A sense of perfidy hits the air. So rather than cavort over the flowering of democracy, we confront the nascent hubris of a dictator. I use the word “nascent” advisedly. We have not seen tyranny in its barefaced and full form.

It is furtive and deceptively tentative, but carries the barbarous aura of the inevitable. Not long ago, the former governor of Zamfara State – no fan of mine – was picked up by the police because he said the APC would stage a peaceful protest if his party was rigged out of the 2015 polls. The Sharia-flaunting lover of nubile flesh did not offend against the law. He exercised a natural instinct of the politician in an ambience of electoral fraud.

Months later, former gun-swinging denizen of the Niger Delta forests, Mujahid Asari-Dokubo, warned that if his kinsman, Goodluck Jonathan, is not tenanted at Aso Rock in 2015, militancy will dissolve the apparent peace in the home region of the president. He merely echoed the sentiment of an officered sympathiser of the militants, Kingsley Kuku, who is special adviser to the president on amnesty. None of them, in spite of the discomfort of the National Assembly, was even called for questioning over clearly subversive threats.

The one threatened peaceful protest and was picked up. The others mouthed apocalyptic prophesies but they spoke back in defiance. Their grandfather and fuddy-duddy of Nigerian politics, rather than intervene in wisdom, played the role of an agent provocateur at over 80 years of age. He joined the delinquency and juvenile ranting and explained that others in the North had said similar things.

In this instance, the office of the inspector general of police iced over with cowardice.

Recently, Governor Rotimi Amaechi’s official aircraft was grounded at Ondo State. The aviation authorities said he had no papers, which the Rivers State Government has challenged. Not long after, the police swooped on a local government headquarters. The excuse was that the governor should not have dissolved the executive, which happened through the state legislature.

This did not only fly in the face of the principle of a federal state, but it violated the principle of the rule of law. If they don’t like what the governor did, why not go to court? It is common knowledge that the battle for Rivers State is the continuation of the friction between President Jonathan and Governor Amaechi by other means. The story, at least in public, can be traced to the open shame of rhetoric from Dame the Vain, first lady Patience Jonathan, in Rivers State during the closing days of Governor Amaechi’s first term. She openly lashed out at the governor over activities in Okrika, where she hails from. Since then, tension has crackled between Port Harcourt and Abuja. What we see today, including the fulminating shallowness of Minister of State for Education Nyesom Wike, represents a proxy war. From his reptilian redoubts in Aso Rock, he is unleashing venoms abroad.

What is going on in Rivers State, with the strong-arm hysteria from Abuja, foreshadows the rough and tumble of 2015. It is the story of a snake trying to encircle his enemies in a jungle where law and order play coy to the logic of the unbridled giant.

We also saw the introduction of a legislation to bar private aircraft owners from carrying what is perceived as passengers. To the undiscerning, it is a clever way of slowing down opponents who would hit the hustings for 2015 election when they compete with him for the meaty prize. It is a legislation for aerial supremacy through monopoly in the air battle of the 2015 campaigns. It is a metaphor of modern warfare. The law seeks to create a no-fly zone for the opposition. So while the president and his team corral the air and unleash the gunfire, the ground battle belongs to the opposition who will lie hobbled below, pinned down and ponderously weak, an army without the aerial sway. President Jonathan can now wield the nimble power of the sky with its lethal ferocity.

As a well-known top politician told me in the aftermath of the Amaechi aircraft saga, no one should take a romantic view of tackling Jonathan and his cohorts in 2015. It came close to journalism recently when two journalists with the Leadership Newspaper were held rather than taken to court. He plots to slam a state of emergency on Borno and Yobe states. By this he is trying to turn his failure to combat terrorism into an advantage for political control against 2015. Our greatest tragedy is the absence of the rule of law. It is in that sewer that tyrants breed.

These are just a few of the signs of what I called nascent tyranny. Because we live in an ostensible democracy, we take those actions for granted. Tyranny comes like a thief in the night. In the early days of Joseph Stalin, complains streamed the news media of a budding tyrant. A prominent New York Times reporter denied it. The evidence of killings, anti-Semitic slayings and concentration camps were regarded as little irritations.

The then well-known critic Edmund Wilson visited from the United States and gave Stalin the thumbs up. Even novelist and essayist Maxim Gorky came from exile and resettled in his home country and lunged at prose spirit Vladimir Nabokov for cynical error for raising a false alarm. Gorky once argued that the only people who deserve freedom are those who are ready to fight for it every day. He ignored his own religion. But he was one of the early victims of Stalin’s purge. Alexander Solzhenitsyn fell into his snare and even fought in his army, before his disillusion and exile. His Gulag Achipelago, One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer War are three masterpieces on the Stalin era that won him the Nobel Prize.

In the early days of the Abacha regime, Ken Saro Wiwa during a BBC interview praised the coup that ushered in the tyrant. I wrote an op-ed piece then in the National Concord cautioning the novelist and playwright. I also noted that he was mistaking his cozy embrace with the general with the general apathy in the land. Saro Wiwa replied that he was cut from a rare gem. Just like Gorky, he became a tragic victim of a tyrant he helped nurture. It is one of the sore memories of my life that he visited me a day before he was arrested. A similar fate almost happened to Wole Soyinka who outgrew his chumminess with the foxy IBB and lived in exile during the Abacha era.

Asari-Dokubo said President Jonathan has performed. He should leave that to voters. He is one man, and his Ijaw nation, whose lives he has not lifted, are one people. When he swept to power in what they gleefully designated as a pan-Nigerian mandate, they should have told him that he ought to rise up to the challenge. Democracy has shown historically that it does not guarantee freedom or well being. It calls for vigilance. That was why right-wing economist – I hate to quote this guy – once asserted that “perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.” He is Friedrich Von Hayek.

Nascent tyranny thrives on a false perception of leader’s innocence. I recall the novel, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, where innocent children carry out the worst tyrannies in themselves. The only solution is vigilance, and a fighting conscience from within. That is what Ghandi referred to when he said, “The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.” This tyrant is the counterfoil to the other tyrant.

SOURCE: http://thenationonlineng.net/new/sam-omatseye/like-a-thief-in-the-night/

Fantastic article. It may not be perfect but this is an angle from which to view the nigeria polity.

Interesting article!!

Sam is highly gifted...