The human rights activist and African Action Congress (AAC) presidential candidate in the last presidential elections, Omoyele Sowore, has insisted on the October 1st nationwide protests.
Sowore, who made this known in an interview with the Daily Trust, said the protests will be entirely peaceful.
The human rights activist lamented the existential crises bedeviling the country, saying he won’t be deterred from taking part in the demonstration.
“The protests will be peaceful and they will be national, across the country. The protests will hold across all parts of Nigeria because the scale of the devastation, hunger, insecurity, and hardship that this government has unleashed on Nigerians is national. I will emphasise again that these will be peaceful protests, as they’ve always been. The last protests were peaceful, yet the government met the protesters with batons and bullets”, he said.
“We will not be deterred, though. Our only weapon is truth, and no amount of force or violence will prevent us from speaking truth to power. Under these circumstances, can anyone be surprised that the Nigerian people want to voice their displeasure with this government’s failure to address the issues affecting them? We are prepared to come out to protest. We are determined to do so peacefully. I can assure you that thousands of voices will be raised in protest on October 1.”
Sowore was one of the alleged sponsors of the #EndBadGovernanceProtest in August arrested on his arrival in Nigeria from the US.
The human rights activist in the interview said he would be happy to be one of Nigerians who lay down their lives for the country to survive.
“I have been harassed, tortured, arrested and imprisoned by tyrannical leaders for almost three decades. I was arrested, imprisoned and detained for five years by the Buhari government. Prison doesn’t scare me. And if the price to be paid for speaking up on behalf of the Nigerian people is to be locked up again, then so be it. The worst they can do is to kill me. If they do that, I won’t be the first person to lay down his life for his people and for what he believes in.”
Government spokesmen like the Minister for Solid Minerals had insisted that the August #EndBadGovernance protest was an attempt to topple the government. The protest had witnessed widespread looting and destruction of public property. Activists like Omoleye Sowore arre unwilling to grand the government a blanket right to ban on demonstrations and protests on the pretext that they could turn violent. They insist that it is the duty of the government to monitor and protect the protests against hijack by hoodlums.
