BONUS PATREON MADE FREE: Nigeria's Cults and Revolution with Omoyele Sowore
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Welcome to the Underworld Podcast, where each week we dive into the secret world of organized crime and mafias and crime bosses all over the world. We just did an episode about Nigeria, specifically the Black Axe, something that I went out to report on a couple of years ago. And while I was there, I met Omoyele Shawari, who is a journalist, a human rights activist, a

politician, am I forgetting anything there, Yeli? Marathon runner, perhaps? Well, maybe the last one, politician. I don't see myself as a politician, I see myself as a political activist. Because the word politician has really negative connotations in Nigeria.

Right, right. But you did run for president in the elections last year, right? Yes. On an anti-corruption ticket. And it has a lot to do with the kind of history of the cults in a way, right? Yes. Yes, it had a complete, you know, it was woven into my history as an activist since I was about 10 years old. Yes.

Yeah. Um, so yeah, I first met you a couple of years ago. It was in Lagos in Sahara reporters, uh, office, which is the media organization that you've been running from, uh, New York for, for several years now. Yes. Right, right, right. And, and then I went off all over the country for about three or four weeks and tried to find various people inside the black acts, which had various levels of success. Um, and,

But yeah, then that story came out last year and we've kind of been talking on and off since then. Now you had a kind of really intimate knowledge of the cults going back to the sort of early 90s, right? When you were at college in Lagos. Could you just tell us a little bit more about that? So when I was in college, I didn't know much about cultism beyond the Paris Confrontation, which is a form by...

professor Wally Schoenker and you know I took you to him as well I think we met him together yeah he's pretty belligerent about the way that it's become now right since the days that he started everything yeah yeah so when I got into school we didn't hear much about them but we were hearing rumors about recruitment into courts

but there were no courts groups. It was later we found out that their means of recruitment was using social groups. So one of it I remember was a social group known as ABC Club. So you come in as ABC Club, the intention is to just

have a social feel on campus, so just to go to parties and, you know, meet hot girls. So it's just like a Greek fraternity or a Greek fraternity in the US. Yeah, so that was the only innovative way of just like bypassing the negativity of being asked to join a court. So, but one day, I think when year one, it was a whole...

You know, they were cheering on campus and posters saying that some group were going to sail that night. It was a cult group and there was panic on campus. They're going to sail? Yes, sail means, you know, they're going to have like an initiation in the night.

They said it hadn't happened on campus for a long time. Of course, the school authorities issued a statement. This was my first year on campus. They issued a statement saying this is not acceptable, it's not going to happen. Of course, during the night, everybody was out to stay clear of the campus.

Next day, we found on a junction on campus a coffin and some rituals at the junction. And that was the last we heard about them. But then in my first year, some guys moved into my room.

without our permission and turns out that they were called guys and we fought and they eventually left but i didn't know how proliferated they were on campus because we didn't have the usual clashes we're hearing from other campuses so it wasn't up until my project on campus that i started to see

the infrastructure of cultures. I would go to certain places and I found guys hanging out in front of the Lagoon Front and then certain clubs. Saw some guys who were students but never went to class and they're always drinking all day long. And we heard about fights.

on campus and that got me interested. So at this point the cults like the Black Acts for example they've been um like lots of cult groups have been banned on campuses by them right this is the early 90s so. Yes they've been banned there's an official ban against I mean on them by the federal government and the school authorities so when you're coming on campus as a freshman it's one of the

information you get that you should never join courts. It's illegal to join courts. You are liable to be expelled if you're found in any of these court groups. So I think he made them go underground, deep underground. But yeah, they were successful in recruiting people, students, yeah. Why was that? Why were they so popular with the young guys? I think it was because they didn't want to be identified and they were supposed to be secret and

Driving them underground made them really become very secretive. But it still offered a number of students, you know, the mouth-watering offers of connection with powerful people outside, connection with getting girls and having fun on campus and becoming, you know, successful in life because quite a number of their people were actually successful.

