Haworth’s Omoyele “Yele” Sowore, a journalist and social activist, has the forgotten type of the coronavirus pandemic.
He’s not sick. Since his arrest in Nigeria a year ago, he has been trapped in a diplomatic quarantine, confined to space arrest, confronting what he calls false criminal charges, with little chance of returning soon with his wife and children.
Back in the United States, Sowore’s liberation crusade, which included citizens tying yellow ribbons to many trees in Haworth, fell into a bureaucratic vacuum in the Trump administration. While the nation’s attention is so focused on preventing the alarming spread of COVID-19 in the midst of a tense and bitter election season, many Sowore fans feel they are asking for help in an irrepressible vacuum.
“Limbo. That’s precisely the word I use,” his wife, Opeyemi Oluwole-Sowore, 46, said, describing his search for a year of answers, and from the US and Nigerian authorities.
In Nigeria, her husband describes her as closest to legal and emotional hell.
In an exclusive interview with Nigeria, the first with an American news firm since her arrest on August 3, 2019, Sowore, 49, said she feared her life was in danger if she tried to draw attention to her case.
Answering questions from WhatsApp, the cross-platform messaging service, Sowore told NorthJersey.com and USA TODAY that he believed the Nigerian government was looking to “silence me all the time.”
“My ability to write has been castrated through various efforts to gag me,” Sowore said.
The story of Sowore’s dispute with Nigerian officials began with the kind of passionate and relaxed expression that he intends to lead to government reforms, and that many Americans take for granted at home.
Sowore, who was born in Nigeria but has the prestige of legal resident in the United States – a so-called “green card” – returned to his country last summer to make a crusade for adjustments in his government.
It was not received precisely through a parade of tickers through Nigerian officials. As a crusader journalist who did not hesitate to braubledly call for political reforms, Sowore had a persistent thorn in the political skin of Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.
A former army general, Buhari is recognized through the U.S. government as a key best friend in the fight against terrorism in Africa. But Sowore, his website, Sahara Reporters, which he founded in 2006 in a New York apartment and funded with grants from the Ford and Omidyar foundations, featured a very different portrait of the Nigerian leader.
For Sowore, Buhari was little more than a tin autocrat who intended to fill his private bank accounts and crack down on critics. From his home in Haworth, Sowore even ran for president opposite Buhari in the February 2019 election.
Sowore’s presidential crusade was undoubtedly a chimeric and vain quest. But it allowed him to raise questions about what he believed to be widespread corruption in Buhari’s management and his brutal efforts to trample on democratic reforms among the country’s 150 million people. At the end of the election, Sowore also accused Buhari’s allies of voter fraud.
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Around August 3, in Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, and just days before he showed up for a protest march against Buhari, security agents arrested Sowore at his hotel.
He was taken to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, and imprisoned, but has not been officially charged with any crime.
It’s been two months. Eventually, the Nigerian government slapped Sowore with a series of questionable accusations, adding treason, encouraging revolution, money laundering and cyberbullying to Buhari.
In early December, a trial was issued on Sowore’s orderly bail. But Nigerian police arrested him again, prompting a major foreign protest.
Sowore, who faces years in a Nigerian criminal if convicted, has denied all charges. Meanwhile, human rights groups, in addition to Amnesty International and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Foundation, describe the allegations against Sowore as false. And the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention is expected to release a report shortly indicating that Nigeria had no right to arrest Sowore.
But Trump’s management has called for his release.
One reason is that Sowore falls into a delicate diplomatic fissure. As a Nigerian, he has a legal in the United States with his “green card” status. But he’s not an American citizen. His wife, who grew up in Old Tappan, and their sons, a 13-year-old daughter, Ayo, and their 10-year-old son, KomiArray, are U.S. citizens.
On Christmas Eve, Sowore was released on bail, but was ordered to remain confined to a space in Abuja where his circle of relatives says he is forced to pay more than $2,000 a month for rent and 24-hour security guards to protect him from imaginable. Reprisals. Buhari regime.
