Omoyele Sowore is the publisher of New York-based
Sahara Reporters, known for its hard-hitting
reporting that is keeping Nigeria’s government
officias, individuals and corporations on their toes.
Recently, Mr. Sowore suddenly walked into our
newsroom in Abuja. Our reporters sat down with
him for an interview during which he spoke about
his work and the political cum economic situation
in his country.
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PT: We are glad to have you here, we will just be
asking you a few questions. Now just tell us briefly
how Sahara Reporters operate?
Sowore: Well, I started off first as a news website
about 7 years ago basically collecting information from
citizens, processing them and publishing them and
distributing them through our media platforms across
the globe. In the last three years, it has escalated and
upgraded to become a complete multimedia outlet that
has an online TV and now an online radio platform
and of course the important thing to mention is that it
is surrounded by Internet users. PT:
Now, 7 years down the line, will you say you have
achieved the original vision. How far have you
come?
Sowore: To be fair to myself and everybody who has
worked with me on this platform, in my estimation I
have far exceeded my expectations of these platforms.
I just wanted to set up a website that I could use in
communicating with Nigerians, Africans and the rest
of the world about happenings in sub-saharan Africa
and doing so from the safety of the United States of
America. I was expecting on an average, on a daily
basis, of 200 or 300 people reading us and feeding back
to us in giving informations but after 7 years, it’s
gone way beyond that expectation. But in terms of the
fulfilment of the mission, yes the site has covered a
good distance but I think there’s still a few more to be
done.
PT: You publish
very damning
reports, how are
you able to ensure
your safety and
that of your
colleagues?
Sowore: Our first
mission is to make
information
available to people
in a way they can
use as they want.
That mission has
been fulfilled. The
second aspect of
our mission is to
speak truth to
power. And the
third aspect of it, in
some cases and in most cases, is to damn the
consequences for as long as the people who need to
benefit from it get it, they can use it. They can take it
to run and that can help them redefine their power
because in a lot of ways I think for a lot of people, I
think the kind of information we provide and the way
we provide them is their only way of fighting back the
myriad of problems they are confronted with by
government. The last part of your question is about
safety. Our mission is also to help ensure that citizens
can turn the trajectory of fear against oppression, that
people should no longer be afraid of people who are
doing evil or who are stealing their commonwealth,
people who are robbing them, people who are denying
them their fundamental future, they should be the
ones that should be afraid and that would mean by
saying we are turning around the trajectory of fear. As
for how we feel safe or unsafe, I think somebody has
to do what we do and when you do it, it’s not hard to
understand that they come with consequences. It’s a
very dangerous job as you know. All over the world,
the business of telling the truth always come with
consequences and a lot of safety issues but what we’ve
also not done is to put the safety pin on ourselves so
we do whatever we can to stay safe. But our primary
or major concern is not safety, it is the delivery of our
mission.
PT: How did you just walk into Premium Times? We
were in shock! How did you just get here without
being arrested?
Sowore: First and foremost, I’m not a criminal and
I’ve said that many times. I navigate my way through
the country as much as I can so I travel as much as its
permissible to help me get to where I need to get to. I
won’t disclose the rest of how I got here but I’m here
and that’s the most importan thing and I can pretty
much go anywhere I want. I take my freedom very
seriously, especially the freedom of movement.
PT: That leads us to the next question. Do you
consider yourself a free Nigerian in Nigeria?
Sowore: No! And I don’t think that there are Nigerians
in the majority who live in Nigeria who feel free. Part
of the reasons why I take the risk that I take, if you
want to call it a risk, is to share in the pain, in the
difficulty, in the bondage that you can be in a country
where you want and love to be but not free to. I’m not
the only one who is not free in Nigeria, a lot of
Nigerians are not free. As I’m speaking to you today,
more than 2oo females who undertook secondary
education in Borno state have been held hostage by a
non-state actor like Boko Haram — just a ragtag group
of militants. Those ones are not free, their parents are
not free. There is a sense of siege even where you are
today so freedom is relative and I’m saying that
nobody can claim to be free in this country for as long
as this country is in bondage and is being run as an
open prison.
PT: What do you think should be done? What does
Nigeria and its people need to do to make the
majority of its citizens to be free?
Sowore: They have to decide to be free and that has to
be psychological. I am psychologically free but I’m not
physically free because I cannot move as freely as I
should. And then they have to decide collectively to be
physically free but that’s where there’s a lot of work
because people have to take away the shackles of fear.
They have to stop being afraid of those in power, they
have to confront them and demand that they leave so
they can be free especially those who have been
holding back their freedom. And talking about
freedom, you are talking about a wide range of
freedom. It’s not just the freedom to move but the
freedom to worship, the freedom to go to school, the
freedom to give and have opportunity, the freedom to
hope in a country of one’s birth.