Yeah, like, so at this point that you've just got to university and you've seen this coffin and a bunch of kind of ritual stuff, like hanging out on the side of the street, that must be a pretty strange thing to see when you just joined up to college. And then how did you kind of, like, join the dots and see that there was this kind of big underground network going on? How did you find out that these guys were getting involved in it? You know, we started researching.

Especially towards my last year at the university and the military rule became more pronounced, they started getting emboldened in terms of political interferences on campus. They will try to sponsor senior union candidates in the senior union government or on one occasion

They had a position that was opposed to that of the Student Union. They were like, who are these guys? Like, oh, you can't go out to protest. We will attack you, kind of thing. And then, of course, we're getting reports from particularly females of rapes, sexual harassment, and, you know, and forceful kind of sexual activity on campus. And we're getting reports of stabs.

Especially coming out of the staff quarters where the university professors are housing and their kids are there. But what has happened to most of the professors is because they have boys' quarters and they rent them out to these guys because their kids are there.

fairly well-to-do Nigerians. So many of them, actually, children of army generals in those days. I mean, military top-notch people. So, this is just, it was just so repetitive that we had to pay attention to that. So, they were coming from all parts of society then? They weren't like poor kids looking for a way into society or...

You know, kids didn't follow him by the wayside. We found out then that different groups, different groups had like different hangout spots. So, like the Black Arts had their own hangout spots, you know. The Bucaneers, as I remember them, and the Ayakon Fraternity in those days. And we had the Vikings on campus. I think there were five or six of them that I know, you know. And then we started getting underground information about their capons.

Capone means the main leader. Right, like Al Capone. Yeah. So, and at a point, some of them actually came out to me when I became student union leader. Oh, you know, we're the ones who choose student union leaders on this campus. But in your own case, you're too popular, but we just want to let you know that we exist. So it's kind of a threat.

It was a subtle threat to say, look, you got to work with us. You got to let us know. We want to let you know that we're existing. You got to just work with us. So at the point, I identified clearly the capone of the Bucaneers. And those ones used to wear yellow.

and that's the signal they were yellow berets but they weren't wearing yellow on campus but there's something yellow about their dressing you know and the ayep were red

And they wouldn't wear berets, even though in their little world, the world was a signal. And then they had a greeting. You know, like some of them, when they shake hands, you know, they use their index finger to scratch your palm. So I got to know about it. See, as a student union president, it was somehow so fascinating. I was a leader of a student and I'm finding out about all these secret groups and

on campus and how they operated. So I took time to learn who was where and where you could locate them or who. So when there would be crime on campus, it was easy to find who did what.

And so at this point, you were the leader of the student union in the university at Lagos. I had become, yeah, I had become. But the time I met, the time that I had when I saw the Bukhanians was as soon as I was sworn in as student union president. I saw them and one of their guys came to me and said, look, we hang out in this place, we're Bukhanians. I was like, wow, that's interesting. What do you do?

Like, no, we're not trying to harm anybody, you know. So when he told me, like, oh, you know, a former student union leader on campus who was former, who was still around, pretending to be doing his master's degree was one of their leaders.

And then he told me extensively how they were connected with the school authorities, because the school authorities used them for balancing, politically speaking, against student leaders who are not members of these cult groups. Why were they kicking out against students on campus then? What was the kind of fighting between students and the cults? Because we were opposed to what they were doing, especially issues of rape and violence.

At some point I said we had a confrontation over, we're planning a protest and they issued a statement, kind of a cryptic statement that we can't go out because they won't support, they don't support the student union. And of course we went bonkers.

Okay. And you mentioned, I think when we last met, you mentioned that you were actually attacked by them, right? Was it 1993? So at a point where we knew these guys had become a distraction and we suspected, rightly later we found the evidence to show that this government was using them as a social political distraction. We had to go after, we had to be opposed to them openly.

