Sowore as best president Nigeria refuses to have

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Nigeria has tried almost everybody except the people who actually frighten the system, who can shake, even extirpate, the status quo and who can cause the sort of creative destruction the country needs to refashion itself.

For sixteen years, the PDP ruled Nigeria and accumulated enough sins, real and imagined, to make its initials almost synonymous with everything that was wrong with the country. Its opponents excoriated its corruption, pooh-poohed its incompetence, scorned and protested its petrol-price increases, savaged its incapacity to keep the country secure, and railed against its profligacy and remoteness from the pains of everyday Nigerians.

The loudest of these opponents called themselves “progressives.” They cultivated an image of ideological and moral difference from the PDP and became virtuosos of oppositional indignation. Then they got power.

Since 2015, the people who had perfected the vocabulary of outrage against the PDP have had ample opportunity to show Nigerians what they would do differently. Nigerians can judge the results from their own lives. They do not need the World Bank, the IMF, APC propagandists or opposition politicians to tell them whether food is affordable, whether transportation costs have risen, whether their salaries still have value or whether life has become easier.

The point here is larger than Bola Tinubu, Muhammadu Buhari, the APC or the PDP. Nigeria has now subjected itself to a long experiment with the two dominant tendencies of the Fourth Republic. The PDP establishment governed for sixteen years. The coalition that defined itself largely through opposition to that establishment has governed since 2015. The personnel change, parties change, slogans change and campaign colors change. The fundamental grammar of elite politics has proved remarkably resilient.

So what exactly do Nigerians mean when they say they want change? That question brings me to Omoyele Sowore.

Sowore has sought the presidency since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2018. INEC records show that he received 33,953 votes in the 2019 presidential election. He ran again in 2023 and is again seeking the presidency on the platform of the African Action Congress. His electoral numbers have so far been minuscule, but the interesting question for me is why a country that endlessly complains about its political establishment shows so little curiosity about one of the few presidential candidates who stands conspicuously outside it.

Sowore is contrarian, irreverent, iconoclastic and almost constitutionally incapable of genuflecting before constituted authority. His political temperament was formed long before presidential ambition entered the picture.