Although I am neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist, but I hold this belief that dictators and tyrants are sick minds. It doesn’t always seem obvious to most people, until it is too late. And this is usually because tyrants look and act like normal persons. Even when their acts begin to verge on the abnormal, many are wont to see it as casual or momentary eccentricity. For those of them who came into power by revolution or liberation struggles, their sick minds are more difficult to discern in the early stages, as they are widely celebrated as liberators and heroes who can do no wrong. But it is this sickness of the mind that make them to become so inebriated with power, to suffer grand delusions of their own invincibility and indispensability to their nations, thus metamorphosing from respected leaders into “maximum rulers” and tin-gods.
To dictators and tyrants, power is such an intoxicating and addictive potion they cannot imagine or visualize themselves as being normal without it. At the height of power-drunkenness, dictators begin to see themselves as omnipotent gods, ultimate law-givers wielding the power of life and death, and who must be obeyed by all as a matter of duty. High-handedness, impunity, lawlessness, gross human rights abuses, and corruption, are the very hallmarks of dictatorial rule. Before you know it, they begin to act as if state power is actually their just entitlement, and thus lose sight of when to quit. It is not uncommon for dictators to perceive themselves as the state personified and to convert the national treasury into a personal piggybank. The late Nigerian tyrant, General Sani Abacha, reportedly helped himself to a big chunk of the national exchequer while he terrorized the nation.
General Omar Al-Bashir, the most ruthless, tyrannical ruler of Sudan, is the latest African dictator to bite the dust. It was only a few days before that the two-decade rule of Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria was brought to an end by months of sustained popular protests across the country. The military high command moved swiftly against him when it became clear that no amount of intimidation or crackdown would make the people back down. The soldiers saw the futility of continuing to prop up an obsolescent regime headed by a vegetative leader. Ordinarily, President Bashir who had since December 2018 been facing relentless street protests against his 30-year dictatorship should have known that the time was up for him. Two simple reasons will suffice. First, Sudanese people were already fed up with him and wouldn’t settle for anything less than his exit from power. Second, another Arab-African despot had only a few days ago been forced out by “people power”. Only a demented dictator would not know from the experience of the Arab Spring that the success of the civil uprising in Algeria would have contagious effect on Sudan, that the Sudanese masses would draw oxygen and inspiration from the success of popular protests in Algeria.
Al-Bashir’s 30-year rule was marked by mind-boggling bloodlettings. He prosecuted decades of civil war which eventually resulted in the excision of South Sudan from the country; he launched the most horrendous campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region of the country through the arming of the so-called Janjaweed militias. For this he has been justly indicted for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity by the UN-backed International Criminal Court (ICC) sitting in The Hague.
Al-Bashir just didn’t get it! He was too inebriated with power to ever imagine he could bow to popular protests. His demented mind simply resorted to the default tactics of all tyrants…mass arrests and detention without trial, torture of protesters and anyone that caught the attention of his intelligence and security agencies, inexplicable disappearances, and other forms of massive crackdowns on the civilian population. He didn’t believe that brutal dictatorships have their expiry dates too.
Since my graduate student days in Washington D.C. in the mid-1980s, I have watched and marvelled at the potency of “people power” and how it forced dictators to flee. My first example was the Philippines in 1986. I was glued to the television day after day for several weeks as civil protests spiralled to force President Ferdinand E. Marcos to flee the country after two decades of dictatorial rule. I was a visiting research fellow in the Netherlands in the year 2000 where I watched live on television the removal through courageous civil unrests of two separate dictators in the same month of November: Slobodan Milosevic, leader of the European country of Serbia and acclaimed “Butcher of the Balkans”, and General Robert Guei, the tormentor of Cote d’Ivoire, here in Africa.
And then came the Arab Spring of early 2011, a campaign of civil unrest unwittingly ignited in Tunisia by Mohammed Bouazizi who set himself ablaze in public protest. Before anyone could say Jack Robinson, the ensuing wave of mass protests had consumed the corrupt dictatorship of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali who had to flee the country. Like a bush fire, it quickly swept through Egypt and Libya, consuming two hitherto immovable despots in its path: Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in Egypt, and Muammar Gaddafi, after 42 years in power in Libya. It seemed that the other remaining African despots had succeeded in consolidating their grip on power, at least until Robert Mugabe was toppled in the midst of mass protests by a not-so-military coup after 36 years in power in Zimbabwe. As if that was not surprising enough, the forced exit of two sight-tight Arab-African dictators in the same week. Is Africa rising?
In most of the cases listed above (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Zimbabwe, and now Algeria and Sudan), sustained massive protests forced the armed forces in each country to take a stand: to be on the side of the people or continue to support murderous despots. For example, it was the Egyptian soldiers’ blunt refusal to open fire on civil protesters as ordered by the Mubarak regime that led to his eventual ouster. Similarly, Al-Bashir’s goose was cooked the moment officers of the armed forces started embracing civilians and refusing his orders to fire on them.
Al-Bashir and his ilk are a bad advertisement for Africa in the 21st Century. I don’t know what fate awaits him out of power but I believe strongly that he should be brought to trial before the International Criminal Court for the war crimes and crimes against humanity he committed in South Sudan and Darfur. I do not share the sentimental claptrap that only African leaders are being brought before the ICC. For me, those who committed heinous atrocities against hapless African peoples should be brought to justice wherever possible. I vote for the ICC because these bloody tyrants may not be properly tried in their countries. It will be a warning to remaining African dinosaurs like Paul Biya and Yoweri Museveni that their comeuppance may not be far off, for in the final analysis, sovereignty belongs to the people. Al-Bashir has gone the way of all dictators, into the dung heap of infamy reserved for them. I congratulate the brave people of Sudan for liberating themselves from the clutches of an anachronistic dictatorship and chart a new course for their country.
- Prof Fawole writes from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.