So I was like, what we stood for was against what we stood for, which was a fight for democracy, human rights, human decency, and the dignity of human students. In this case, as I mentioned to you, we've had several cases of rapes, sexual assault on campus that were not treated. And then it got to the head when we

When they called for a meeting on campus and as we were doing surveillance, found one of them with a hand grenade. You found a hand grenade? Yes. Yes. And what happened then? We dispossessed the guy with the hand grenade, handed him to police and the next day he was back on campus. Why do you think that was? Why was he not put in jail at that point?

I think the person with the grand grenade was coming in, there was supposed to be a clash between the group that was meeting and the group that was opposed to them. Because there's always a tough war. So this is the defining thing about these groups. You know, wherever, whenever they, any campus where they exist, there's always this continuous superiority of war.

You know, someone wants to dominate so that the other ones will submit to them and respect them. So, and I think there was an attempt to attack the group that was meeting on campus on that night. And this guy was coming on campus with a hand grenade and we caught him red-handed. We dispossessed him of the hand grenade before he could...

remove the pain because when he saw that... I mean, this is going to sound kind of crazy to many listeners that someone's just walking around with a hand grenade but did they actually set them off? Did that kind of stuff happen? We did a little research. There was newspaper reporting of this particular matter. It's just that in those days newspapers were not used to being online. Yes, it was crazy. He told us when we subdued him that we could all be dead because...

This is Han Grenier. He's never seen any student group so courageous that we approached him and dispossessed him of his grand hand. He said, if you remove the pain, it would have been deadly. I mean, that puts into context the kind of fights that are going on on U.S. college campuses, I guess, right?

I think so, but I've never heard of a U.S. college campus where people went to a sorority fight with a hungry man. This one is a little bit sorority 2.0. Yeah, I mean, I remember you describing them to me at the time as kind of lower district gangs in the U.S., right? They have more in common with your just kind of straight up and down gangs than anything else. Yeah, I believe they're more like street gangs, you know, well-armed, you know, or fairly armed.

And, you know, because I've, you know, I mean, I attended a university in the U.S., Columbia University to be specific, in New York. Never seen, the sorority is worried. I've seen members of sorority getting drunk, but not with a big knife or gun, you know. Yeah, but I've also lived in Brooklyn, where I've had, I've seen street gangs at war. It wasn't funny.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, that's...

The interesting thing about these cults, I guess, is kind of the difference between the gangs on campus and off campus and how they kind of work together. And I guess the difference with the Black Axe especially is that it still claims that it's this kind of charitable organization, right, the MBM. And they claim that the two aren't linked and that this is just kind of historical anti-racist freedom fighting group. And I'm guessing that you would see it differently than that.

Well, my experience with the Blackers is different. I'm aware that there's a struggle within the movement to separate the militia from the original intention of the group. But the evidence is very evident out there, and that there is a complete deviation, a huge degree of deviation from what the original intention was.

and what they're doing now, I will use the description of black-on-black violence that's set to the South Africa after the end of apartheid. So I don't know where the NBM is doing charitable work today, but I've seen where the NBM, I've seen, you know, after effects of gang wars between the NBM and ordinary black hearts. And so something that's quite hard to parse apart is like,

How are these guys on campus that are maybe like dealing drugs and causing fights and committing abuses on fellow students? How are they connected to the guys outside the campus gates, the politicians and the kind of crooks and the kind of, how are those two worlds linked together? Oh, no, you know, I'll tell you that anybody that is willing to do a dirty job or,

oppressing either formally or informally is a darling of the Nigerian political class. Darling of the Nigerian political class. You could be like a lone wolf. If you get killed, they'd know you to be real daring and destructive. Or your phone would be ringing out the hook from big-time politicians.

So you just have to show that you've got some muscle behind you and then they're going to come running for you. You just have to show that you can do damage, real damage. Yeah, I think that Americans might have seen some guys like standing outside the ballots recently in Virginia and they're like, these guys are holding up democracy. But in Nigeria, I mean, historically in the last sort of 15, 20 years ago,

It gets really violent, right? It's not just people standing outside the voting booth. It has been violent. I mean, if we were taking, if there was a museum, not a museum, if there was a burial ground for victims of court violence, court gang violence in Nigeria, there would probably be as many as the number of people that were killed in one city in Liberia during the war.