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In the WhatsApp interview, Sowore said that he himself cannot write freely or explicitly and that his country’s efforts to expand democratic reforms “continue to fall.” He also said that his private bank accounts and the reversal of the Sahara Reporters online website had been frozen and that his online page had been attacked by a suspicious cyberattack that he attributed to Buhari’s agents.
Meanwhile, his wife raised cash for their rental grants or taking advantage of the family’s finances here in the United States. “He charges us thousands and thousands of dollars to care for two homes,” Opeyemi Oluwole-Sowore said from his home in Haworth.
In Nigeria, Sowore said he could just leave his house rented. But he rarely ventures. He’s afraid of being hurt by Buhari’s supporters or being arrested again.
“I am monitored and monitored through state security services,” Sowore said.
“This is incredibly damaging given new efforts to have me arrested through Nigerian security agents,” he added. “And all this is designed to keep me quiet all the time.”
You may contact the Nigerian government for comment. A call to the Nigerian embassy in Washington, D.C., went to voicemail. An email was left unanswered. Calls were also answered to the Nigerian consulate in New York.
In reaction to a request for comment from USA TODAY, the U.S. State Department He said he was following Sowore’s case in Nigeria, but refused to say whether he would officially request his release.
“We continue to closely monitor Mr. Sowore’s case,” a State Department spokeswoman wrote in an email. He added that the United States “engages the government about the importance of the rule of law and respect for the right to freedom of expression for all people, especially dissidents and members of the press and civil society.” But he didn’t provide details.
This is the void facing the Sowore family. He has little influence on the Nigerian government. And the US authorities, while issuing benevolent statements, play a diplomatic drum to force the Nigerians to free Sowore.
Last year, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, Democrat Wyckoff whose district includes Haworth, and Senator Bob Menendez, a Paramus Democrat, signed a letter calling for Sowore’s release. Senator Cory Booker, the Newark Democrat, also expressed fear over his arrest.
On the first anniversary of Sowore’s arrest last week, Gottheimer said he was writing another letter to the Nigerian authorities.
“I have to put up with the tension until I get home, ” said Gottheimer.
In a statement issued Friday through his office, Menendez said Nigeria’s refusal to release Sowore “feels the politicization of the judicial process.”
However, the continuing tension exerted through Gottheimer and Menendez is the virtual silence in other corners of the United States government.
“There has been a sustained lack of leadership on the part of the U.S. State Department,” said Adotei Akwei, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director of Government Promotion and Relations. “The Case of Sowore Lost in confusion with the COVID pandemic and with everything Trump did.”
Akwei said that in a personal conversation, some State Department officials told him that they had called Sowore as a “political actor” and that his fate was not a priority.
“This is a Nelson Mandela who deserves full attention,” Akwei said, describing the attitude he faced when he asked Sowore’s release to the American authorities.
Wade McMullen is a Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Foundation lawyer who took Sowore’s case to the United Nations, accusing the Nigerian government of violating Sowore’s rights to silence him.
“His ongoing prosecutions are nothing more than a crusade for persecution that opposes him,” McMullen said.
Shortly after Sowore’s arrest in August 2019, McMullen sent a 33-page petition to the United Nations calling for his release, which the Nigerian government “arbitrarily deprived” him of his “freedom and continued to arbitrarily detain him.”
Nigerian officials responded.
Sowore’s trial has been postponed three times. Nigerian prosecutors have yet to provide a list of potential witnesses or other court documents to their attorney, a procedure that is not unusual in the local, state, and federal courts of the United States.
So he waits.
The same goes for his circle of relatives in Haworth.
“They’ve got it where they are, ” said Opeyemi, Sowore’s wife. “They restrict their freedom. Technically he’s still in prison.”
It’s now been more than a year.
Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited information on how we live in New Jersey, subscribe or activate your virtual account today.
Email: [email protected] Twitter: @mikekellycolumn