Paul C Nwabuikwu, a longtime communications lieutenant of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has written a lengthy piece in ThisDay attempting to explain why Nigerians supposedly do not take my presidential candidacy seriously.

Before dealing with his arguments, however, readers deserve to know where this sermon is coming from. Nwabuikwu served twice as Special Adviser to two-time Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a Bretton Woods lackey who, by the way, hates me with passion, to the extent that she wrote a book and made up lies about me just because I challenged her when she came to Nigeria as a dollar-receiving Minister of Finance under the Olusegun Obasanjo regime.

Indeed, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala herself recently recalled that she personally recruited him (Paul C Nwabuikwu) into her economic team because she needed someone to communicate and sell her “reform program” to Nigerians.

That history matters because Nwabuikwu now presents himself as an impartial examiner of who has substance and who does not.

He is entitled to his opinions, of course, but Nigerians are equally entitled to examine the political and economic establishment from which those opinions emerge, and to ask whether they are informed by genuine analysis or driven by personal vendetta.

Nwabuikwu describes me as an “eternal student activist,” a “perennial presidential candidate,” a practitioner of “SUG theatrics,” and essentially a noisy fellow whose politics is supposedly long on drama and short on substance.

The insults may be entertaining, but they are not arguments. Yes, I was a student activist, and I am proud of it. At a time when many members of Nigeria’s current establishment were accommodating military dictatorship, some of us confronted it.

Student activism was not a hobby or some extracurricular adventure. It was a revolutionary endeavor!

Nigerians were jailed, expelled from universities, beaten, disappeared, and killed fighting for freedoms that commentators comfortably exercise today. If standing up to dictatorship as a student is supposed to be an insult, I will gladly wear it as a badge of honour.

Nwabuikwu then reaches for my 14,608 votes in the 2023 presidential election as evidence that Nigerians do not regard me as a serious candidate. He is free to interpret an election result however he wishes, but votes obtained within Nigeria’s profoundly unequal political system do not constitute an intellectual test of a candidate’s ideas; in fact, Paul had argued stridently in many posts that the 2023 elections were not credible. I guess it is only the 14,000 votes allotted to me that he considers credible in his hypocrisy.

If the number of votes secured automatically established the quality of one's ideas, then every entrenched political machine would, by definition, possess better ideas than every challenger. By that logic, Nigeria’s political establishment, which has presided over decades of poverty, corruption, insecurity, unemployment and failing public institutions, would have to be regarded as the greatest collection of political thinkers the country has ever produced simply because its members have repeatedly “won” elections.

More importantly, Paul carefully avoids seriously engaging with what we actually propose. We have advocated a living wage of at least ₦500,000 for Nigerian workers. We have proposed mass public housing, free and qualitative education, fundamental police reform, an end to casualization, a radically expanded electricity system, modern mass transportation by rail, road and water, agricultural value chains, industrialization and a frontal attack on corruption, waste and monopoly.

These propositions can be interrogated, criticized, debated, and challenged. But pretending that they do not exist because “marijuana” produces a more amusing headline is intellectually lazy.

Which brings us to marijuana. I have advocated the legalization and regulation of cannabis rather than the hypocritical criminalization of Nigerians while a global legal cannabis industry develops elsewhere, including through the World Trade Organization (WTO), where Paul’s principal, Okonjo-Iweala, holds sway. The proposition was never that Nigeria should abandon oil (even though I am openly for transition from a fossil fuel economy to a green economic transition), agriculture, manufacturing, technology, and every other productive sector and transform itself into one gigantic marijuana farm.

The argument is that cannabis has legitimate industrial, pharmaceutical, and commercial applications, and that Nigeria should regulate and derive economic value from it rather than continue with an approach based overwhelmingly on prohibition and criminalization.

Paul may disagree with that position. That is perfectly legitimate. But disagreement with a policy is not the same thing as demonstrating that the policy has no substance.

Then there is my statement that my Defence Minister would be “a drone.” Paul apparently heard the slogan and stopped listening. The point is, however, straightforward, Nigeria cannot effectively confront increasingly sophisticated armed groups by endlessly purchasing expensive conventional platforms while terrorists, bandits and other armed groups exploit cheap technology, intelligence gaps, difficult terrain and rapid mobility. A modern Nigerian security doctrine must make unmanned aerial systems, surveillance, intelligence gathering, domestic defence technology and precision capabilities central to protecting our people. The expression “my Defence Minister will be a drone” is deliberately memorable, but behind it is a serious proposition about the technological transformation of Nigeria’s security architecture. Calling the idea “shock” does not answer it.
Nwabuikwu's essay also contains a revealing contradiction.

He acknowledges my record of exposing injustice, defending poor Nigerians and enduring harassment and detention by the state. He even rejects the conspiracy theory that I am secretly an establishment operative because, as he effectively concedes, the price I have paid confronting successive governments makes such a theory difficult to sustain. Yet somehow, after acknowledging all of this, he still manages to reduce everything to “performance.”

I have been detained, prosecuted (persecuted), attacked, and imprisoned under different governments. SaharaReporters has exposed powerful people across political parties, administrations and economic interests. We have stood with ordinary Nigerians whose names would never appear on the guest lists of the powerful, people who had nobody else to call and whose cases offered neither money nor political advantage. That may look like theatre from the comfort of an editorial boardroom, but it is certainly not theatre to the people whose freedom, livelihoods and sometimes lives are at stake.

Paul also wonders why I criticize former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, ex-Governor Peter Obi. and other establishment politicians. The answer is uncomplicated, I am not running for president to become their friend. I am running against an entire political order. I have consistently argued that Nigeria requires a clean break from the political class that has recycled itself through the PDP, APC, Labour Party and their various permutations.

When their records and policies deserve criticism, I will criticize them. When the Tinubu government deserves RESISTANCE, I will do precisely the same. I do not believe that opposition to Tinubu requires me to suspend my judgment about everybody else who wants his job.

That is what ideological independence means.
Perhaps this is the fundamental disagreement between Paul Nwabuikwu and me. He comes from a tradition that believes Nigeria can be repaired through another round of elite-managed reforms, half-clever technocrats, and carefully packaged policies sold to suffering Nigerians by professional communicators. I believe the structure itself must collapse. Nigeria cannot remain a country where a tiny political and economic elite enjoys extraordinary wealth while workers cannot afford food, housing, transportation, healthcare, or their children’s education. We cannot keep recycling the same people, the same economic orthodoxies, the same political arrangements, and the same excuses, then describe anyone demanding fundamental change as “unserious.”

Nwabuikwu concludes that voters supposedly enjoy my politics as entertainment but “see through the act.” That is his opinion, and he is entitled to it. I will continue to travel across Nigeria, speaking directly to workers, students, farmers, market women, young people and communities abandoned by the political establishment. I will continue explaining our program, defending it and submitting it to Nigerians for scrutiny. I am not asking Paul Nwabuikwu or any member of Nigeria’s establishment commentariat to issue me a certificate declaring me a “serious candidate.” The Nigerian people will ultimately make their own judgment.

To me, Paul represents a professional bogeyman. Unlike the establishment Paul has spent much of his professional life explaining and defending, however, we are not promising Nigerians another expertly communicated version of the same system.

We intend to fundamentally change that system through social revolutionary justice. That is what we mean when we speak of revolution. It is not about marijuana, headlines, theatrics, or the caricatures Paul Nwabuikwu finds convenient. It is about changing who Nigeria works for, how it distributes its resources, how its institutions function, and whether ordinary Nigerians can finally live with dignity in their own country.
That is the revolution.

-Omoyele Sowore is the presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC) for Nigeria’s 2027 general election.