ignorance, meaningless, wasted and unfulfilled life.

At this juncture of our political history, we should remind ourselves that history is one endless massacre stretching back to the dawn of mankind. Wherever we are in history, we stand on a mountain of corpses – and, however terrible the thought, we are the beneficiaries of all this carnage.

We must therefore push ahead impatiently for necessary changes and reforms. We are moving from resistance to aggression, from revolt to revolution. Every protest or resistance or uprising has some notion of redemptive suffering. Somehow, someday, we must be liberated in a new order.

We must be prepared to accept the price of suffering that will have to be paid in overthrowing the status quo. We must resolve to unleash our raw energy in organising not agonising, in demanding what is legitimately due to us, in challenging and fighting the oppressive political system that is ruining our lives. 

History informs us that martyrs, who lived, suffered, died, passed on the torch of truth in every country of the world. The flame lit then is a roaring furnace today. Nothing in the world is going to intimidate, coerce, subdue, subjugate, and stop the Sowores of this world. #RevolutionNowis here to stay. No man born of a woman can abort #RevolutionNow.

The great controversy between good and evil will increase in intensity in the days ahead. In all ages, the wrath of oppressed people served as incinerator for the tragic end of dictators. 

The controversy between light and darkness have a new significance cast upon our future: illuminating the pathway of generations of reformers to come. Nigerians must wake up from their stupor and fight for what’s right, legal, constitutional, and moral in the face of unprecedented assault and siege from a clueless, brainless, “lifeless” despot. Let’s go there!

Bayo Oluwasanmi wrote in via [email protected]