There are heroes and there are heroes. Adolf Hitler was one kind of a hero, so also was late Nelson Mandela. Back home, General Murtala Mohammed was another kind of a hero and so also was Ishola Oyenusi (Dr. Ishola) or Lawrence Aninni (the law).
In other words, some heroes are positive and productive to humanity while others are stupid and unrefined in character and interactions with others. The stupid heroes are those who see open fire and walk with eyes wide open into it, and expect people to hail them for their stupidity.
No doubt, the Publisher of Sahara Reporters and presidential candidate of one of the mushroom political parties in the February 23 election in Nigeria, Omoyele Sowore obviously falls into the category of stupid hero or hero-seeking.
Just when the leaders who won the 2019 general elections in the country were putting heads together to find solutions to, especially the security challenges that have held the country hostage, Sowore woke up from his slumber, probably, from his home in America, with a strange call for revolution – REVOLUTION?
With a ragtag group he put together in a hurry, known as Coalition for Security and Democracy in Nigeria, Sowore fixed August 5 and 6 for people of his ilk across Nigeria to pour onto the streets for revolution protest. The message he gave out as reason for the revolution was so childish and puerile that it leaves right thinking citizens in great awe.
To present the issue of minimum wage which had long been addressed; to talk about kidnapping and other criminal activities, which had been raging since the time of Olusegun Obasanjo’s government and other issues that are clearly not new, is to take the intelligence of reasonably thinking Nigerians for granted.
The scenario became even more disturbing and reeks of suspicion when some Nigerians who are supposed to know better began to blame President Muhammadu Buhari and his government for the arrest and detention of Sowore. Such Nigerians like Wole Soyinka, Balarabe Musa, Oby Ezekwesili really amazed those of us who understand the enormity of the offense of declaration of REVOLUTION.
In any case, for them who don’t know and those who know but pretend not to know, revolution is clearly an equivalent of coup, which of course, Sowore even acknowledged when he said “we will bundle the President (Buhari) from the Aso Rock.”
And what is revolution? According to Wikipedia, “a revolution is a fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political organization which occurs when the population revolts against the government”
Longman Dictionary defines it as “when people change a ruler or political system by using force or violence → revolt, rebellion,” even as an online Dictionary – dictionary.com defines it as “an overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed.”
Similarly, Collins Dictionary sees revolution as “a successful attempt by a large group of people to change the political system of their country by force.”
Anybody, whether educated or illiterate or even educated and prefers to act like a fool who deceive himself or others that any government across the world would allow revolution as a way of installing alternative government, especially by a criminal opposition, is clearly playing with his life.
Like I said, the word revolution also connotes coup. And let us see what coup is all about.
The same Wikipedia describes coup as “means to the overthrow of an existing government; typically, this refers to an illegal, unconstitutional seizure of power by a dictator, the military, or a political faction.”
Clayton Thyne and Jonathan Powell’s dataset of coups defines attempted coups as “illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive.”
They all arrive at this definition by combining common definitions in the existing literature, and removing specificities and ambiguities that exist in many definitions.”
If coup and revolution mean the same thing, i.e. the forceful overthrow of a legitimate government, why would people like Wole Soyinka, Ezekwesili and others who cannot be described as local political champions, and Femi Falana, blame the security agents for arresting Sowore, who by all intent and purpose is not different from Suka Dimka and others who have attempted coups in the past?
It is even a fearful venture for anyone to mention revolution in the confines of his room, because of its high security content, but for Sowore, who of course, contested the Presidential election and was defeated, to go into the open to canvass for and worked towards staging revolution in whichever guise is to carry temerity, courage and stupidity, all rolled into one, too far. And so it is too for people who are supposed to be educated and enlightened querying the government being challenged from taking necessary action to forestall its downfall.
How would Wole Soyinka and his like, for example, want the government of President Buhari react to Sowore?
Invite him to a dinner party and ask him to carry on with his constitutional right of staging REVOLUTION?
Like the Presidency said in its statement on August 4, the initiators of the so-called revolution might have hidden their faces from public, only pushing a none-descript entity like Sowore into the forefront, which is what the educated, enlightened and supposedly respected Nigerians like Soyinka and Ezekwesili have been trying to prove.
For a fact, if Sowore had tried his warped kind of revolution during the regime of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, he and his group would have seen the difference between rascality and constitutional right people are talking about.
Even, with the light manner Buhari’s government has been treating stubborn Nigerians who hide under human rights to challenge it, it is still not wants to be seen as banana republic.
Sowore and members of his group as well as those who believe in his revolution which is coup in disguise should be left to face the consequences of their stupidity.
We all know the punishment for coup plotters. It is death, which Sowore said he is ready to face, saying that he is not better than those killed in Zamfara State and elsewhere.
Let no one makes a hero of him out of this stupidity and arrant nonsense signifying nothing.
