A human rights advocate has said there is no law stopping anyone from protesting in Nigeria but said protests should be peaceful so that protesters will not get into trouble with the law.
Barrister Higher King, human rights advocate based in Port-Harcourt, Rivers State, stated this in a telephone interview on Tuesday as he spoke on the arrest of Omoyele Sowore by officials of the Department of State Services (DSS).
Sowore was arrested by DSS officials in Lagos at the weekend for allegedly calling for “revolution in Nigeria” for a change of government in the country.
Barrister King, speaking on the issue, said: “Everybody has right to protest in Nigeria. There is no law, as far as I know, that prevents anybody from protesting. There is no law that says you cannot protest. Everybody has a right to protest but you don’t have to in the guise of protest destroy individual or public property… There is peaceful protest”.
He said law enforcement agencies come in to break up protests when protests become violent and protesters destroy individual and public property saying that protesters in some cases over the years had allegedly harassed innocent Nigerians and looted and destroyed public and private property.
He wondered if the protest called for by Sowore had “element of overthrowing the government” saying Nigerians were watching to see how the federal government would interpret the planned protest.
The human rights advocate said: “I don’t think what they did was revolution because revolutions are not planned. Revolutions are spontaneous. They just come up and before you know, there is revolution. You don’t plan revolution. You can plan a protest but not revolution”.
Omoyele Sowere, the Presidential Candidate of African Action Congress (AAC) in the February 23, 2019 general elections had called for a nationwide protest with the hashtag “RevolutionNow” scheduled for August 5, 2019 against bad governance in Nigeria.
Despite his arrest, the protest reportedly held on Monday as planned in Lagos and other parts of the country but it was reported police arrested those who came for the protest.
There was no report the planned protest took place in Rivers State.
Rivers State governor, Chief Nyesom Wike, earlier warned against the protest saying that people of the state should not take part in the planned protest and directed security agencies to take action against anyone who might be involved in the protest.
Wike also directed local government area chairmen to report any illegal gathering in their areas to security agencies in the state.
He had said that: “Rivers State does not subscribe to what the RevolutionNow protest represents and Rivers State is not part of the protest. All council chairmen are directed to be at alert. If they suspect any illegal gathering, they should report to the security agencies for immediate action”.
The Presidency in a statement by President Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, said the fact that Nigerians did not take part in the planned protest meant millions of Nigerians defended the country’s “hard-won democratic rights”.