PT: You have been very critical of successive
administrations. What’s your impression of the
Goodluck Jonathan administration?
Sowore: In an order of successive administrations in
my lifetime I think this would be the worst in terms of
delivery of services, in terms of organisation, in terms
of even the style of governance, in terms of
transparency, in terms of economic management and
of course in terms of security. So this is the worst
government in my lifetime that I have seen. You
would say maybe Abacha was worse but you can
understand Abacha was a military dictator. Nobody
voted for him. He just hijacked power and he did
whatever he wanted with it. But even within that
framework as you can see, the Abacha regime is
actually better than the Jonathan regime and I’m sorry
to say this because you could almost feel that this
country was more secure during those days. The value
of the naira under Abacha’s regime was higher than
the value of the naira under Jonathan regime, in fact
it’s double that rate now. There were perhaps even
better roads, in some cases better schools, in some
cases better opportunities.
PT: So you are saying even within the framework of
the Abacha regime…
Sowore: (Cuts in) By the time you look at the entire
corruption that Abacha perpetrated in his five years in
power I guess, we are looking at 10billion dollars.
Jonathan’s people stole at least 20 billion in less than 3
years from just sales of crude oil alone. If you add that
to what the oil marketers or importers stole, which
was 6.8 billion dollars, so you are looking already at 28
billion dollars stolen under Jonathan’s regime which is
three times more than what Abacha stole during his
regime. I’m not making this comparison saying that
Nigerians deserve any of these leaders from Babangida
to Abacha and the rest of them. I condemned
successive administrations but it’s important to state
that in clarifying my position as to which government
is worse. This is my own statistical definition of how
bad things have gone.
PT: But this government is building the airport road
in Abuja. Did you not pass through the airport
road? They also say they are creating jobs. Will you
ever say anything good about the Jonathan
registration?
Sowore: There is a difference between what the
government says its doing and what we know the
government is doing. For example, they claim to have
created 1.5 million jobs and we have been asking for
the last two months for them to provide us the sector
of the economy or society where those jobs were
created and nobody can give us answers. If the U.S
says they have 240,000 jobs, they can tell you how
many of them were from the hospitality business,
academics, road construction. All of the sectors that we
count, nobody can provide those sectors for you. The
airport road you are talking about was awarded under
Yar’adua so it’s not Jonathan that awarded the airport
road that you are talking about. It’s possible that he
attempted to construct such roads but none of those
roads I see today exist to my understanding. They said
a few months ago that they had turned around the
power sector by privatising the power sector. As we
speak today, you and I know that they have only
invested more money in buying more darkness for
the Nigerian people.
PT: T he government also says it’s rebuilding the
airports….
Sowore: Which airport did he build? Is it the leaking
airport in Lagos where the materials that were bought
were fake? And they are falling apart already. That one
you can verify. You are a journalist and I don’t need to
tell you these things. Theirs is a tokenistic government
and governance of mediocrity that is wrapped up in
propaganda. That’s not the way countries are
governed. You can’t govern a country with propaganda
of how many airports are under construction. You
actally judge a government by how many airports they
are able to construct within a reasonable period of
time, within a reasonable cost in terms of resources.
PT: What do you think of Boko Haram and the way
the government is handling the insurgency?
Sowore: First and foremost, I think Boko Haram is a
security problem. It’s just like how the Niger Delta
militancy was a security problem but this security
problem doesn’t mean that they can be tackled the
same way. If government does its job, it decreases the
amount of people that get attracted to any kind of
crime. So for as long as the Nigeria police is not doing
its job and is bogged down by corruption, for as long
as the Nigerian army is ill-equipped and incapable of
fighting any kind of war inside and outside of Nigeria,
it will be difficult to make Nigeria safe. All these
problems, as small as they look, can become really
really big and it’s compounded by the incompetence of
the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria,
Goodluck Jonathan, who doesn’t have a clue how to
resolve any of these problems. That’s why every small
problem in this country under his regime has
escalated to become a major problem. When they were
extra-judicially executing Boko Haram people, we were
the ones warning them that this would become a
major problem. But they were calling us names
because we were asking them not to kill people. They
said we were sympathetic to terrorists, NO! We were
just saying that if you do things the wrong way, they
will haunt you in a bad way especially where you have
a government that doesn’t even know how to tackle
any of these problems. PT:
What do you think of the future journalism,
especially in Nigeria?