I'll be saying we would have nothing less than some 1,500 persons buried in that place if we were to have a cemetery for victims of gang violence. So the politicians would be kind of paying these guys just to cause chaos around elections and make sure that people were voting for the right guy. After I was done with campus politics,

as I call it, or campus student activism. I went on to become a publisher and I did a lot of, I did some focusing on the role of the court gangs in political activities. Found them to be very active in Ogun State years ago under a former governor. Where's Ogun State? Just for people that might not be... Ogun State is a state next to Lagos. Okay. I found them to be very active in Delta State, in Edo State.

in river states, cross-river states, in a quite bomb state, they're still active today. In fact, the bulk of the Niger Delta militants, I won't say bulk, but a considerable, reasonable number of them were former compost gangsters. So these are the militants that are kind of in the Niger Delta that have been either trying to

You know, the remnants of the Biafran War, I guess, or activists against the oil companies there as well. It was just the militants that started fighting against the Nigerian state after they killed Ken Sarawira. Most of those guys were former campers, you know, secret cult leaders or operatives. And Edo being the state around Benin. It was an awkward reaction for them.

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And yeah, I mean, I traveled out to Edo when I was there and spent some time in Benin City. And that's the kind of I think the NBM calls it their mother temple. And they they speak a lot about the history and the massacre that the British committed there and how that's kind of characterized the movement in its early years. But but there's all sorts of different stuff going on in Edo now. Right. That's the home of the human trafficking problem, really.

so many women being trafficked into sex and the Black Acts is a part of that, right? Well, you know, what we have heard and found out is that they have gotten involved in this and I have seen video, I've seen video clips of fights in Italy.

between these court gangs fighting for power. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. So the evidence is clear that some of these guys have really graduated internationally and that some of them were involved in the human trafficking rings between Edo State

And Europe, particularly Italy. And you mentioned before, to take it back to your time as a young man kind of fighting for rights on the campus, you said that they grabbed you one day, these guys, right? And they kind of tortured you. Yeah, they grabbed me, they tortured me, they injected me with a lot of chemical stuff. I don't know, I was a chemist. We don't know substance. And left me for dead.

And I ended up in the hospital. What was the lead up to that? It was because we were having issues with the operations on campus and we didn't want to have the campus taken over by cult groups because we felt it was sponsored. Not we felt, we knew it was sponsored by the government and the school authorities to suppress one of the most active student union groups in Nigeria at that time that was fighting for democracy. And...

Well, if anybody tells you Nigerian politicians are not linked with cult gangs, especially the violent cult gangs...

And I don't know if any court gangster at this time is non-violent, I have to tell you. Yes. Well, it's as good as saying that the Pope is not linked with the Vatican. Right, right. They're still just all around, they're still doing the same stuff as they've been doing before? Yes. And now they spread onto the streets. They now have streets. In fact, there are now courts

gangs on primary school uh primary schools and secondary schools right yeah i was down in um a wedding on a campus down there and some guy told me that he'd been threatened back in his home town near lagos uh by a kid that was like 10 that was wearing a beret and the yellow outfit and everything and you just couldn't believe that this had sort of i guess the cults have kind of

injected themselves into every part of life right they've they've gone for the young kids and now the old guys are kind of pulling the strings in the country at the top level as well right yes they've done everything they can to uh maintain presence everywhere and now they have they have female passions of uh you know all the male court groups it used to be particularly chauvinistic uh

system of gangsterism or cultism or secrecy is according to African culture which is sad women could never be trusted with secrets

