Omoyele Sowore, presidential candidate of the African Action Congress, on Thursday urged young Nigerians to stop searching for heroes or sympathy and instead build solidarity to confront oppression and bad governance.
“There’s nobody who is going to help you liberate yourself,” he told a gathering in Abuja.
Sowore delivered the keynote address at the Building Blocks for Peace Foundation event themed “Building Intergenerational Solidarity for the Future of Activism,” held at the Dennis Hotel. He said he came directly from a hospital check following an incident in Ado Ekiti the previous week and had not prepared a formal speech.
Reflecting on more than three decades of activism, Sowore rejected the idea that the struggle for justice began with his generation. “The struggle did not begin with people like me,” he said. He warned those who believe silencing one activist would end the movement: “For those who feel like if you kill one of us, the struggle will end, you are making the biggest mistake of your lives.”
He criticised a tendency among some young people to wait for others to fight their battles. “What I have discovered about some generations in Nigeria is that they’re always looking for people who will do the battle and fight for them. They’re always looking for heroes. That is why in the search for heroes, some of you are so confused that you abandon your real heroes for villains.”
Sowore said the distortion had reached the point where long-time activists sometimes doubt they live in the same society when “fake activists” are presented as genuine ones. He challenged the audience to define their mission clearly: whether to romanticise oppression or to vanquish it, bad governance and those who sustain it.
“Fear can never help you,” he said. He noted that the first people to counsel caution after an incident are often the fearful themselves, telling activists to “be careful” or that “God will take control.” “God is not coming to take control of your situation,” he added. “If you believe in God, you know that God is not a coward… If God was fearful, he will not give you the power to confront oppression.”
He criticised the habit of postponing action until the next election. “A lot of you are always postponing your day of liberation by saying that, well, maybe we need to wait for the election. The people organising election know that every four years added to your life is diminishing return and your strength as a person.”
Drawing on his own experience, Sowore recalled enrolling at the University of Lagos in 1989 with plans to graduate in 1992, complete national service and raise a family. Those expectations of stability and prosperity, he said, had not materialised. Many who focused solely on graduating still struggled to find work.
He rejected the stereotype of student activists as “layabouts,” noting that at the University of Lagos a candidate could not become student union president without a second-class upper degree. Some activists graduated with third-class degrees after their campus work, while others earned first-class results. He cited a friend who served as student union president at the University of Ibadan, graduated with a first class and later completed a PhD at Cambridge. “There’s no layabouts in our lists, none,” he said.
Sowore defined solidarity as standing with one another when collective strength is required, whether locally or internationally. He pointed to international solidarity as a key factor in ending apartheid in South Africa. While acknowledging that solidarity can be betrayed—he has been insulted online by people he once supported—he insisted it must continue because it embodies “the spirit of love and affection for those who are vulnerable.”
He identified distraction as a major problem for the current generation. Time spent on football clubs, religious leaders and celebrities, he argued, has little connection to people’s well-being. Governments, he said, are content when such distractions divert attention from governance.
On the 2020 EndSARS protests, Sowore said the movement did not fail for lack of participants but because the government co-opted it by creating its own “EndSARS directors,” at one point involving the musician Davido as a representative in Abuja.
He also dismissed the relevance of foreign elections, including the recent United States vote, to Nigerians’ daily struggles. Such events might provide temporary satisfaction, he said, but “it doesn’t pay your rent.”
In closing, Sowore called on young people to reject self-pity and passivity. “Young people, don’t engage in self-pity. Look for solidarity, don’t look for sympathy. Look for empathy, not dejection. There’s nobody who is going to help you liberate yourself. There’s nobody anywhere in the world.”
The event brought together activists, civil society actors and young people to discuss ways veteran and emerging voices can sustain the struggle for justice, freedom, democracy and social change.
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