Sowore: As you know, we have what you call legacy
media, the old big-time guys who produce big
newspapers and now there’s new media where
everybody has moved to. My own genre is citizen
journalism which is something that is completely
different because I’m not trained for journalism. I’m
just collecting and passing information based on the
guarantee of the United Nations Human Rights Article
19 that allows anybody no matter who he is to
exchange information. That is where I derive my own
expertise and it is my fundamental rights to do what
I’m doing. My own suspicion is that the old legacy
journalism will have to die a natural death to feed into
the new media. What I mean by natural death is that
the way they do journalism in the olden days is not
going to work anymore. The truth today is that, you
can ask any of the big media how many newspapers
they are distributing on daily basis. Probably not up to
50,000. Let’s give them 200,000 combined together.
That’s the same kind of readership we can get in a
breaking news within two hours when we have really
big news. You should also look at the channels of
distribution of news, it has changed. The idea of
holding newspapers on the street with a vendor with
an apron is no longer the way journalism is done
anymore. So the future of citizens journalism is
actually the future because the citizens themselves see
news first and report them first. What we do and how
we are going to become the future is that the citizens
are going to be driving journalism through the use of
small technological devices and finally through the
entrenchment of community. The devices feed the
news, the community discusses and debates and
distributes the news. That’s new media, that’s the
future of media.
PT: Do you consider yourself a journalist?
Sowore: No. I actually studied Geography and
Planning at the University of Lagos, went to do my
Masters in Public Administration at Columbia
University in New York. So, I do not consider myself a
journalist but you do not have to go to journalism
school to be a journalist. I think anybody who is smart
enough to report can be referred to as a reporter, not
necessarily a journalist. Journalism is actually an old
word of people who keep journals and nobody does
that anymore.
PT: What’s your motivation for the things you do?
You seem to be a troublemaker, giving people
sleepless nights. What’s your motivation? Do you
want to be appointed to government?
Sowore: I don’t think I can survive in government for
one night because I have no motivation to subscribe
to the kind of deceit that goes on in government. I
cannot be a minister who goes to a meeting and start
praising the president and claiming that things are
alright when things are not. I’m the kind of person
who would show up and tell Mr President you are
running a bad country, this place is terrible. And they
are going to hate me for it. I’m however not ruling out
the possibility that I am capable of governing this
country better than all these characters that are
governing the country and I am serious about it but
that is not to say I’m trying to position myself for
political office.
PT: You now live abroad. Is there a possibility that
one day you will return home to play a role in the
affairs of your country?
OMOYELE SOWORE
Sowore: I’m here now and I’ve returned. You see if I
don’t show up in your office, you won’t know I’m in
this country. That’s one of the things that is very
interesting in my lifestyle and what I do. I go in and
out of Nigeria as it’s convenient for me and whenever
possible. It’s not that I don’t want to confront them at
the airport by travelling through the airport but I also
don’t want this work to be disrupted so if it takes a
few more hours to travel here, it’s ok. And that takes
me back to the issue of motivation for the work I do. I
just dread the fact that at my age I have to live in
another country just because I want to practice my
trade or to live any kind of life I consider to be an
acceptable standard of life. I want to live my life here. I
want to drink Nigerian water. I want to live in a house
that doesn’t have walls. I want to be able to drive from
Lagos to Abuja in the middle of the night without fear
of being attacked or being kidnapped or being blown
up by anyone. I want to have a country in which I can
live and be proud of. Right now, we just have a
country no one can claim to be proud of, including the
people governing the country.
PT: So if your people in Ondo state ask you to run
for office, what will you say to them?
Sowore: The concept of my people has been
bastardised that if any group of people approached me
to come and run for office, I would be shocked. I
would wonder if I won a lottery. You know that
concept is a scam. It’s only the corrupt elements who
have stolen so much that get those kinds of invitation.
The people prefer them to people like us. You know,
the idea of inviting anyone who even claims to be
honest, who wants to run an honest administration
does not appeal to this concept of my people you just
referred to. It’s like an anathema . If I want to run, I
will go to my people and say ‘look! We have to fight to
free this place from this buccaneers and you can
imagine what will happen. They don’t invite you to
that kind of war.
PT: Now just tell us, how have you been able to
make Sahara Reporters sustainable?
Sowore: I have said it openly and would continue to
say it because of all the new media in town, we have
been the most transparent to the extent that you can
google and find out how we get our funding. I started
this with my own money. It was so cheap. I started
Saharareporters with 20 dollars hosting the website
with an individual whose server got knocked out when
I had the first DDOS attack and I went to yahoo and
from there it grew bigger. So I started with my own
funds. I raised some little funds at the beginning from
some people. And then I got foundation funding, Ford
Foundation and then the foundation with link to ebay
known as Omidyar Foundation. To limit the damage
that can be done to our conscience and brand, we do
not take government ads, we do not take from people
praising people or people who want to greet others for
birthdays and things like that. We focus mainly on
product advertisements and ensure that whatever we
are taking, we make it very clear that those cannot
affect our editorial decisions.
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