Because of the huge money available to them, by virtue of the offices they occupy, they see the world as their permanent abode and those placed under their care as footstools. For them, nobody else should talk or challenge their authority. They brook no opposition and entertain no genuine admonitions. Those who summon courage to speak out must be hunted down. Around them are praise-singers and charlatans whose only assignment is to sing their praise to high-heavens and do other dirty jobs as may be given to them from time to time.
Their major weapons of operation are coercion and presumed closeness to the seat of power. They also relish name-dropping and flaunt their alleged connections with the security agents (even though some of the claims are debatable).
The truth about these new despots and power-drunks is their wealth and new-found fame lack solid foundation. They are opportunists – feasting on the gullibility and vulnerability of the disadvantaged poor and dregs of society. They know deep inside them that posterity will judge them wrongly for all their iniquities.
Unfortunately, how many Nigerians have paused to ponder this endemic new wave of despotism and arrogance of power sweeping across our political space, even to the point of threatening our current democracy? Indeed only a few concerned Nigerians have openly condemned this sickening development that is gradually but steadily getting ensconced in the psyche of some people – consciously or unconsciously – and making them lose their sense of honour and integrity.
Despotism and power-drunkenness share some strange similarities. Despotism flourishes on sadism and the propagation of one’s overweening egotist tendencies, which are usually products of a self-indulging love of oneself above others, while arrogance of power evolves from flattery enmeshed in servility. Also both draw from a deceitful and chameleonic undercurrent of self-fullness to further a particular agenda.
Those who engage in these psycho-indulgences do so out of share expediency, which they hope would benefit them in the end.
To point out the evils of despotism and power-drunkenness demands that we take a peep into history to see how such despots from other climes ended.
In the past 1000 years several despots had arisen who left in their wake despoliation, desolation, destruction, deaths, and other forms of crudity. Top of the pack were Tamerlane, Ivan the Terrible, Maxmillien Robespierre, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Francois Duvalier, Nicole Ceausescu, Idi Amin and Pol Pot.
It is necessary to comment briefly on the tenures of these notorious despots to drive home the evil of despotism. Tamerlane was a Turkik Mongol. He engaged in ruthless savagery at recurring frequencies –massacring an entire population plus over 80,000 residents of Delhi. He left annihilation wherever he went and built towers with human skulls. Ivan the Terrible, as the name portrays, was the first Czar of Russia and mounted the saddle in 1547. The early part of his reign was devoted to the expansion of Russia. But this later gave way to a more ruthless and vicious Ivan. His sudden change in temperament was attributed to psychiatric instability. Ivan was notoriously linked to killing his son and heir, including some of his several wives out of anger.
Maxmillien Robespierre of France presided over a reign of terror and the dark side of the French Revolution that buried the democratic ideals and ethos and instituted in their place tyranny and highhandedness that sent many innocent citizens to their early graves through the guillotines. Over 40,000 were killed in the process with about 300,000 others imprisoned without legal trial or representation. Next was Josef Stalin who was leader of the Soviets from 1929- 1953. He promoted with some megalomania and repressiveness his own version of Communism, which entrenched fascism and absoluteness in administration and caused the death of more than 20 million people through the excruciating life in labour camps, summary executions and starvation.
The emergence of Adolf Hitler was greeted by mixed feelings. A product of seizure of power in Germany Hitler earned a reputation as a ‘most chilling tyrant’. His ultimate aim was to bring the entire world under German control and this led to resistance from many countries, including Britain. His involvement in the genocide that left over 6 million Jews dead still evokes a deep feeling of hate and loathsomeness from the relations of the victims. Many Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and communists were known to have been executed by Hitler to satisfy his thirst for blood and power. Interestingly, he died in hazy circumstances. Some reports said he committed suicide.
Mao Zedong (Chairman Mao Tse-tung) as maximum leader of China undertook many experiments that spelt doom and catastrophe for his country. His penchant for intolerance for dissent and opposition was remarkable. The Great Leap Forward economic plan was an abysmal failure. All that it left in its trail was famine, blood-bathe that extinguished between 23 million and 30 million lives. Several thousand of suspected class enemies were also felled.
Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s tenure brought untold hardship and a harvest of deaths to the people of Haiti. Over 60,000 of them were brutalised and killed in the many cases of abuse and brutality that was like a signature tune in the political life of Haiti at the time.
Nicole Ceausescu earned a place in the Hall of Infamy, going by the terror he unleashed on the people of Romania. He introduced neo-Stalinist Police State that had zero tolerance for opposition and dissent. He squandered billions of dollars of state fund in meeting his endless self-glorifying indulgences. Human rights abuse under his tenure ranked highest in the East bloc. The end of Nicole was tragic – what a way for a despot to die for his many sins against humanity!
