By SULEIMAN A. SULEIMAN
I was an avid reader of the THISDAY Backpage columnists in the late 1990s to the early 2000s, from Dr Amanze Obi on Mondays to Waziri Adio on Sundays. Somewhere in the middle of the pack was always Simon Kolawole, who would end his columns with “And Four Other Things…”, where he would dispense with four other issues in a series of short and sharp comments after the main article. It became his signature style, and he does it still at TheCable. Surveying the Nigerian and global scene over the past week, I found myself unable to settle on a single issue, and I thought I might as well do a Kolawole today.
Rising ‘stealth authoritarianism’ under Tinubu?
When I read that yet another court has ordered the deregistration of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), my mind flashed back to a political science concept called ‘stealth authoritarianism’. Political science concepts try to describe the real political world, and this one, proposed by the American constitutional law scholar Ozan Varol, refers to the use of legal, institutional, and structural mechanisms to subvert democracy from within, rather than, for example, through overt military intervention.
Varol argues that rather than suspend the constitution or abolish elections, as military governments repeatedly did here in Nigeria and elsewhere, modern leaders maintain the outward appearance of democracy but use the same democratic institutions to gradually but effectively entrench a dictatorship, hence the term stealth authoritarianism. Varol drew his empirical evidence from a range of countries including his native Turkey, but he might as well have been describing what has long been happening in Nigeria, particularly in the past three years under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