Wow. Yeah. Yes. So this is not my position, just to make it clear. This is backward African culture. Right. So there were not a lot of females that were in those new parts. So many groups forbid females from becoming secret courts members. But now there's Black Bra. I've heard so many women

female counter passions of each of the deadly cultures. And some of them are deadlier than the female passions. I mean, so it's like really out of control at this point. And I mean, like I was kind of discovering when I was doing my reporting as well, so much of the, um, so much of the violence and the kind of gangsterism that came out of the confraternities in the sort of late seventies, early eighties was, um,

A direct result of the military dictatorship, right? That it was imposing its power down on the people. Exactly. It was military dictatorship and following up to that is this very apatious political

class that was a development from the military. Because when Nigeria returned to democracy in 1999, there was no direct handover of power to a non-military class. The next person was a military person, retired, Lusheg Mbassanjo. So that culture of violence and the use of violence to achieve

as a means of achieving power was still very prevalent and still prevalent today. Yeah, I mean, Buhari is in power now, right? If you look at where we are today, we still have a former military grandpa who is still in power, still using violence and intimidation, harassment.

and general muscling of opposition as a means of achieving compliance. So we're still in that cocoon of militarization of the poverty in Nigeria. And you set up Sahara Report in 2006, right? And people have called it... I just set up, well, I would say it's 2005, but the publication, the first publication didn't come out until February 2006.

Okay, okay. And people have called it Africa's WikiLeaks because, you know, unlike so many outlets in Nigeria, you've really hammered corrupt politicians. You haven't really had the fear to go after people. The way I like to call it is that it's an equal opportunity offender to the corrupt and the powerful and the oppressive class.

Yeah, yeah. And I guess that brings us up to date with your current run in politics. So could you give me a little rundown? I mean, I don't know if I've mentioned this already on the interview, but you're actually calling me from house arrest in Abuja, the capital, right?

Well, the right way to describe it is probably never seen in a dictionary of any form of arrest. I mean, a city arrest. City arrest. I'm confined to Abuja, the federal capital of Thieves. It's called FCT. The federal capital territory is what they call it. But I call it federal capital of Thieves. That's my own appellation for Abuja. So that's where I'm talking to you from. And how long have you been in Abuja for?

I've been here since December 24th, 2019. It's almost nine months now, in a few days. And yeah, tell me a little bit about how that came about and how you decided to run for the presidency last year.

Well, you know, I ran for presidency in 2018 and the elections happened, or the non-election or selection happened in 2019. And after I found out that they weren't very interested in free and free elections, I started organizing young people across the country for elections.

a peaceful confrontation against the states, the Nigerian states and President Muhammad Buhari. So we scheduled a peaceful protest for August 5th, 2019. I came from the U.S. in July to organize it and mobilize for it. On August 3rd, 2019, they invaded my hotel room in the middle of the night.

and got me arrested and flown to Abuja, where I am now. Detained me for about five months and charged me to court for a variety of crimes, about seven counts. One of it was that I was trying to overthrow the government and that I insulted the president. In addition to laughable crimes,

charge that I was engaged in money laundering for transferring money from one account, one of my accounts to the other. Right, right. And so... By the way, they dropped all the charges. They dropped all the charges? Yeah, they dropped the money laundering charges and I'm in charge and also that of insulting the president. So I'm left with a treasonable felon, which is the insinuation that I was trying to overthrow the government with placards.

Since you were kind of bundled into a van and taken up to the capital, you've had people back in New Jersey led by your wife who've been protesting on your behalf there. You've had Amal Clooney has kind of joined the call to set you free from the Nigerian government. Have you had any kind of comeback from any of that yet?

No, yeah. The Nigerian government unfortunately doesn't respect public opinion or international pressure as such. But I must thank them. All of their efforts led to my initial release into the city. I used to be in solitary confinement for 23 hours every day until I was released December 24th to come out of the city. But I've been confined to the city in my day

They're holding on to my passport. They seized my passport and they've froze all my accounts in Nigeria. And I've made it impossible for me to get out of the city of Abuja to visit my mom, who's been sick, by the way. And all allowed me to go see my wife and kids in New Jersey. That's awful. I'm sorry, man. That's really, really terrible. And what, I mean, have you had no conversations with the government at all during this time?

