Can anyone really plan and carry out a revolution?

The answer is No, and this is probably the best defence Sowore will have. He is being accused of planning that which is impossible. I have been laughing at the various things Nigerians have been writing on the social media in the past one week. I have not come across anyone who seems to realize the fact that you cannot plan and carry out a revolution. Only the gods can do that.

You can plan a coup and overthrow a government, but that is not a revolution. You cannot call for a revolution in the sense of causing it to happen. You can only wish for it. And by the way, all those things you call revolutions are not revolutions. For instance, what happened in Egypt recently is not a revolution. There was no fundamental change. You have Al Sisi doing exactly what Mubarak used to do.

Perhaps, we can make some progress on this by looking at the definition of the term “revolution”. Thus: “In political science, a revolution is a fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political organization which occurs when the population revolts against the government, typically due to perceived oppression or political incompetence.’  – Wikipedia.

It has to be a sudden change, which is fundamental, involving majority of the population revolting. Without going further, you can tell that revolutions are not planned. It involves a chain of events that sweep the society in a tide that often starts without any sense of direction. It is more easy to tell a revolution after the fact than to plan and execute it. This is why in history those leading at the beginning of a revolution are hardly those that end it, that is: those that bring things to order after the revolt. (Castro is an exception).

You can plan a revolt if you have control over any defined group of the population. But a revolt per se doesn’t make a revolution. The most recent recognized revolution is the Cuban revolution of 1959.

The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt conducted by Fidel Castro’s revolutionary 26th of July Movement and its allies against the military dictatorship of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista. The revolution began in July 1953 and continued sporadically until the rebels finally ousted Batista on 31 December 1958, replacing his government with a revolutionary socialist state. 26 July 1953 is celebrated in Cuba as the Day of the Revolution. The 26th of July Movement later reformed along communist lines, becoming the Communist Party in October 1965.

You can accuse Sowore of planning various other unlawful things, but not for planning a revolution. He had no contact with the armed forces. He had no capacity to wage any resistance. The last time he tried to mobilize people was when he tried to get their votes and he failed woefully. His hope of getting the IPOB members to team up with the Shiites behind him is a symptom of mental health condition. If he could amass enough people to make any revolt successful in Nigeria, it would have been 10 times easier for him to get them to vote him into office as the President of Nigeria.

I doubt that the word, revolution, will be used in the legal documents to be filed in court, as such will make little sense. So, ironically, the most harmful words used by Sowore is not the word, revolution.

If I ask you to point at historical examples of revolutions that you know, you will easily tell that none is like what Sowore could have contemplated.  And this was why I wrote earlier that Sowore probably did not understand the meaning of the term revolution. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have used it.