WP Customizer: Save a control state

Found a solution. Turns out the activate, deactivate functions are not persistent, meaning the controls’ state are reset if the page is refreshed!

Therefore I used 'active_callback' => 'fname' in my customizer.php in order to make changes persistent where fname is the function name as seen below.

function fname() {
    if ( !strcmp ( get_theme_mod('above-header'), 'no') == 0  ) {
        return true;
    }
    else {
        return false;
    }
}