Opinion
By Professor Akinyemi Onigbinde
FINALLY, in this dispensation, the season of anomie, of State capture, commenced in 2015, a sad reminder of the dark days of the stone-age goggled one, Gen. Sanni Abacha, is here, as tyranny is exhumed from its inglorious grave and mounted on a ‘democratic chariot, as it was in the days of Adolf Hitler’ Third Reich. Hitler, we must remember, successfully deployed racism to gain ascendancy as a ‘democratically-elected Chancellor of Germany. The rest, as they say, is history
Lovers of liberty need be told that this is not a time to be silent, or neutral because you do not wish to appear ‘politically-partisan’. In a season of moral crisis, neutrality is a consciously-adopted position on the side of Tyranny, Tyranny with a capital ‘T’.As Martin Luther King, Jr. Says, “…in the end, we will remember not the words of the enemies, but the silence of our friends”.
8However, the present dispensation would be recorded in historic recount, not the toxic statements of threats and actions of ethnic revanchists who deployed bigotry as political weapon in the service of incompetent, insensitive, and selfish leadership.
But historical narratives would remember and recall in its annals the eloquent silence of ‘human rights’ careerists, and others that have chosen to be ‘politically- correct’ by speaking with forked tongues..They denied the Truth, subsisting in self- denial of reality with their refusal to tell the king that he walks around the village square Naked, and that his fart chokes the village Nose
Yet, in the face of this primitive assault on Freedom with the on-going attempt to criminalize protests and political dissent,major planks on which Democracy rest, those who will live in freedom, standing on their feet, as citizens, rather than existing on their bended knees, as slaves, must reach out to every weapon of artistic expressions, in all genres, to protest this assault on individual freedom and group solidarity.As Jean-Paul Sartre, the Philosopher- Existentialist and Humanist admonishes, “Whether he is an Essayist, a Pamphleteer, a Satirist, or a Novelist, whether he speaks only of individual passion, or whether he attacks the social order, the Writer, a freeman, addressing free men, and ( free women addressing free women), has a Single subject- Freedom”
Let us protect this Estate, lest the Leviathan tear up the document of the social contract, drawn up as we departed Thomas Hobbes’ ‘State of Nature’ where life was ‘poor, solitary, nasty,brutish and short’.
11th September, 2024.
C.E.
Tags: Gen. Sanni Abacha
