They alienate and annihilate their citizenry and bestride the political lexicon like a colossus. They have the power of life and death and they award contracts and enact decrees just by words of mouth. You can only challenge them at your own peril. They have elevated thieving to high art, preferring to hobnob with fellow dictators and cast themselves above the law while erecting large than life stature in the city centres.
In an effort to play commander-in-chief, they inadvertently end up as comedian-in-chief. They are basically plain cowards, loudmouths, rabble-rousers and gutless rulers who excel in subjugating and bringing down the dignity of mankind. When the chips are down and when push comes to shove, they scamper, tails in-between their legs into one rat hole where they think life could be better. The change of residence from fortified Presidential palaces to rat holes is normally their last-minute unconscious attempt to remain alive, albeit transient. It only takes one united strong movement with vision to pull the carpet off their bloated feet.
They pretend to be the manliest of men and brook no dissent. Their favourite tune seems to be Marvin Gaye's popular track – Let's get it on. They serve a stew of bad and worse and take interest in undermining and devaluing the life of people they rule. Good governance, democracy and human right are words that you shouldn't be mentioning. They live in underground bunkers, move around in bullet-proof limos and wear armoured vests. When not in the bunkers, they dwell in an equally intimidating fortresses built on people's sweat and blood.
They accumulate so much money that three generations can't finish and their children dip their hands in all facets of business. Their children only respect big cars and their owners and their descendants and indirect descendants become untouchable. Look at the way Saddam Hussien's sons, Uday and Quasai, were mowed down in a hail of bullets, yet they had an honourable way of ending the impasse. They are both cowards like their father.
In 1988, Saddam gassed his Kurdish people with sarin and mustard just because the Kurds were celebrating Iranian victory against Iraq.
When the end game came for Saddam himself, and quite bereft of all his tricks, he ran to his native Tikrit village where he made a new abode of rat hole, feeding on rotten apples and stale food. Meanwhile the mess he created was still raging and people were slaughtered in their hundreds. He had all kinds of weapons including grenades, bazookas, chemical weaponry, RPGs and rocket launchers but he had no guts to use them. He preferred living a miserable life in the rat hole until one of his minders passed on information to the Allied Forces who quickly came in handy with camera crew in tow and recorded his last moments as a free man. Images of what looked more or less like the biblical Methuselah buffeted all major news channels.
Osama bin Laden suffered a worse fate as he was butchered right in his hideout cowering behind his wife. Using his wife as human shield, the NAVY SEAL took a shot right on his temple and proceeded to take more precision shots that ended his sojourn on earth. His body was to be later fed to the sharks and whales in the ocean. He had the luxury of ending his life or asking one of his aides to do that but he cowered and yet this was a villain who loved taking people's lives.
Then came Moammar Gaddafi, our beloved and blush tyrant who was normally comfortable in the company of female body guards and foreign "nurses". Faced by the fact that his fighters deserted him and banking on the efforts of African mercenaries, he egged on foolishly thinking that he would triumph. I am ready to die among my people as a martyr, he bellowed and die he did. He was netted from something that looked worse than a sewage pipe, beaten, battered, bludgeoned (some say bayoneted and sodomised) before being flung head-long like a felon which he inevitably was into a waiting white Toyota Pickup van bleeding fatally from the head. His assailant, barely a teen, immediately seized his gold plated pistol and became the proud new owner. Again it is not clear why Gaddafi didn't use that pistol on himself or ask his aides to extinguish his life if he was a brave man. He was to lie lifeless like a stray dog crushed by an angry truck driver and villagers he tormented filed past to take cheap shots of his bleeding half naked body.
Sani Abacha's story strikes a familiar cord to all of us. The man who many say met his midnight death cavorting and romping with exotic whores in one of the Government Guest Houses while the wife snored away has his place assured in history, albeit negatively.
It is true that everybody wants to live but life in a dictator's den is something else. It is such a place where poor economic downturn has directly translated to individual depression and stress. A place where press freedom is pressed down like a hefty man pressing a teenager down while committing rape. Imagine your world today with Facebook, Skype or Twitter.
In the Syrian cities of Homs, Aleppo and Damascus, normal questions of democracy and other things that improve life seem irrelevant because there is no need. Blood and body parts have since replaced children's play toys and new books and the only familiar noise is the booming of Al Bashar's MiG Jets hovering over head with warheads. A boy whose friends have been killed and neighbourhood bombed out and reduced to rubble will grow up maladjusted and present a bigger threat to the society.
The revolution ship that ran aground in the bank of Syria will soon roar back to life bringing in its wake both unintended and intended consequences. The innocent blood of women and children killed in the afternoon of their life will serve a combustion fuel that will smoke out the tyrant, whether Russia or Iran likes it or not. Assad will soon find himself in the dark corner of hell where Saddam, Gaddafi and bin Laden have taken new residency. Who knows, Assad may even hide himself in a hospital theatre or disguise himself like a woman in a last minute unconscious effort to escape the guillotine. That is their pedigree.
The world is watching!
•Onwukwe, an international development practitioner based in Tanzania, wrote in via mikeonwukwe@gmail.com
