By Festus Adedayo

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.

Fast-forward to February 15, 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. He 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 October 20, 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.

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, Tripoli. Earlier, three of Gaddafi’s sons were also killed in the uprising that eventually consumed him.


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.

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.

Once they encounter an issue that troubles them, my people surrender themselves to the embrace of the allegory of the pouched rat, the Okete. 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 Gbedu 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 Oro p’esi je moment. Literally, it means that word had swallowed response/meaning. What kind of song does one sing to that cryptic Gbedu drumming? Like the Gbedu drum itself, the Okete allegory mirrors an existential dilemma.


Mrs Tinubu’s Trump
A number of events that occurred in Nigeria last week signify a de ja vu, an Oro p’esi 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 ofon. 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 gbegiri 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: “ofon to-o gbegiri, k’onikaluku o k’eko re dani”.

How does anyone link 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 stakeholders are unanimous that the Akpabio legislature had some “America Wonder” tricks up its sleeves. If the 10th Senate is allowed to block electronic transmission of results, it will be a perfect prelude to rigging the 2027 elections. If their ploy is not countermanded on time, fighting the 2027 election with them would be akin to, again in the words of Tatalo Alamu, wearing a high-heeled pair of shoes (bata) on a lame, (atiro) preparatory for a 100-meter dash.

If you read Trinidad and Tobago-born British writer, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad (V.S.) 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.

Come to think of it, “sebi” we are told that Aso Rock is so fortified and is standing “gidigba” 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 personalized 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. 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. Indeed, the Breakfast is a political, social, and business elite forum. Holding his microphone, his head slanted in his usual, Trump looked at the crowd and sprayed a huge deodorizer on Mrs Tinubu. From a man who labeled the country the Tinubus govern “a disgrace”, that indeed was huge.

The world knows that Trump is a master of superlatives. No middle of the way. It is either ‘biggest’ or ‘smallest’. On Trump’s faith, many Americans have chosen to see him more of an anti-Christ, a Hitler-reincarnate than a Christian. At that same Washington National Prayer Breakfast, Trump did not shock Americans when he claimed without evidence that immigrants threaten churchgoers. This was a man who, on Air Force One last year, had told reporters that he was not sure that he would make heaven.

At that same breakfast meeting, Trump called a sitting Republican party member of the House of Representatives a «moron» for opposing Republican legislation. He also spoke of his inability to sleep well on airplanes, and had nothing but mockery for Christians who pray at mealtime. A few days after, Trump re-posted on X a racist photograph caricaturing Mrs. Tinubu’s black brother and sister, the Barack Obamas as apes. He has since refused to apologize. Apes are indeed obeying.

But not to worry, it was time to play politics of re-contextualization. Adams Oshiomhole, former governor of Edo State and senator representing Edo North, recently embroiled in the sleazy allegation of a libido run riot, was in Aso Rock to deflect arrows. Allegations are flying about like arrows that he was the man aboard a private jet massaging a lady’s legs. My people say that if you do not walk in the mode of the Okete giant rat, also known as Awasa, no one would offer you palm kernel, that big rat’s most sought after delicacy. Leshaan Dagama, a South African lifestyle influencer and adult content creator, later came out on her Instagram page to say, “Your senator is the problem, go be mad at him, not me”. This was after Oshiomhole had threatened fire and brimstone, while claiming that the video was AI-generated.

When it was obvious to Oshiomhole that, in the course of catching the Okete inside its hole, all he had in his hands was the peel of the rat’s tail, (Okete ti bo’ru) the Senator then visited the Villa. The mission was clear. What else could he latch on to? The celebrated Trump doggerel. Jimoh Ibrahim, the Ondo State senator, who abandoned the parliament for an ambassadorial posting, also followed the tide of this genuflection. Palace courtiers and fawners of power, they are. I am sure Gaddafi had his, too.

Very soon, the political elite who hold over Nigeria’s tomorrow would realize that they are the Okete who, on the day of the festivity for their mother’s funeral, they had eaten the animal hide meant for making the drum for the entertainment of guests. By then, it would be too late. All that would be heard is the sorrowful tune of a dirge.

By Tope Ajayi

Our habit of amending our electoral laws almost every election cycle deserves serious scrutiny. The popular justification, continuous improvement, sounds persuasive but does not withstand close examination.