As you read this piece, charlatans, hagiographers and boot-lickers have taken over the political arena, taunting their gimmicks and seeking who to recruit. Like vampires their sense of reasoning is beclouded by greed and convulsive impetuousness. All they are interested in achieving is relevance for themselves and making of monsters and despots out of our leaders, even if this is done at the expense of decency and our fledgling democracy.
They were visible on the political landscape in 1998 when they set up over 500 pro-Abacha groups to “force” him to shed his military toga and assume the leadership of the country as a civilian president. The campaign reached a feverish pitch when a five-million-man march was staged in Abuja – drawing the young, the old, the cripple, the blind, and all manner of persons. Almost 99.9 per cent of the campaigners could not adduce any clear-cut reason for trying to draft him into the race. To show their deceitfulness they flaunted all kinds of imaginary propositions. While some of them even vowed to commit suicide, others threatened to go into exile if he refused to declare his interest publicly to run. As weird and obnoxious as some of these declarations were some gullible persons believed them.
To compensate them for their foolhardiness they were offered huge monetary rewards with a promise of juicy government contracts, which was the major reason for their involvement in the first place.
The same scenario played itself out in 2007 when the same discredited and shameless persons lined up behind the tenure elongation agenda of former President Olusegun Obasanjo.
The irony of it all is that a majority of those on that mission were the same people that goaded Abacha to contest as a civilian President.
You may wonder why I refer to these campaigners as vampires. What difference does it make if I call them vampires, considering the deviousness and ruthlessness they bring into their tricks? As vampires suck their victim’s blood until he dies so also do political sycophants milk their victims until they fall into self-destruct.
How do despots emerge? They are usually produced by a self-serving and hagiographic clique that is bent, even at the detriment of the nation, to mortgage decency and candour – to achieve its egocentric agenda. They are ready partners to leaders that want to perpetuate themselves in power or promote their egoistic and fanatical designs.
It is true that these maximum leaders would not have got away with the atrocities associated with their regimes if a few disgruntled elements had not pandered willingly to their promptings and cravings. After all, it takes two to tango. This explains why the British say: ”One swallow does not make a summer.” The Nigerian Pidgin version of this idiom, “A tree does not make a forest”, paints a better picture of the analogy I try to draw. The renowned British author, statesman and poet, Edmund Burke got it right when he said that all it took for evil to thrive was for good men to do nothing.
Yes, how many good men and women can we find in our nation today that can measure up to Burke’s postulation? He spoke in an era when those who were expected to speak up against the evils in the society rather chose to be numbered among the perpetrators of these evils. Almost all of us are gradually been turned into cacophonic praise-singers, boisterous cymbalists and salacious charlatans – who believe that the future of our nation lies in the hand of a mortal without sparing any thought for all the sermonising about the transience of power and life.
It is nauseating to see supposedly responsible, respectable men and women, including the vulnerable youths, engaging in this national charade. They walk about with an offensive, putrefying trademark, “Politics for money”. Ask them what their ideology is and you will be stunned by their lack of analytical depth and easy-virtuousness. They ply their trade with the ultimate target of fleecing their victims. These victims normally end up tragically and ignominiously. Their place in history is permanently obliterated by infamy, while they languish in the cold bowels of the earth with a grimace of dishonour in their miserable, grotesque faces.
History has never recorded where a despot has been accorded a place of honour in the hall of fame. Idi Amin died in exile. King Saul killed himself. King Nebuchadnezzar was turned into a strange beast. Adolf Hitler died unsung. In fact, the list is endless. When these men found their way into power little did they know what fate held in store for them. They trod the power firmaments like colossuses, while extinguishing with brutality any opposing voice.
Having examined the lives of these men above, it is easy to see a common denominator – arrogance of power. Their reasoning was interfaced with a demonic mindset that they were larger than life, but forgot that the line between life and death is thin. Saul, for instance, was afflicted by psychiatric unstableness that tormented him continually. God used this ailment to unsettle him in order to fulfill his plan to make David King of Israel. All the plots by Saul to kill David were thwarted by God.
I wonder who could have believed that Hitler would ever be subdued by any human force. He held the world by the jugular and built a formidable army with which he carried out his numerous belligerent exploits across the world. But the day his cup was full God pulled him down. This became a lesson for mankind.
Corrupt and self-seeking politicians in Nigeria are emboldened by the allies they find in a few equally unconscionable Nigerians who serve as malleable tools in their evil hands. Because these misfits surround them, like flies on a corpse, their hopes are heightened. Their sense of reasoning is obviated by greed and self-aggrandizement, such that they do not notice the putrefying smell from the decomposed corpse.
My advice to them is to retrace their steps and embrace decency. It does not do anybody any good to bite more than he can chew. If you bite more than you can chew you will certainly be choked, if not to death.
I believe the ongoing National Conference and the new consciousness of the Nigerian citizenry will assist immeasurably in containing the scourge of despotism and power-drunkenness sweeping across the nation. Failure to deal with these cankers immediately may sound the death-knell for our young democracy.
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