Of sycophants and rulers

By Akintokunbo A Adejumo, London, UK.

A London Evening Standard columnist recently wrote that, three years ago, the world laughed at the spurious and laughable fabrications peddled by Iraqi Information Minister “Comical Ali”, and wondered who could fall for such obvious nonsense and propaganda. We now have the answer – Saddam Hussein.

According to new Pentagon reports based on captured documents and interviews with former Iraqi top officials, even at the end of March 2003, Saddam still thought he was the “invincible man”. Why? Because that’s what his ministers and generals were telling him.

This shows that there is an exception to F M Cornford’s famous definition of propaganda as “that branch of the art of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies”.

A despot who runs a reign of terror or mis-governance where no on dares to tell him the truth, will end up wholly and truly deceived. Unfortunately, it is their people who will suffer from their conceit, paranoia and incompetence.

It was not only Saddam Hussein. History is replete with them – Hitler, Mussolini, Idi Amin, the Shah of Iran, Pinochet, Stalin, Mobutu, Haile Selassie, Bokassa, Samuel Doe, Charles Taylor, and even close to home, our very own Gowon and Abacha.

This seems to be what is happening with the  sycophants and hangers-on who are desperately pushing the Third Term Agenda for President Obasanjo, and are either telling the man what he wants to hear or afraid to tell him the truth under the circumstances. Of course, these are only conjectures, as I believe OBJ is not that type of person who suffer fools gladly. The man is his own man and makes his own decisions no matter what people surrounding him say.

As Dimgba Igwe observed in the Daily Sun of Wednesday 29th March 2006, it is not Nigerians that want Obasanjo to continue for third term, after surviving him for two terms! It is the sleight in hand invention of the presidential cabal, some governors frightened by "their dirty past" to quote Governor Boni Haruna of Adamawa State, several crooked senators and legislators, greedy corporate interests and of course, the professional political parasites in the corridors of power who had played such ignoble roles in the past.

From this point, however, I beg to differ from Mr Igwe in proposing Babangida by saying, “If not Babangida who, by the way, created this national political calamity, who else is more suitable to square up in the battle?”, albeit while acknowledging IBB’s misrule and then going on to write that “Babangida’s entry into the ring is a most welcome development, perhaps the most significant development since the battle for third term engulfed the nation”.

I believe F M Cornford’s definition and instance might be applied to those idiotic and morally corrupt sycophants urging former President Babangida to come back, after eight years of misrule as a military president, a man who crushed the democratic hopes of his people, institutionalised corruption and contributed almost single-handedly to the decrepit and depraved society that we have today, to now insist that he wants to come back and rule the people of Nigeria again. The man is also clearly listening to what his lackeys are telling him or he actually likes listening to them, because they would not tell him otherwise. He had better take his ill-gotten gains and run.

A lesson to be borne in mind by megalomaniacs and tyrants everywhere – whether they are Presidents or Governors or ex-Presidents.