By Uthman Shodipe-Dosunmu
The last presidential election which comprehensively and unequivocally elected Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the next President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria was apparently waged with the most divisive ethno-religious separatism never seen in the history of the fragile union called Nigeria.
Peter Obi, the Labor Party presidential candidate for the high office obviously waged a rivening campaign of ethnic bigotry and religious twaddle, which has distorted the national landscape, slashing the Nigerian compass into an ethnic-religious duel.
Obi mustered his camp into a flawed grapple between Christianity and Islam, deliberately injecting a fissiparous division among a people who never dwelled in such provincial latitude.
Obi’s greatest destruction of the Nigerian accommodation was his ability to collar the mob and the intelligentsia into his separatist campaign of calumny.
Whereas the dark ogre of Obi’s chicanery is petering off with the deluge of his manipulative agenda, he however still holds some people in thrall.
It may be easy to hold the vacuous mob in thralldom. But not the supposedly enlightened, who ought to know and perceive the maneuverings of the mercurial puppeteer.
It is obvious now that there is a hurry and stampede to chain the unknowing into the puerile laager of the defeated Obidient.
But not Chidi Amuta! That’s what I thought. Amuta has been known for his enlightened exposition, for his cultural expansiveness, for his literary grace and effortless analytical thoughtfulness.
Not this time. Not now. He has failed incredibly in his flawed misconception of aligning tyranny with our President-elect.
This is sad. For an intellectual now apparently polluted with tribal savaging, Amuta has mangled the very integral notion of the word ‘tyranny,’ which sprang from the late Latin origin of Tyrannus.
Tyranny is a rule of one man, an oppressive disposition that shackles any oppositional voice with the dungeon and the stake.
Tyranny is about the virulent venom of a mad despot, who absorbs the totality of the state as a personal fiefdom, ringed around himself the most bestial coterie of murderers, lunatics, hate-baiters, the bestial goon squad, who nullify all plural contributions.
Tyranny can never bestir itself in a democratic dispensation, where there are institutional structures and balances to arbitrate governance.
The ancient exemplars of tyranny are Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, The Savage of Abyssinia, Calligula and many others.
Sanni Abacha was the only Nigerian that intimates the dark savagery of tyranny. No more.
In summation, tyranny is the absence of the countervailing balance of a legislative assembly, the nullification of plural contribution, the denial of the necessary essence of liberty, which inheres in alternative voice.
Sad enough, Amuta has disinterred his once intellectual purity in a shameful withdrawal into partisan ethnic laager.
•Prince Shodipe-Dosunmu, the Olóríẹkùn of Olowogbowo, is the Director-General of The Patriots Roundtable.