No. My lawyers are the ones who are responsible for speaking on my behalf, and the government has not reached out to us in a way that shows that they're remorseful for this atrocious attack on my liberty. I was struck when I was reporting the story about the Black Acts, actually, that the kind of level of

hate that I was getting back from people that I would just be reaching out to on the phone or anything really, meeting in bars. I received so many death threats by people, people trying to follow me around everywhere. I think you had mentioned to me that it would be a really hard one to report. But is this just what happens in Nigeria? I mean, everything's so secretive, it seems. It is. Because as you really had mentioned,

The Black House is one of the oldest. I think the oldest was the Paris Conference, and it was led by Professor Wally Schoeniger. And the Black House was followed as a rival in those days. And they had, to my historical knowledge, had a viable plan to liberate humanity, particularly fighting to end apartheid and discrimination on the continent of Africa and Israel. I think when this...

was uh diverted in a very negative way it became an albatross on the neck of probably the guys who started it and who are now influential to be associated with such a disgraceful conduct was uh something very hard to swallow i just that's my suspicion and that's probably why you will follow that was uh i was followed for years i was threatened

Even after I was attacked, they threatened me for several years. And to this day, I still get harassed by some of these cool guys. We have confrontation on campus. Yeah, I still... I'm amazed how many people's identities I had to change in that story just to be able to do it without them getting killed. Because absolutely everyone is...

always getting threatened by one of these guys, right? I mean, it's so, so pervasive in Nigeria. How much of the fight against corruption on the political level is a fight against the cults in Nigeria? Are the two kind of like an interchangeable thing at this time? No, no. I don't think... I mean, most likely the corrupt guys have, you know, cultist relationships with

I don't see any defined fight against cultism that has anything to do with corruption. The Electoral Commission that's supposed to go after this kind of stuff, the ballot stuffing and the violence, they're kind of, from what I understand, they're not the most independent of groups in the country anyway. The word independent is...

a misnomer. There's nothing independent about the National Electoral Commission. They work for the highest bidders and those in power. I mean, the contradiction of the bill is that when you have the president of a country appointing the head of the Electoral Commission, you should already expect where you want his loyalty to be. You should understand that he'll probably support the president

who elected or appointed him into office. So I don't know why people expect so many different from the Nigerian electoral commissions or electoral bodies. They were designed ab initio, from the beginning, for the PIPA to take the turn.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess that America's going for it right now with its Supreme Court pick, right? And so many people are up in arms about whether the next Supreme Court pick is going to be a conservative along the lines of Trump. But it's like, you guys created this system. So who's surprised that who's in power gets to decide on kind of what justice looks like as well? And I guess that's a similar thing to what you're describing, isn't it? Yes, there's a subsystem. There's a subsystem. Yeah.

We've got a long way to go here. It's the reason why after the 2019 election, I switched, or we switched, and my seven number of young people, lots of them, switched over to Revolution Now. We don't think the existing reform templates can take Nigeria to any enviable heights. It's not possible.

Right, right. So it's only from the ground up that people can really fight back. It has to be a complete overhaul. It has to be a complete overhaul. Okay. Well, yeah, thanks, Omri Ali. I guess I'm really sorry about your predicament as it stands, but I'm hoping that something can sort out soon. Do you have any hopes that anyone's going to be changing your situation in the near future? You know what? I'll just say to you, whatever you do, do it.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's not for us to say, man. Well, I hope the best for you. And thanks so much for speaking to me. Thank you so much. Revolution now. I'm sending my Aunt Tina money directly to her bank account in the Philippines with Western Union. She's the self-proclaimed bingo queen of Manila. And I know better to interrupt her on bingo night, even to pick up cash. Sending money direct to her bank account is super fast. And Aunt Tina gets more time to bingo.

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