Nigeria's Democratically-Elected Tyrants

 By Andy Ezeani

The exit of the military from political administration of Nigeria in 1999 and the attendant restoration of democratic order was expected to engender the ethos of civil contention of ideas and liberal disposition in the political space. These, after all, are the hallmark of democracy, the antithesis of the command structure of the military that had gone.

Considering that military rule prevailed for a very long time in the country, it was not unexpected that some mannerisms of the defunct regime will linger after them. But for how long? This is the question that has become relevant and increasingly worrisome, against the backdrop of disturbing undemocratic tendencies that seem determined not to go away, years after the military left the scene.

I Will Tell General Sani Abacha

By Dan Amor

Sunday June 8, 2014 indubitably marked the sixteenth anniversary of the death of General Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s most treacherous tyrant and who ranked with Agathocles and Dionysus I of Sicily, as the greatest dictators, not only of antiquity but of all time. 

*Abacha

It is true that the degree of cruelty and loathsome human vulgarity that the Abacha era epitomized is already fading into the background because of the mundane and short character of the human memory. But his timely exit ought to have been marked by Nigerians just as the United Nations marks the end of the Second World War not only for posterity but also as a thanksgiving to God for extricating us from such epoch of human misery.