Adolf Hitler was a sick man. He was not just physically, sick; a circumstance, which underwrote his addiction to cocaine and opiates. He was also a raving lunatic, who was elected to the German chancellorship through the ballot box. But ended up ripping German democracy asunder; and morphing into a full-blown dictator, that he was all along. He was a tyrannical virus, that afflicted a bubonic plague-grade pestilence on German democracy. He shook the foundations of Western civilization, plunged the world into a conflagration that incinerated 50 Million lives, and convoked an abomination that was the Holocaust. That is exactly what a nation gets, when an autocrat, dresses himself in the borrowed robes of a democrat to gain power.
President Muhamadu Buhari, is a sick man. His London junkets testify to that. But he is much more than that. He is really a sick man, mentally and metaphorically. He is an irredeemable autocrat and a toxic pestilence to our democratic experience.
He is also desperate. And his desperation may end up becoming Nigeria‘s Waterloo. He is desperately trying all in his might, to smuggle Nigeria into a dictatorship, once again.
While many Nigerians, are slumbering in civic apathy; including those pretentious stewards in the temple of our laws, who call themselves „learned men“, and who should be our first line of defense against the wiles of the irredeemable tendency of power to midwife the illusions of omnipotence; this disgruntled neo-dictatorial pretender, has been busy dismantling all the checks and balances to his capricious whims, with a stealth unparalleled in the annals of treachery. And he is gaining steam and speed by the day.
Buhari just delivered a speech to the Nigerian Bar Association. He went there, to shamelessly and ignorantly proclaim like an emperor drunk on power, that the Rule of Law is not Supreme in his understanding of democracy; and that the rule of law could be set aside in the national interest.
The lawyers sat there in silence, like a host of timid school boys. No one raised an objection. No one walked out in protest. Many of them must have struggled to take selfies with a man, who just destroyed the basic metaphysic of their profession, vocation and livelihood. They all sat their quietly in timorous inaction, while a dictatorship, unfolded its manifesto before their eyes. They sat in somnolent silence, as a dictator plundered the sacrosanct essence of their legitimacy, as officers of the law. They sat there in frozen immobility, as a dictator raped the holiest sanctuary of their beings.
Buhari went to a congress of lawyers, and tore the foundations of law in civil society to shreds. And no one raised an eyebrow. No one batted an eyelid. They sat their like dummies, while a democratic ignoramus raised an apologetic for raw tyranny; unfurled flags of caprice, rendered them obsolete, and banished them to the peripheries of irrelevance in one fell swoop!
The lawyers kept quiet. I can’t for the life of me understand why. Has „stomach infrastructure“ compromised them? Is this a situation, where Jesus the Galilean would say, “accursed are you lawyers”?
They kept quiet, while a dress rehearsal for tyranny was dramatized on their biggest stage. They can as well keep their peace.
We will not!
What this democratic ignoramus presiding over Nigeria at the moment forgets, is that you cannot cut the branch upon, which you are sitting. You cannot come to power in a system, where the rule of law is supreme; and turn around to advocate before your supine and spineless audience that the rule of law is now subject to whatever you would capriciously determine to be the national interest.
All one can take from Buhari’s utterances and body language in recent times, is not only that Buhari is a desperate man; desperate to cling to power come 2019, but that he is also a thoroughgoing and irredeemable autocrat, who habours only disdain for the checks and balances of the democratic process. That is the danger Nigeria walked into the day they allowed Tinubu to convince them into accepting that Trojan gift, that was Buhari’s candidacy.
We are now reaping the whirlwinds for those winds we sowed. Nigerian nascent pretense of a democracy, has now come full circle. It is now finally and consistently being cannibalized, and stripped of all democratic robes, pedestals, and pretenses, by a vile armada of prebendal rentiers, led by a congenital dictator; who piggybacked on a democratic electoral process, to gain access to our levers of power, and social legitimacy. On that perch, he is now releasing he toxic payloads of his tyrannical nature into the bloodstreams of our nationhood and democratic experiment.
This alliance of debauchees, were the same yesterday-men, who ran Nigeria aground; marooned in the sandbanks of poverty, underdevelopment and intractable dysfunction. They are at it again. And Nigeria is becoming a dictatorship by installment. Muhammadu Buhari is making sure of that.
Every democracy is a realm, where the rule of law is supreme, separation of powers sacrosanct; and equality before the law holy. In democracies, the rule of law provides for the respect of the fundamental principles of justice. In fact social justice, equity and good conscience as a principle, is so much of essence for the existence and legitimacy of a State, that St. Augustine of Hippo was compelled to ask: „What is a State without justice, but a band of robbers“!
And if we are to examine Buhari’s Nigeria with the lens of Augustine‘s interrogations; the only conclusion that reason could pitch her tent with, is that Nigeria is a robber-baronial imperium, led by clever rogues; who are merchants of illusions; who are of such Liliputian intellect, that their crimes against their people, is that of dogs defecating in their feeding trough; and whose cocktail of toxicities have totally polluted and poisoned all facets of Nigerian life and experience.
These consortium of knaves have been inflicting a lavatorial assault on every democratic principle, that Buhari swore to uphold and defend, on assumption of power as an elected president.
The instances of that are legion. Just open your eyes and you would be affronted by the daily assault of this government on our democracy.
And he is being enabled by the silence of our lawyers.
Gwazia ndi yard unu
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