It cannot be the case that credible elections are only possible if electoral laws are rewritten every four years. If that were true, stable democracies would be in permanent legislative flux. Countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Africa, the neighbouring Ghana and Benin Republic all conduct regular elections. Yet, it is difficult to find evidence that they amend their electoral laws before every round of general elections. Their systems improve not because the rules are endlessly rewritten, but because institutions mature, enforcement is strengthened and political actors improve at internalising democratic norms.

The question, therefore, is not what laws they are passing, but what behaviours and institutional disciplines they are sustaining that we are not. I am all for compulsory electronic transmission of election results. But it is drunkenly optimistic to assume that merely writing it into law will automatically improve electoral outcomes.

We must understand that laws do not conduct elections. People do. The fixation on legal amendments often obscures a more uncomfortable truth. Nigeria’s electoral problems are less about rules and more about conduct.
Our political class and, increasingly, civil society actors, have become addicted to buzzwords. Every election cycle produces a fresh vocabulary designed to animate advocacy, sustain NGO ecosystems and give the impression of reform. But elections will only improve when politicians accept a basic democratic reality. In every contest, someone wins and someone loses.

The controversy surrounding the 2023 presidential election illustrates this problem clearly. The candidate who came third has continued, years later, to insist that he won. He attributes his loss to rigging, particularly the alleged failure to transmit results in real time to the IReV portal.

It has been nearly three years since we had the election that produced President Bola Tinubu and just as long since results from over 170,000 polling units were uploaded to the portal. If the results declared and signed at polling units truly differ from those published online, three years offer more than enough time for political parties, civil society organisations and election observers to present credible counter-results. None has done so.

This silence is telling. The reality is straightforward. Voting is manual. Ballot papers are counted manually. Results are written manually after BVAS accreditation. Party agents sign these results and retain copies. Whether transmission is delayed or instantaneous does not alter what was recorded at the polling unit.

Technology can enhance transparency, but it cannot manufacture outcomes. The most significant electoral reforms Nigeria has achieved since 1958 are the Permanent Voter’s Card and electronic accreditation via BVAS. These innovations have drastically reduced ballot stuffing and election-day brigandage. No polling unit can now return results exceeding the number of accredited voters captured on BVAS. That is real reform, not rhetorical progress.

If compulsory real-time transmission of results will provide emotional or psychological reassurance to aggrieved actors, the National Assembly can include it. But it should do so without illusions.

Those determined to reject defeat will always find something else to blame. If not IReV today, it will be another contrivance tomorrow. Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of electoral laws. It suffers from a shortage of democratic restraint, institutional discipline and political maturity. Until those change, no amount of legislative tinkering will deliver the elections we claim to desire.

Ajayi is the senior special assistant to President Tinubu on media and publicity

(From the archives in reaction to former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s latest efforts to rally Rabiu Kwakwanso and Peter Obi to topple President Bola Tinubu in 2027 presidential poll).

By Wole Olujobi

He appropriates Oedipus orientation in consummate complexity. Raised and augured to preserve a kingdom, Oedipus, a grand patron of hubris, fell into a complex interplay of fate and pride to become an albatross to the kingdom he sought to preserve.

Sophocles in his play ‘Oedipus Rex’ presents a gripping narrative of a man at the mercy of fate, but who pride would not allow to rediscover himself until he suffers irredeemable consequences.

The ancient legend of Oedipus, the mythical king of Thebes who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, in several of his sojourns, lived in Tenea, a mythical lost city in Greece, according to the Greek mythology.

As recently as 1984, one of the Greece’s top archaeologists, Eleni Korka, a Greek-American, made the biggest discovery of her 40-year career: the mythical city of Tenea, which was built by Trojan prisoners of war sometime around 1100BC.

After a laborious excavation by Korka and her team, the abandoned Tenea City in ruins was discovered to harbour golden carvings and other precious, high levels of art that could turn the fortunes of the delerict city of Tenea for good.

As it is with both Oedipus and Tenea, so it is for Nigeria and General Olusegun Obasanjo (rtd), former President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as Nigerians again prepare for the February 2023 ballot to elect their President.

After long years of misrule that left Nigerians at the mercy of poverty and Nigeria herself in the throe of ruins, conscious efforts were made to find a befitting leader to turn the nation’s fortunes for good after the conspiracy among the Nigerian ruling elite claimed MKO Abiola’s life in 1998, the unfortunate incident that sank Nigeria in the abyss like was the case with the lost city of Tenea.

