The latest Presidential election, which decisively and unambiguously chose Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the next President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, was supposedly fought with the most divisive ethno-religious separatist ever witnessed in the history of the fragile nation known as Nigeria.
Peter Obi, the Labor Party’s presidential candidate, has clearly led a raging campaign of racial intolerance and religious nonsense that has skewed the national terrain, turning the Nigerian election into an ethnic-religious struggle.
Obi rallied his troops into a shaky battle between Christianity and Islam, thus establishing a fissiparous divide among a people who had never lived in such provincial confinement.
Obi’s greatest devastation of Nigerian accomodation was his ability to entrap the crowd and the elite in his separatist campaign of slander.
As the dark monster of Obi’s deception is fading with the downpour of his manipulative goal, he still has certain individuals in his grip.
It may be simple to keep the vapid mass in thralldom.
But not the ostensibly enlightened, who should be aware of and notice the capricious puppeteer’s machinations.
It is clear that there is a rush and stampede to bind the unknowing into the puerile laager of the vanquished Obedient.
But not Chidi Amuta! That’s exactly what I thought. Amuta has been praised for his educated explanation, cultural breadth, literary elegance, and seamless analytical thinking.
Not this time. Not now. He has failed spectacularly in his mistaken assumption that despotism is synonymous with our President-Elect.
This is unfortunate. Amuta has distorted the fundamental essence of the word tyranny, which arose from the late Latin root of Tyrannus.
Tyranny is a one-man rule, an oppressive temperament that chains any opposing voice with the prison and the stake.
Tyranny is the virulent poison of a crazy dictator who absorbs the entirety of the state as a personal dominion, surrounded by the most bestial clique of killers, lunatics, hate-baiters, the bestial goon squad who invalidate all other contributions.
Tyranny can never flourish in a democratic system with institutional institutions and checks and balances to ensure governance.
Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, The Savage of Abyssinia, Calligula, and other ancient tyrants are examples of tyranny.
Sanni Abacha was the only Nigerian who embodied the dark brutality of dictatorship. No more.
In summary, tyranny is the lack of a legislative assembly’s countervailing balance, the nullification of multiple contribution, and the denial of the necessary essence of liberty inherent in alternative voice.
Unfortunately, Amuta has disinterred his once intellectual purity in a disgraceful retreat into partisan ethnic laager.
Prince Uthman Shodipe-Dosunmu wrote from Lagos Island.
