I am reading a copy of Marcel Dirsus’ How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive. A 2024 non-fiction book, in it, Dirsus examines historical strategies for overthrowing dictators. He also looks at how effective dictators can be in this modern era, especially in a world of contemporary mass surveillance technologies. One of Dirsus’ narratives that prologues the book is the imperious reign of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Cosseted by his Amazonian Guards, an unofficial all-female elite cadre of bodyguards officially known as the Revolutionary Nuns, a frighteningly high physical and mental walls were built round Gaddafi, leader of the Republic of Libya from 1969 to 2011. Eccentric and murderous, Gaddafi never believed that an end would ever come. No one could speak against him in Tripoli or anywhere underneath the swath of Libyan landscape. At the cusp of his glory, Gaddafi had a golden gun decorated with intricate engravings. Ulf Laessing, Reuters correspondent in Nigeria and formerly its correspondent in Libya, in his Understanding Libya Since Gaddafi (2020), even quoted a Libyan as saying “Not only would we not dare express any criticism, we wouldn’t even dare thinking anything critical in our heads”.
Fast-forward to 15 February, 2011. Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city, was in turmoil. Gaddafi had ordered the arrest of a lawyer who represented victims of the Abu Salim prison massacre in Tripoli in 1996. Human Rights Watch had estimated that 1,270 prisoners were massacred in the prison by Gaddafi. Protests began to mutate. Then bombs draped the streets. The man who nicknamed self Godfather of Libya, King of Kings of Africa, the Leader who Lived in All Libyans’ Hearts, was on the verge of kissing the canvas. As he ran from house to house in Sirte, where he was born, it was obvious that the end, mimicking biblical exegesis, was nigh. Rebels had taken over nearly all parts of Gaddafi’s huge Libyan personal estate. One of them, upon taking hold of Gaddafi’s home, seized his golden gun as symbol of his rout. Gaddafi and remnants of his bodyguards were so hungry that they made do with miserable pasta and rice. When the end came on 20 October, it came with indignities. The rebels brutalized and sodomised the Libyan leader with a bayonet. They then flung him on top of a car. As he lay dead, the only shroud for his topless corpse was the indignity of being kept inside a locker in a local shopping mall.
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Fast-forward again to sometime last week. Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi’s second-born son, was assassinated. Libya media said armed “four masked men” had killed him in Zintan,
Two things came to my mind at Saif’s assassination. First was Peter Tosh, Jamaican reggae music avatar’s warning of the retribution of Karma. In his Feel No Way track, shawled in Jamaican patois, he sang: “No bother feel no way/It’s coming close to pay day, I say/No bother feel no way/Every man get paid accord(ing to) his work this day…” It is a message of karmic justice which spells out that everyone will reap what they sow. Its emphasis is that, no one can live wrongly, without corresponding calamity. “Cannot plant peas and reap rice/Cannot plant cocoa and reap yam/Cannot plant turnip and reap tomato/Cannot plant breadfruit and reap potato,” Tosh sermonised.
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In a way, Tosh’s sermon speaks to Dirsus’ epilogue about Gaddafi and his celebrated Golden Gun. “This is what I call the Golden Gun paradox: tyrants can have all the trappings of power, even a gun made of gold, but at the point where they need to use their power to save themselves, it is already late,” he said.
What I have on offer today is a potpourri, an assemblage of seemingly unrelated issues kneaded together with rainbow-colour threads. It is something in the neighbourhood of a collage.
Once they encounter an issue that troubles them, my people surrender themselves to the embrace of the allegory of the pouched rat, the Òkété. The Okete it was who, on the day of the festivity for his mother’s funeral, the animal hide called awo, slated to be used to make the native Gbèdu drum for the entertainment of guests, was found pockmarked, torn into unrecognizable shreds by hungry incisors. The rat had consumed the instrument of his own glory. Such moments, immortal Fela Anikulapo-Kuti described as Òró p’èsì je moment. Literally, it means that word had swallowed response/meaning. What kind of song does one sing to that cryptic Gbèdu drumming? Like the Gbèdu drum itself, the Òkété allegory mirrors an existential dilemma.
A number of events that occurred in Nigeria last week signify a de ja vu, an Òró p’èsì je conundrum. Tatalo Alamu, Ibadan bard notorious for his caustic tongue and massive self-underscore, illustrated this conundrum with another allegory of the rat, this time, a variant of small house rodents called the òfón. In a missile aimed at his imaginary musical enemies, Tatalo told them that the outcome of a fight for supremacy between him and them was a foregone conclusion. The rat had just been found to have peed on the soup delicacy called gbègìrì while a feast was about to begin. The dilemma, sang Tatalo, will necessitate that everyone who had readied to dip their corn meal food (eko) inside the soup would have no choice but to beat an immediate retreat. He sang: “òfón tò-ó gbègìrì, k’óníkálukú ó k’éko rè dání””.
How does anyone leak a soup soaked in a rat’s pee?
