OPINION: Buhari And The APC: The Dangerous Desperation of a Drowning Despot, By Ade King

That Mohammadu Buhari is intoxicated with power is a foregone conclusion.

That he has been absolutely corrupted by the absoluteness of power that he has arrogated to himself in three odd years of being a President, is not in doubt.

What people, including many contributors on social media and some of those close to me, haven't figured out yet is how dangerously desperate this man has become in trying to hold on to power, a power that is fast slipping out of his wearied and weather-beaten hands.

We have watched his long-standing hounding of his political enemies for long.

We have watched how he has used the instruments of state to arrest, intimidate, hound and harrass high-ranking elected government officials, with the sole objective of brow-beating them into toeing his dictatorial line.

In Ekiti, video evidence first emerged at how patently dangerous this drowning man  has become.

Using armed police and soldiers to shoot at, and tear-gas the peaceful gathering of an opposing party, is the height of abhorrent dictatorship; it is an anathema to everything democratic.

The events of yesterday, July 24, 2018, send should send trepidation down the spine of any keen watcher or lover of despotic history.

It scares me to no end.

The wilful, brazen and unhidden use of state power to illegally subject the leaders of the National Assembly, and other members of the law-making body, to illegal house arrests, with the sole purpose of preventing them from going to perform the duties which we, The People, have voted them to go do, and for which trillions of naira are expended every year, should scare every student of history of despotic governments all around the world, especially in Africa.

The National Assembly (the Legislature) is an integral third of a democratic government, the Executive and the Judiciary being the others.

It's primary purpose, if my elementary Government is not rusty, is to serve as a check-and-balance on the Executive; to checkmate and prevent Executive excesses, lawlessness and arbitrariness that humans with absolute access to power are wont to exhibit.

Now, if the institution charged with the responsibilities of check-mating the Executive are themselves under the unbridled physical attack by the Executive, using the instrument of police and other military agencies, especially as we get close to an election year, every lover of freedom, of democracy, of the continued existence of Nigeria as a sovereign entity, should be worried stiff.

If Buhari could send armed military men to attack and disperse a peaceful crowd of opposition voters, on the eve of a state election, should we really expect such a man to peacefully go into an election that involves him as a person, especially one he is sure to lose?

If Buhari could send heavily-armed soldiers and policemen to restrict the movements of National Assembly members and prevent them from sitting, to stave off, albeit woefully unsuccessfully, the announcement of mass defection from his ruling party, would the man not use same heavily armed soldiers to seal up the National Assembly completely and permanently, if the legislature finds a need to institute an impeachment process against him?

In fact, are the acts of this dictator not impeachable offences already?

Buhari, in his three odd years in power, has brazenly and systematically subjected every institution of democracy in this country - same institutions he unexpectedly and undeservedly rode to power - to so much attack that one begins to wonder if he truly wanted to be a democratic President in the first place.

Or was his preference his beloved dictatorship, one he was forced to abandon some thirty four years ago, but which he obviously couldnt get again through the barrel of the gun?

That a supposedly democratically-elected President has become so dangerously desperate to the extent of using state power to attempt to cower the electorates, the Judiciary and the Legislature into submission, gives me very wild goose pimples.

But I am more scarred that 2019 that we are so looking forward to, to get rid of this bigoted aberration, may not come afterall.

And if it does, would a Buhari, who still senselessly and quite illogically holds on to his jaundiced belief that he won the presidential elections of 2003, 2007 and 2011, accept defeat and do a Jonathan?

I would have to be smoking something stronger than a Warri weed to hold any hope of that happening.

Rather, I see a man ready to plunge this nation into a senseless internecine war, than concede defeat.

The signs are omnious enough.

In his desperate attempt to stem the tide of opposition that continues to well up against him, and in his flailing attempt to swim against the very strong current of widespread public odium of him and his contraption of a government, Buhari has become a drowning man.

And a drowning man claws at every straw in sight.

As the tide and current draw him deeper into the unforgiving belly of the sea, to a certain death, the drowning man attempts, ever so desperately, to pull others down with him.

Can anyone not see the similarities between this and the many despotic dictators that have dotted the scorched-earth landscape and the chequered history of Africa and some parts of the world?