AAC presidential candidate Omoyele Sowore has categorically denied allegations that his activism and journalism are financed by Western governments, telling PAPShow host Umar Isa that his 37 years of public life have been driven purely by personal conviction — while also revealing that security agencies falsely claimed in court that he collected money from Atiku Abubakar in Dubai to fund the 2019 #RevolutionNow movement.
Omoyele Sowore has heard the Western funding allegations for decades — and he is done staying quiet about them.
In a wide-ranging interview on PAPShow, hosted by Umar Isa, the detained African Action Congress (AAC) presidential candidate and SaharaReporters founder addressed head-on the longstanding claim that his activism and journalism are bankrolled by the United States or other Western interests.
“I’ve been at this for 37 solid years. You cannot find anything. So whenever they can’t find anything, they have to throw things at you that they hope can stay,” Sowore said.
He traced the pattern back to his university activism in the 1990s — before he even owned an international passport — when opponents accused him of being funded by outside politicians and human rights groups. Decades later, the labels merely shifted. “In 2015, the Jonathan people said I was working for Buhari. By 2019, the Buhari people said I’m working for Atiku,” he said.
The most striking revelation concerned his 2019 arrest. Sowore said security agencies claimed in court that he had travelled to Dubai to collect money from former Vice President Atiku Abubakar to fund the #RevolutionNow movement. “I’ve never been to Dubai before in my life,” he said flatly, adding that he had only transited through Dubai airport en route to other destinations without ever leaving the terminal.
Sowore described his journalistic approach as adversarial journalism — a deliberate rejection of neutrality in the face of injustice. “My stand is ‘confront oppression, corruption, and be unapologetic about it.’ So that cannot be neutral,” he said.
He described SaharaReporters as one of Africa’s earliest digital journalism platforms, calling it “disruptive in ways that journalism had never experienced in Nigeria before it came about.”
On political alliances, Sowore was equally direct: “I don’t technically have any relationship with any one of them.”
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