By Lasisi Olagunju
General Sani Abacha was a great teacher. He pioneered the doctrine of consensus candidacy in Nigeria. He founded a country of five political parties and when it was time for the parties to pick their candidates for the presidency, all the five reached a consensus that the man fit for the job was Abacha himself. Today, from party primaries to consensus candidacy; from setting the opposition on fire, to everything and everything, Abacha’s students are showing exceptionally remarkable brilliance.
Anti-Abacha democrats of 28 years ago are orchestrating and celebrating the collapse of opposition parties today. They are rejoicing at the prospect of a one-party, one-candidate presidential election in 2027. Abacha did the same. So, what are we saying? Children who set out to resemble their parents almost always exceed their mark; they recreate the parents in perfect form and format. Abacha was a democrat; his pupils inherited his political estate and have, today, turned it into an academy. Its classes are bursting at the seams with students and scholars. Aristotle and his Lyceum will be green with envy, and very jealous of this busy academy.
Like it was under Abacha, the opposition suffers from a blaze ignited by the palace. But, and this is where I am going: fires, once started, rarely obey and respect their makers.
My friend, the storyteller, gave me an old folktale of a man who thought the world must revolve around him, alone. One cold night, the man set his neighbours’ huts on fire so he alone would stand as the ‘big man’ of the village. The man watched with satisfaction as the flames rose, dancing dangerously close to the skies. But the wind had a scheme of its own. It hijacked the fire, lifted it, and dropped it squarely on the arsonist’s own thatched roof. By dawn, all huts in the village had become small heaps of ash.
Fire, in all cultures, is a communal danger; whoever releases it cannot control its path. The Fulani warn that he who lights a fire in the savannah must not sleep among dry grass, a wisdom another African people echo by saying that the man who sets a field ablaze should not lie beside raffia in the same field.
Yet our rulers strike anti-opposition matches with reckless confidence, believing fire is a loyal servant that burns only the huts of opponents. They forget that power is a strong wind, and wind has no party card and respects none.
When it is state policy to weaken institutions, criminalise dissent and have rivals crushed with the excuse of order, the blaze spreads quietly, patiently, until it reaches the bed of its maker. Fire does not negotiate; it does not remember or know who started it (iná ò mo eni ó dáa). In politics, as in the grassland, those who weaponise flames rarely die with unburnt roofs over their heads.
The folktale above is the story of today’s ruling party. People in power think it is wisdom to weaken, scatter, or destroy opposition platforms outright. They have forgotten the ancient lesson of the village: when you burn every hut around you, you leave nothing to break the wind when it blows back.
A democratic system that cannibalises opposition always ends up consuming itself. Our First Republic is a golden example to cite here. History is full of parties that dug graves for their rivals and ended up falling inside.
Literature is rich with warnings about the danger of lighting fires; they more often than not get out of control. In Duro Ladipo’s Oba Koso, Sango is the lord of fire and ultimately victim of his fire. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, we see how a single spark of regicide grows into a blaze of paranoia and bloodshed that ultimately consumes Macbeth himself. In D. O. Fagunwa’s Adiitu Olodumare, we see how Èsù léhin ibejì is consumed by the fire of his intrigues; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart shows a similar pattern with Macbeth: Okonkwo’s role in Ikemefuna’s death ignites a chain of misfortunes that destroys his honour and his life. In The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s characters take turns to unleash hysteria through lies, only to be trapped by the inferno they created. Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame and even Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein echo the same lesson. Again and again, literature insists that those who start dangerous fires, whether of ambition, deceit, violence, or pride, should never expect to sleep safely. Always, the tongue of the flames turns and returns home.
Abacha must be very proud that the democrats who fought and hounded him to death have turned out his faithful students. From NADECO to labour unions and to the media, every snail that smeared Abacha with its slime is today rubbing its mouth on the hallowed hallways of his palace.
Under Abacha, to be in opposition was to toy with trouble. Under this democracy, all opposition parties suffer pains of fracture. Parallel excos here; factional groups there.
Opposition figures are in greater trouble. It does not take much discernment before anyone knows that Tiger it is that is behind Oloruntowo’s troubles; Oloruntowo is not at all a bad dog. But how long in comfort can the troubler be?
In 1996, Professor Jeffrey Herbst of the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, United States, asked: “Is Nigeria a Viable State?” He went on to assert — and predict — that “Nigeria does not work and probably cannot work.” He said the country was failing not from any other cause but “from a particular pattern of politics … that threatens to even further impoverish the population and to cause a catastrophic collapse…”
That was Nigeria under Abacha. We struggled to avert that “catastrophic collapse”; with death’s help, we got Abacha off the cockpit, and birthed for ourselves this democracy. Now, we are not even sure of the definitions of ‘state’, ‘viable’ and ‘viability’. What is sure is that the “particular pattern of politics” that caught the attention of the American in 1996 is here in 2025. As it was under Sani Abacha, everyone today sings one song, the same song.
