A Dictatorship Masquerading As Democratic Governance In Kaduna State – Gora Dauda

January 10, 2018 Greg Abolo

The Oasis Reporters

January 10, 2018

As a resident of Kaduna City, I am eminently qualified to comment on the travails the population in Kaduna State is passing through. We are supposed to be practising or operating a democratic government but what is playing out and has played out since May 29, 2015 in Kaduna State cannot by any stretch of the imagination bear any relationship with the tenets of democracy. Our Kaduna State technically is like a state under an army of occupation.

The very pillars upon which hung the place of Kaduna in the comity of other States making up Nigeria have all been viciously pulled down. We are without a shred of doubt, under a gangster government.
How else will anyone describe a government whose primary objective was at inception to put under, those other institutions which together make up a democratic government?
The Kaduna State House of Assembly as we use to know it has simply been put under, to the level that the entire House is nothing short of a RUBBER STAMP for the dictator.
On the surface of it, the APC being the Party on which the dictator rode to power has been thoroughly emasculated to the level of insignificance.

The dictator rules in much the same style and manner of King Louis XIV of France (1638 – 1715) who, drunken with power boastfully declared, ” ‘L’etat C’est M’oir,” meaning “I am the State” or, “The State is me,” at that time or there about King Louis XIV could have been right but the French revolution 1789 – 1799 was to prove that France was not any king’s personal estate or that France was many times bigger than him or any King after him.

As it turned out, King Louis made this boast not very long after the Social Contact Theory advanced by the trio of Thomas Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, the godfathers of modern democracy.
It may be possible that the French dictator was so engrossed in the immense powers he wielded to have been aware that the times were changing fast.

Today almost 303 years after Louis XIV, a 21st Century equivalent has dubiously come to power in Kaduna State of Nigeria. This character having hidden behind the mask of a democrat to come to power is now baring the vicious fangs and claws of the dictator that he really is. This character diminutive in stature and an elite by every standard has completely turned his back on the electorate while riding roughshod over every democratic institution that has given democracy it’s name. This man has turned Kaduna State into one huge battle field.

It is either he is warring against the traditional institutions who have been a stabilizing force in a State with a history of combustibility. In this theatre, he has scored a pyrrhic victory of sort, or ordering his demolition squads to bring down structures that belong mostly to those seen as his political opponents.

Not tired of conquest like Napoleon Bonaparte of old (1769 – 1821), he ordered his conquering battalions to engage the 23 Local Councils in the State that he has quickly reduced to a grovelling and lachrymal lot.
It’s hard to forget that he had first made sure he had so terribly wraught such a devastating defeat on the State House of Assembly that none could even afford to bark.

This modern day Napoleon has not spared even the State Civil Service, he is sacking people using very questionable criteria. Neither has the judiciary been spared of the jackboot mentality. Whilst on the one hand he is quick to disregard the judgement of the courts, on the other hand he threatens his subjects with arrests and prosecution.

Currently, a bloody engagement is underway between our Napoleon Bonaparte and the Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT) and the the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) over the planned dismissal of about 22,000 teachers who were ambushed in a dubious and highly controversial competency test administered to the teachers the pass mark of which was jacked up to 75%.
The Teachers’ Union is arguing that there are no such standards anywhere in the world. Besides, they are questioning the competence of the body which organised the test.

Before the close of last year a court ruled that the status quo should be maintained pending further hearing. Our Napoleon has disrespected the ruling of the court and gone ahead to issue backdated letters of sack to the teachers.

How can anyone call this character a democrat?
He has earlier been chronicled as a seasoned lair and traitor by very highly placed leaders in this country. He is noted for being cunning and only loyal to himself and none other. His highly dictatorial impulses and instincts have occasioned a schism right through the State chapter of the APC.
Shockingly, all entreaties to get the National Headquarters of the APC to help reconcile the various factions of the APC in this State have fallen on deaf ears. The understanding we have is that the Headquarters of the APC prefers the dictator to the rest of us. Let me assure the Headquarters of the APC that we in Kaduna State are done with the gangsterism masquerading as governance and are waiting for 2019. We shall not only be casting our votes, we shall be on standby to protect and escort the votes to the collation centres and ensure that they count.