Tinubu: The making of a dictator

By Emmanuel Onwubiko

The Dictionary of Oxford Languages defines a dictator as “a ruler with total power over a country, typically one who has obtained control by force.” In another breath, the same dictionary defines a dictator as “a person who behaves in an autocratic way.” An autocrat is “a ruler who has absolute power,” so argues the definition obtained online from the Dictionary of Oxford Languages.

Going by the above, it is clear that a dictator and a democrat are polar opposites because a democrat, as defined by the Dictionary of Oxford Languages, is “a person who believes in the rule of the people”. One of the finest explanations of the conceptual framing of democracy remains that of Abraham Lincoln, who defined democracy as “a government of the people by the people and for the people”.

By all indications, dictatorship, as opposed to democracy, is a deeply frightening fundamental threat to the exercise of freedoms and human rights that are inherent, universal, and inalienable for all of humanity. Human Rights are those rights that are inherently and naturally human and belong to humanity.

Mancur Olson, in his piece titled “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development, offers the following postulation: “Under anarchy, uncoordinated competitive theft by “roving bandits” destroys the incentive to invest and produce, leaving little for either the population or the bandits. Both can be better off if a bandit sets himself up as a dictator—a “stationary bandit” who monopolizes and rationalizes theft in the form of taxes.”

Mancur Olson argued further thus: “A secure autocrat has an encompassing interest in his domain that leads him to provide a peaceful order and other public goods that increase productivity. Whenever an autocrat expects a brief tenure, it pays him to confiscate those assets whose tax yield over his tenure is less than their total value. This incentive, plus the inherent uncertainty of succession in dictatorships, implies that autocracies will rarely have good economic performance for more than a generation. The conditions necessary for a lasting democracy are the same necessary for the security of property and contract rights that generate economic growth”.

Writing specifically about the political development unfolding in Nigeria at the moment, it is sadly true that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is silently demolishing every democratic platform and institution embedded in the Grund Norm that ought to guarantee the sustenance of constitutional democracy. These democratic institutions and systems that are grounded and supported by the constitution of Nigeria are actively undermined in a bid by the President to transform himself into a dictator.

The reason the current President is progressively becoming a dictator is because of the distorted manner of democratic power transition from one administration to the other. The succession into the office of president of a newly elected president is in such a way that if the winner of a disputed presidential poll is inaugurated even when litigation challenging his electoral victory is being contested at the court, it is difficult to explain that the beneficiary of a disputed presidential election will behave like an angel by not abusing the presidential, executive power at his disposal to dictate to the judiciary how to determine the litigation mounted against his electoral victory.

In this case in point, Bola Ahmed Tinubu was sworn in as president amidst heavy disputation about the credibility of the February 2023 presidential poll, which Tinubu’s main opponents believe was anything but free, fair, and transparent.

To be candid, the year 2023 presidential poll conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission was not in any way transparent because the electoral umpire sabotaged the electronic transmission of the presidential poll results in real-time from the polling centers even when the results of the National Assembly seats were transmitted electronically. Both the presidential and legislative elections happened simultaneously. The electoral tribunal, the appeal, and the supreme courts were manipulated by the office of the newly inaugurated president whose electoral victory was challenged, so these court systems happily accepted to overlook that fundamental crime by INEC, which made the court validate the poll.

As time passed, the newly inaugurated president Tinubu quickly acted to ensure that his political surrogates in the National Assembly became the leaders in both chambers, which the president achieved in June of last year, barely a month after his inauguration. From June of last year till now, Nigeria hasn’t seen the principle of separation of powers in practice even when sections 4,5, and 6 of the constitution envisaged that checks and balances are critical to the sustenance of democracy built on the two pinnacles of transparency and accountability.

Fast forward to July this year, when stories started circulating of nationwide protests against bad governance, it is not surprising that the president went to full throttle to try to stop the protests under different guises, such as brandishing false intelligence of foreign sponsorship and the plot to hijack the protests. To be candid, only a fool will believe what is coming out of the politically biased mouths of politically exposed persons working for the government concerning the protests that eventually happened but were heavily suppressed by the use of brute force by the president through the armed forces. The fact that police and even soldiers opened fire with live bullets and killed protesters shows the extent to which the government went to suppress the protests.

It is also suspected that some thugs were mobilized by politicians in the Federal Government to infiltrate the protests and generate anarchy in the core Northern States of Kano, Katsina, Kaduna, Borno, and Niger state. In Kano, thugs invaded the Kano state High Court and went straight for the case file of the immediate past governor, who is facing criminal charges from the incumbent government in Kano. Since the armed forces subverted the exercise of the constitutional freedom of peaceful assembly, there has been a cacophony of propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation oozing out of the mouths of the key heads of the institutions of the security services with different tales of how some foreign powers sponsored the protests.

To try to validate these lies, the DSS arrested Polish exchange students of Bayero University in Kano who were on an exchange program but who, out of curiosity, watched the protests in Kano, but the Europeans were rounded up as those who facilitated the hoisting of Russian flags during the protests in the North. The question is, is Poland under Russia, that the Polish students will now be used as agents to distribute the Russian flags? This is a lie from the pit of hell.

Predictably, Polish diplomats in early August said they were making progress as they appealed for the release of seven citizens who were detained in Nigeria in what Warsaw believes was a misunderstanding that happened as protests were underway in the West African country.

As aforementioned, six Polish students and a lecturer from Warsaw University, who were taking part in a program to study the Hausa language, were detained earlier this August in the state of Kano in northern Nigeria. The foreign news cable reported that Nigeria’s secret service said they were arrested for carrying Russian flags during a protest — something Polish officials say they find unlikely. The Polish consul in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, met with the detained students as Poland sought to clarify their legal situation. They “are feeling well and in good condition. They are currently living in a hotel in a good city district,” Poland’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “No charges have been brought against them, and procedures are underway to conclude the investigation.

“Deputy Foreign Minister Jakub Wisniewski appealed to Nigeria to allow the students and lecturer to return home to their families, briefing reporters after meeting separately with Nigeria’s chargé d’affaires and the families of the detained Poles. “During the meeting, I conveyed that I was convinced the student’s behavior could have resulted from their ignorance of local customs, culture, and laws. I appealed for the possibility of their return to Poland, to their homes, where their families are waiting for them,” Wisniewski said.

The above narratives demonstrate that the story that foreigners were deeply involved in organizing the protests against hunger, poverty, economic deprivation, and bad governance does not hold water. The NSA says over N82 billion were intercepted as money meant to fund the protests and that some politicians have been detained, but he failed to name names in Nigeria, government officials are not accountable to the people and they make use of propaganda and disinformation, and they get away with such bad behaviours because the citizens are not seriously concerned about insisting on accountability and full disclosure.

The aversion to civil protests by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is symptomatic of a budding dictator because dictators do not tolerate free speech. The National Assembly and the judiciary are all but captured by the executive arm of government. The only category of people that must guard against the total evolution of the president into a full-blown dictator is the people of Nigeria. The people of Nigeria are constantly divided by politicians using tribes, religion, and other banalities to create a wedge against any unified civil action to defend constitutional democracy. The ball is in our court as citizens to either accept to be slaves and captives of the government that doesn’t care about our well-being and welfare or to actively resist these attempts, subterranean and publicly, by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to achieve TOTAL STATE CAPTURE.

• Onwubiko is head of the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria and Was a National Commissioner of the National Human Rights Commission of Nigeria.