And so like archaeologist Korka, Nigerian ‘archaeologists’ in military fatigue led by Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Abdusalami Abubakar, dug through the length and breadth of the thoroughly degraded Nigeria to find a leader to turn the nation’s fortunes for good. Their search through ‘diligent excavation’, just like that of Korka, yielded Obasanjo, who had already decayed in General Sani Abacha’s gulag like the ruins of Tenea. Pronto, most parts of Nigeria hooted, prospecting that the nation had found fortune and so had hit the road to prosperity.

But unlike Korka, what the Nigeria’s “excavators” found was never gold, but a crippling albatross in the class of Oedipus: a fortune turned awry that opened the floodgate to compound-complex problems that stalk Nigerians even in their sleep.

For instance, Obasanjo met Nigeria in her sorry state with the power supply capacity at 4,700 megawatts in 1999, but after spending $16billion by his PDP administration, Nigerians discovered that their leader had spent such colossal sum to purchase darkness as power generation plummeted to 3,500 megawatts after eight ruinous years in government.

During Obasanjo’s administration, mass political murders debuted in Nigeria, and symbolically, from his party, as all unprecedented political murders in Nigeria were recorded only in PDP during the administration that lost the nation’s chief law officer, the late Chief Bola Ige, Obasanjo’s bosom friend, to PDP’s top marksmen in the game of death.

From Halliburton multi-billion scam to Third Term bribery scandal that shocked the world when millions of naira in cash were ferried into the National Assembly Chambers to bribe lawmakers, other anti-social conducts debuted that threatened the moral fibre of a burgeoning society that Nigerians hoped to build after Obasanjo won the cake but held the stick.

As it turned out, Nigerians knew poverty as a common room-mate while alleged personal fortunes of the President reportedly grew in leaps and bounds as revealed recently by former Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose, a member of PDP.

Propelled by depravity fuelled by monopolistic and narcissistic mania to control power in his native Yoruba land with scant regard for any other Yoruba man to climb the same ladder of power, and stoutly buffeted by his messianic pretensions fueled by hubris, he had sold a confounding quixotic allegiance to nation-building, posturing as the only one with the magic wand to fix the nation’s problems. Or that if he can’t take the lead, the choice of who leads must be his exclusive preserve. He allegedly did everything possible to block the evergreen sage, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, from governing Nigeria and he allegedly succeeded, according to history books.

Even though Nigerians voted for the late MKO Abiola in the June 12, 1993 presidential election in what turned out to be the freest and fairest election in Nigerian history, this megalomaniacal fantasy and contempt towards fellow Yoruba leader allegedly seized Obasanjo and took him around the world, raising false accusations against Abiola and claiming that he was not the Messiah that Nigerians needed. Yet the same Abiola did his best to canvass support for Obasanjo while seeking to contest as the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Instead of supporting Abiola, Obasanjo was allegedly selling a formula that would make a Yoruba man the head of an Interim Government with himself as that Yoruba figure that must allegedly lead that selfish contraption.

Any wonder he has chosen another anti-Yoruba assignment for himself, this time, to allegedly campaign against the nation’s foremost promising presidential candidate with impeccable records of performance and achievements, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in the February 2023 presidential election, all because he will not support any other Yoruba man to aspire to any position that seeks to compel and confer same authority he once enjoyed in the nation’s political leadership.

He started his political domination in 2003 when the greatest electoral heists were recorded in Nigeria by foisting his men on Yoruba people as governors in what later turned out a disaster for the Yoruba people. Except in Lagos where Tinubu resisted Obasanjo’s onslaught, the entire Yoruba land came under Obasanjo’s jackboots, as the people moaned in shrieks of pains, even as all stories of political assassinations in Nigeria were mainly reported from the South West states.

According to Aremo Segun Osoba, all the South West governors in the opposition Alliance For Democracy (AD), including Tinubu, rallied support for Obasanjo to weather his impeachment storm masterminded by his own party only to turn around against the same AD governors in an election fraud allegedly orchestrated by Obasanjo that swept all of them from power in 2003 polls.

Just a few years after his jack-knife democracy began, virtually all the leaders he allegedly forced on Yoruba people as governors were in courts facing criminal trials over alleged frauds and assassinations.

