Perspective
by Chukwudi George Ozalla
There comes a point when activism loses its moral centre and drifts into performance. Omoyele Sowore has built a public identity around permanent dissent, positioning himself as a constant antagonist to power, authority, and the state. That posture once carried moral force. Today, it increasingly appears detached from realism and perilously close to cruelty masked as principle.
His swift condemnation of a reported United States counterterror operation in Sokoto highlights this contradiction. Nigeria is worn down by years of insurgency, banditry, and organized terror. Communities are routinely attacked, families displaced, and security forces stretched beyond capacity. Yet Sowore’s response to an operation aimed at violent extremists was not to centre the lived reality of victims or the fragile security context, but to reflexively oppose the action itself. The question is not whether dissent is permissible, it is whether dissent must be automatic, even when hollow, reckless, or morally inverted.
Activism is not noise. It is not opposition for its own sake. It demands judgment, context, and proportion. When every security response is condemned by default, activism ceases to function as a corrective force and becomes indulgence. Realism requires confronting uncomfortable truths. Nigeria is battling non-state actors who massacre both civilians and security operatives, occupy territory, and destabilize entire regions. Public discourse must engage honestly with that reality rather than dismiss it in pursuit of ideological purity.
What makes Sowore’s intervention especially troubling is not merely that it is misplaced, but that it edges toward moral sadism, a disturbing detachment from the human cost of terrorism. There is something deeply unsettling about appearing more aggrieved by the neutralisation of armed extremists than by the daily violence they unleash on defenceless citizens. At that point, activism no longer prioritizes human life. Suffering becomes abstract, relevant only when it can be deployed as a rhetorical weapon against power.
There is also a red line in public advocacy, and Sowore appears to be crossing it. When rhetoric consistently undermines legitimate efforts to curb mass violence, when it blurs the boundary between defending civil liberties and inadvertently offering moral cover to violent actors, it stops being radical or courageous. It becomes irresponsible. A society already strained by fear and instability cannot afford influential voices that reduce complex security decisions to simplistic moral theatre, especially when the supposed victims in that narrative are armed terrorists.
Nigeria needs critical voices, unquestionably. But it also needs honest ones. It needs activists capable of condemning abuse without erasing context, challenging authority without trivialising the pain of citizens trapped in cycles of terror. Speaking at every moment is not the same as saying something meaningful. Sometimes restraint is not silence, it is wisdom!
Sowore must decide whether he intends to remain an activist grounded in human reality or a permanent contrarian imprisoned by his own megaphone. If every intervention is driven by a compulsive need to speak, even when pointless or harmful, the cause served is no longer justice, but ego. That is a dangerous place for any public figure to stand.
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, NEWSCOUNT
