Why Sowore? She asked.
She asked me for my prefered presidential candidate
My reply: I voted for Obafemi Awolowo, I voted Gani Fawehinmi, so you should know my prefered candidate.
She said “so you are voting for Sowore, why? But he can’t win he doesn’t have money and he should just remain an activist.
My response: Well, I’m not a bandwagon voter, I don’t vote for who and who people think will win. That’s the height of idiocy. I don’t like to use my finger to do myself and start regretting it later like how many Nigerians are regretting now for voting Buhari and APC. They promised them better governance from the odd past but they make today worse than yesterday. Facts speak for themselves.
I’m voting Sowore mainly because he’s the only one who didn’t say he would remove a non existent petrol subsidy. You can’t talk of subsidy when all your refineries are consciously destroyed and a huge amount of your crude oil stolen on daily basis running into billions of Naira. Even candidate Buhari himself in 2015 said correctly that there’s no oil subsidy, he described it as fraud. He was right, as a former petroleum minister and former head of state, he’s well experienced to know that there was no oil subsidy in the real sense of it but subsidizing corruption and inefficiency in government and passing the yoke to poor Nigerians who are now paying over N300 per litre of petrol from the N87/litre .Buhari is like a sheep that flocks with dogs, feces will be its best meal.
The first major protest I participated as a student activist in Great Ife was against the so-called “oil subsidy” removal in 1988 during Babangida regime. Myself & Yinka Odumakin took the protest posters to UI and Ibadan Poly for mobilisation. The risk of entering back to the heavily militarized campus through the bushy sewage area was much to bear in the night. And since then every succesive looting government has been talking of oil subsidy removal to punish the people as stealing and inefficiency continues in government.
Sowore is the only candidate that publicly declared his assets. Others didn’t. You can’t fight corruption by hiding your own wealth, the source, your assets and liability should be known and verified. I think that’s a simple public morality aspiring public officers should observe if we are serious about fighting corruption.
She interjected: Sho you don’t know politics. Activism is different from politics..
I asked, please what is politics? Brigandage, looting, killing and maiming. Vote buying and selling, election rigging, unprincipled acts of political survival. So you don’t know that great politicians like Awolowo, Olufunmilayo Ransome Kuti, Margaret Ekpo, Mallam Aminu Kano, Nelson Mandela, Nnamdi Azikwe were activists and politicians. Madam, pls go and read your political history very well. Stop joining arrogant political illiterates who always spew rubbish that activism is different from politics just because they have been made to see politics in the wrong image of their rogue leaders. Pro-human politics is an extension of public good driven activism.
I asked her: Pls tell me your own understanding of politics for my enlightenment.
“Sho, .leave me alone, you are too opinionated, na you Sabi”
I asked again: “so you can’t tell me your own understanding of what you people call” politics? ”
” Goodnight Sho, pls leave me alone… ”
Adeola Soetan