The FBI, CIA, DEA Just Delivered the Biggest Blow to Democracy in Africa

I just read the document detailing the United States’ multiagency defense of the drug baron in Aso Villa. Let’s be clear about one thing: the FBI, CIA, DEA and other US agencies in that report just delivered the most damaging blow to liberal democracy and representative governance the world has ever witnessed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The CIA and other covert US intelligence agencies have dedicated most of their existence since the post-1945 period to throttling regimes considered inimical to liberal democracy, from Eastern Europe to South America, Asia, and Africa. African leaders have been summarily assassinated, overthrown, or demonized by the CIA and other Western security agencies and propaganda outfits under the pretext that these leaders were undemocratic and “unreasonable.”

Telling the Nigerian people that they do not have the right to question the background of the impostor who has imposed himself on them is precisely the same as telling them not to exist or be citizens who fulfill their civic duties. How much privacy is too much privacy? Nigerians know all about the adventures of Hushpuppi, as publicly and volubly disclosed by the FBI, despite Hushpuppi being a private citizen. How is the Instagram Hushpuppi different from this unpresidential Hushpuppi in public office?

Even Donald Trump, while merely campaigning, was unequivocally open about his medical records and several other so-called “private” information. So what is all this buffoonery and obfuscatory Glomarization concealing crucial details on a public servant who bludgeoned his way to the highest office in a country of nearly 250 million citizens?

What is the point of representative democracy if the people cannot question their public servants about anything and everything? Every liberal democratic constitution I know states that sovereignty belongs to the people. What the FBI, CIA, and others are telling us now is that this is pure speculative fiction. Even pre-colonial African states did not indulge in this level of tone-deafness whenever the people asked consequential questions.

How many more people must die? How many more juveniles must be unjustly imprisoned and violated? How many more citizens of this country must suffer and be strangulated? How much more damage must the usurper in Aso Villa cause in Nigeria and the Sahel before the US starts taking its professed commitment to democracy, human rights, and transparency seriously in Africa?

At this point, we Africans had better set to work to revive and critically develop our traditional institutions if we ever want to make it out of our current rut. We were democratic long before the Europeans came to tell us their democracy was superior.

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Raphael Adebayo

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