The blood-cuddling accounts of political misfortunes of that epoch in the South West will remain an evergreen memento in the Yoruba chequered political history.

Even though Obasanjo is never reported as having recorded sterling performance in both military command posts as well as in government, he prides himself as the best to happen to Nigeria. And when he was confronted recently in a foreign television interview over alleged misdeeds in government, he offered no concrete evidence of a disciplined leadership, instead, he raved, raked and raged in a tempest of anger as he stammered to no end in a croaking voice.

He is the man now out to work against Asiwaju Tinubu and Kashim Shettima, two exemplars in modern governance and urbane visionary scholars of the Harvard school, who know the rules of engagements in political thoughts, and an immense influence on young Nigerian professionals and politicians in their tasks to climb their leadership ladders. Obasanjo has no such track records.

This is the difference between a dream killer and destiny helper. While Tinubu and Shettima choose career progression for young Nigerians North or South, Obasanjo chooses wreckage of their leadership ships. Ask Bode George, Sunday Afolabi, Murtala Ashorobi, Adolphus Wabara, Audu Ogbeh and Ayo Fayose, among others. This much his daughter, Iyabo Obasanjo, admitted in her media expose and supported by her mother in another burst of anger fuelled by alleged famed Obasanjo’s moral deficiencies.

He did it to his Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, over alleged offences bordering on inappropriate conducts in governance, even though Nigerians can’t differentiate between himself and Atiku during their party’s ruinous 16 years rule that took Nigerians to the Golgotha of want and hopelessness, particularly after PDP members shared security funds allocated by the Federal Government to fight terrorism in the country. For that sleaze and theft on the nation’s till, terrorists and bandits now knock Nigerians’ doors 24/7 effortlessly in careless raids to seize their wives and other possessions.

While Atiku has his albatross in poor performance as Vice President over alleged sale of national patrimony to cronies at half-pence, Nigerians are today talking about Peter Obi’s notoriety in alleged uncanny capacity for telling lies; all hidden in the famed Pandora Files and misrule that turned Anambra people on their heads for survival. He is Obasanjo’s candidate in what promises to be a cliffhanger poll.
Obi, a prized merchant of the Shylock school, will soon find out that he is just a cannon folder in a complex game of wits to achieve a predetermined end.

Conversely, Tinubu and Shettima have backgrounds they are coming from as very brilliant professionals with a clear vision and mission in governance process. Tinubu deployed this process when Obasanjo erected roadblock on his mission to grow Lagos to a bustling economy for millions of Nigerians, North and South, to survive by seizing the federal allocations to the state, while Shettima is a model of modern governance process in Northern Nigeria.

But Tinubu showed his strength of character and avowed commitment to growth as a philosophy in governance by even creating more local governments that thrived without federal pay to the amazement of Obasanjo in the malice corners of his Aso Rock precincts.

Today, Lagos is the fifth largest economy in Africa, courtesy of Tinubu’s visionary leadership; a record Obasanjo never achieved, can never achieve; and the feat he hates to appreciate and will never acknowledge about the quality of the presidential candidate of APC.

A distraught cynic in a viral video moans that Nigeria will never make progress until Obasanjo bids farewell to the light. I do not share that sentiment, though.

While the abandoned Tenea held promise for the glory of Greece, the rehabilitated Obasanjo from Abacha’s dungeon in full throttle stands for the sabotage of his own race.

As the nation prepares for the February 23 presidential election, Nigerians should not seek solidarity with Obasanjo in his aberrant design or allow his counsel to sway their political behaviours. Obasanjo’s counsel in political thoughts and choice is nothing but a poisoned chalice.


* Olujobi is Deputy Director, Media and Publicity, Ekiti State APC Presidential Election Committee,Ado-Ekiti

Footnote: Fate has placed Tinubu in a vantage position to rebuild Nigeria. The narcissistic Obasanjo does not want it. Therefore, Obasanjo is up in arms with Fate as he rallies Kwakwanso and Obi to seize power from Tinubu. He does not want to share power glory with anyone in his native Yoruba land, even though Fate smiles on Tinubu to succeed in his second term election. I do not know a man that wages war against fate and destiny and he wins; instead such a man becomes a pitiable victim of superior force of fate and dynamism of history. Okonkwo is my witness in ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Chinua Achebe.