Abacha died in 1998; Abacha is alive in 2025. It is strange that his family members are not celebrating. How can you win a race and shut yourself up? My people say happiness is too sweet to be endured. The default response to joy is celebration, but we are not seeing it in the family of the victorious Abacha.
Because the man in dark goggles professed this democracy, this democracy and its democrats have apotheosised Abacha; he is their prophet. They take their lessons from his sacred texts; his shrine is their preferred place of worship.
“As surely as I live, says the Lord, every knee will bow before Me; every tongue will confess to God.” — Romans 14:11. Our political lords copied those words and, in profaned arrogance, read it to Nigeria and its terrorised people. Now, everyone, from governors to the governed, bows; their tongue confesses that the president is king, unqueriable and unquestionable.
When a man is truly blessed, all the world, big and small, will line up to bless him and the work of his hand. Governors of all parties are singing “Bola on Your Mandate We Shall Stand.” In the whole of southern Nigeria, only one or two governors are not singing his anthem. Northern governors sing “Asiwaju” better and with greater gusto than the owners of the word. In their obsessive love for the big man’s power and the largesse it dispenses, they assume that “Asiwaju” is the president’s first name. They say “President Asiwaju.” The last time a leader was this blessed was 1998 — twenty-seven years ago.
Our thirst for disaster is unslaked. All that the man wanted was to be president; he became president and our progressive democrats are making a king out of him. And we watch them and what they do either in sheepish horror, complicit acquiescence or in criminal collusion. We should not blame the leader for seeing in himself Kabiyesi. That is the status we conferred on him. Even the humblest person begins to gallop once put on a horse. True. Humility or simplicity disappears the moment power unlimited is offered.
The chant of the president’s personal anthem is what Pawley and Müllensiefen call “Singing along.” It is never a stringless act. Worse than Abacha’s Two-Million-Man March, we see two hundred million people, crowds of crowds, move together in one voice, bound by an invisible script and spell.
We feel a ‘terrorised’ democracy where citizens learn, through bowing, concurring and context rather than conviction, to sing the song of the kingly emperor. People who are not sure of anything again discover that synchronised voices create safety and belonging. They proceed to stage it as a ritual for economic and political survival.
The popular Abacha badge decorated the left and right breasts of many fallen angels. Collective chanting signalled loyalty and reduced individual risk. Under this regime of democrats, the badge will soon come, but the chant is louder and wider cast. Unitarised voices have become instruments through which power is normalised, and by which dissent is dissolved.
Two years into this democracy in 2001, Nigerian-American professor of African history and global studies, Raphael Chijioke Njoku, warned that “new democracies often revert to dictatorships.” He was a prophet and his scholarship prescient.
We are there.
There are sorries to say and apologies to drop. On September 8, 1971, Nigeria killed Ishola Oyenusi and his armed robbery gang members because they stole a few thousands of Nigerian pounds. Why did the past have to shoot them when it knew it would stage greater heists in the future? It is the same with Sani Abacha and his politics. Why did we fight him so viciously if this grim harbour was our destination? I do not have to say it before you know that the spirit of the dead is out celebrating its vindication.
American political scientist, Samuel Huntington, in his The Third Wave, lists four typologies of authoritarian regimes: one-party, personal, military and racial oligarchy. The last on this list (racial) we may never experience in Nigeria, but we’ve seen military rule and its unseemly possibilities. The emergence of the first two (one-party and personal dictatorship) was what we fought and quenched in the struggle with Abacha.
Unfortunately, the evil we ran out of town has now walked in to assert its invincibility. What did Abacha’s sons do that today’s children of Eli are not doing ten-fold? Democracy is a scam, or, at best, an ambush.
Politicians have borrowed God’s language without His temperament. They have restructured the Presidential Villa into Nigeria’s Mount Sinai where commandments descend on tablets of gold bars. The whole country has become an endless Sunday service; the president sits on the altar, ministers and party chieftains swing incense burners, emitting smokes of deceit and self-righteousness; the masses kneel in reverence and awe of power. They look up to their Lord Bishop, the president, as he dispenses sweet holy communion to the converted — and dips the bottom of the stubborn into baptismal hot waters. We were not fair to Sani Abacha.
We cannot eat banana and have swollen cheek. But we can eat banana and have swollen cheeks. What will account for the difference is the sacrifice we offer to the mouth of the world.
The words of the world rebuke absolute power. By choking the space for alternative voices, my Fulani friend said the ruling party is setting the whole political village ablaze, including the patch of ground on which its own structure stands. No parties or leaders survive the inferno they unleash on others. The flame of the fire the ruling party ignites and fans today will, inevitably, find its way home tomorrow.
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
