Human rights activist and #RevolutionNow convener, Omoyele Sowore, has celebrated his mother, Esther Kehinde Sowore, at 73 describing her as a “mum that never gives up on her dream.”

Eulogising her mum as she turned 73, the presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC), in the 2019 and 2023 general elections, explained that the septuagenarian has continued to trudge on resiliently, “even though the last four to five years have taken a significant toll on her health.”

Sowore on Saturday revealed that her mother had him when she was only twenty years old, adding that “between then and when she stopped making babies, she popped 11 kids without getting to a maternity ward of any known hospital.”

Recalling an event that happened in 1980, the RevolutionNow activist narrated, “I remember vividly one day in 1980 when she had a serious argument with my dad, himself a teacher at my local secondary school, asking to be allowed to register at our high school as a class one student. The same class I was then, my father’s feeble response was that she might come late to school one day and he wouldn’t like to flog his first wife in public for arriving late to school.

“My mum never gave up,” he said. “She attended every after-school “adult education” class there was then and ended with some auxiliary nursing certificate in order to fulfill her dream.

“Again, Happy Birthday, Iye Ibila!”

Sowore is from Ese-Odo, Ondo State in South West Nigeria. He was raised in a polygamous home with sixteen children.

At 12, he learned to ride a motorcycle so that he could go to the lake to go fishing for food for his entire family every morning before going to school.