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?
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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