In Nigeria last week, uproar and condemnations across board erupted, following Wednesday’s Senate passage of a bill to review the Electoral Act 2022. In that political vinyl, you could see the small man of Nigeria’s parliament wielding the gavel and playing big Gaddafi. Apparently, you could see the small combine, ostensibly mannequins of Aso Rock, giving Small Gaddafi support to trample down people’s will. Barau Jibrin quickly rose to support the motion to kill Nigeria’s tomorrow. Ope Bamidele’s face was lit up with hunger to consume the people’s electoral future like a plate of pounded yam.
The lesson of Marcel Dirsus was totally lost on them. It is that tyranny does not inhabit only empires. It lurks round even small hovels where men play God. It is nourished in the hearts of those who try to foist their tomorrow on people’s tomorrow. Those Villa urchins know that in a free and fair election, without tweaking the Electoral Act, they will be footnotes of history. Godswill Akpabio is the small symbolism of political tyranny. Gaddafi wanted to live perpetually in Libya. He built small effigies and totem of power in his children like Saif al-Islam. Akpabio, the water bug, “Ìròmi”, dancing on top of the water, whose drummer lives in Aso Rock, and their recruits, like Gaddafi, all want to live longer than 2027 in power. They are united by a tyranny of purpose. Some people may see this as an exaggeration of Nigeria’s current political reality but, what the dog sees that makes it bark ceaselessly is same thing the sheep sees and looks seemingly unbothered about. The èsìsì (the Tragia plant) must not sting Nigerians twice. Infamous for its sting, the èsìsì is deployed as an instructional metaphor for people to learn from and not repeat their past mistakes.
Political activists, civil society organisations, election monitors and opposition parties
If you read Trinidad and Tobago-born British writer, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad (VS) Naipaul’s satirical voyage on elections called The Suffrage of Elvira, like Tatalo Alamu, you would see the atiro, the incongruousness and wobbling in Nigeria’s electoral system. The author attempted to pain the picture of the complexities of democracy in a fictional Caribbean island. Like Nigerians, Naipaul said of Elvira voters: “Once they are bought, they stay bought.”
Come to think of it, “sebí” we are told that Aso Rock is so fortified and is standing “gìdìgbà” for a second term, with 30 governors now in its kitty, and having had opposition political parties held down for it? How come it needs to again hold the Electoral Act’s Golden Gun aloft, strewn with all manner of rainbow-colour threads, for all to see? Why? I raced for my copy of Dirsus’. Dictators are also created in small amulets and little effigies. Yes, their liar is a den of secrets. Yes, power is personalised in their pouch. Yes, proximity to dictators is more important than formal power. Yes, they run on whispers, clandestine deals and cover-ups. But, dictators don’t fall in one fell swoop. Tyrants and closet tyrants fall day by day. There will always come a tipping point. That day, the fear of the people and the confidence of the tyrant will exchange sides. The people will be confident and tyrants who do all manner of things to stay in office will nurse fear like a painful sore. That was what it was for Gaddafi.
Now, last week was a huge celebration in Nigeria. Mama Nigeria, wife of the president, Mrs. Oluremi Tinubu, had just harvested a plaque of honour from saber-rattling American president, Donald Trump. Everything else had failed and the irascible Trump morphed into a chimera. Chimera was the Greek mythological goat, a monstrous hybrid creature depicted with the head of a lion; a goat’s head on its back, and a serpent for a tail. With its head in the middle, ancient myth said it breathed blazing fire. So when Trump went gun-ablazing last year, Aso Rock was seized by indescribable spasm. Political traducers said Trump was actually gunning for a replacement of the president in the 2027 elections.
But, what money cannot do, more money will, was a clandestine quote ascribed to the husband of the latest American honorific, the Nigerian president. So Villa thinkers set a-thinking. Money can do it. Chris Smith, America’s House foreign affairs Africa subcommittee chairman was the one who burst the bubble. Nigeria had entered into lobbying deals with some American concerns to influence the US government and secure Trump’s smile, said Smith. That deal fructified with last December hiring of the DCI Group, a lobbying firm, for $9 million. Its brief was to communicate the Tinubu government to Trump pleasantly. Some strands of Nigerian money also went into it from other friendly purses. Same month, Matthew Tonlagha, vice-chairman of Tantita Security Services, contracted Valcour Global Public Strategy, a Washington-based lobbying firm, to clean up the smelly anus of the Tinubu government.
Thank God for little mercies. Last Thursday, Nigeria reaped dividends of her petro-dollar investments. It was at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. Since Abraham Vereide established it in the 1930s, the Breakfast has been the norm since Dwight Eisenhower broke its veil. Since Eisenhower, every American president participates in this annual politico-religious ritual. Holding his microphone, his head slanted in his usual, Trump poured a huge deodoriser on Mrs. Tinubu. Coming from a man who labeled the country the Tinubu’s govern “a disgrace”, it was indeed huge.
Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.
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