The Dictator
By Baba Galleh Jallow
That dictators are essentially paranoid is a fairly well-known fact. Feeding on public insecurity and fear, the dictator is himself supremely insecure and fearful. There is not a single moment of a dictator’s life when he is not preoccupied with his personal security, when he does not imagine daggers in the lurking in the dark shadows of his mind, waiting for an opportunity to pounce upon him and stab him to death. The dictator perpetually mistakes the bogeys and demons conjured by his paranoid mind to the realities of life. This makes him feel perpetually defensive and hostile. Because he feels that every brutal action he takes is legitimately taken in self-defense and self-preservation, the dictator manages to stifle his conscience and justify the most senseless of tyrannies inflicted upon his perceived enemies. The dictator is always under siege, not necessarily by any hostile forces, but by the siege mentality lodged in his paranoid mind and threatening to annihilate him every single moment of the day.
The dictator is therefore a very miserable creature, perhaps the most miserable of all creatures. Surrounded by power, he feels utterly powerless. The fact that his power is limited by the very reality of life represents a painful regret in his heart. The fact that reality dictates that he cannot possibly know everything that’s going on sharpens his obsession with needing to know everything that’s going on. This explains why the dictator inevitably creates a network of informers who feed him with all manner of information and misinformation, all of which are taken to be gospel truths and used as the basis of actions whose consequences are never adequately considered. Ironically, the more he “knows” about what’s going on, the more powerless and paranoid he feels. This explains why he tries to regulate what people say on the phone, who they see on skype, what messages are sent by electronic or surface mail, what meetings are held in distant cities. This explains why he publicly proclaims that he knows everything that’s going on, everything that his enemies are saying, and everything that they are doing and thinking. In reality, the dictator feels perpetually empty and painfully ignorant and limited, a fact that further drives him into the desperate antics of a clueless smartalec.
Surrounded by security, the dictator feels supremely vulnerable and exposed. His obsession with being a supreme being is perpetually frustrated by the reality of his mortality. The realization that the invincibility he hankers after is simply beyond the reach of mortal beings lurks in the thick dark jungle of his mind like a deadly serpent waiting to bury its fangs into his soul. The dictator’s delusional mind is crowded by poisonous reptiles, monster scorpions, bloodthirsty predators, infectious substances and harmful organisms of all kind. This explains why he is perpetually in search of defensive mechanisms in magic portions, amulets, prayers, blessings, and concoctions designed to protect his person from the imagined monsters in his mind that pose imagined threats to his security. This explains why he habitually turns upon his personal security detail with allegations of coup plots and conspiracies, arrests, detentions, killings, sackings, transfers, redeployments and all manner of ploys to destabilize all potential threats to his security. This explains why he is so obsessed with riding in bullet proof hummers and building bunkers and seemingly impenetrable walls around his residence. Feeding on the insecurity of his people, the dictator is the most insecure of all his people. Happiness perpetually eludes him like a mirage in the desert. Brief moments of pleasure are interspersed with extended periods of inexplicable rage and a crippling sense of dread that makes him feel like a badly wounded wolf ready to tear into pieces anything that comes within a mile of his person.
Under a dictatorship the frontiers between penal and non-penal deeds are totally effaced. The law becomes not an instrument for the punishment of criminals, or an institution for the maintenance of peaceful order, but a bogey for the frightening of the population and a sword for the slaughter of principles and human dignities. In his crippling insecurity and insatiable greed for power and immortality, the dictator turns the law into a malignant instrument of remote control and surveillance in the service of his callous despotism. The law watches out for wrong smiles on the faces of people looking at an image of the dictator, listens to wrong words spoken in reference to the dictator, browses the pages of journals for wrong words directed at the person of the dictator, and is trampled and spat upon whenever and wherever it threatens to obstruct the objectives of the dictator. In every case, the law, now transformed into a monstrous public enemy number one, is poised to pounce on perceived offenders and tear them into shreds for the benefit of the dictator, who becomes more of an inhuman behemoth than a public official accountable to his country and people.
The dictator’s obsession with exercising total and absolute control over all affairs of the country causes him to by-pass all legitimate institutions of the state. Parallel to these legitimate institutions he invents a forest of structures and pseudo institutions and places them directly under his personal service. This explains why we see in a dictatorship the sudden mushrooming of secret police units, personal militia groups and death squads that operate outside the ambit of the Interior and Defense ministries. We see youth wings and party zealots loyal and answerable to every whim and caprice of the dictator. We see religious leaders whose loyalties lie not with the dictates of their professed faiths, but with the dictates of their patron tyrants. All these institutions and individuals come to constitute a shadow state through which the dictator feels at liberty to perform and exercise his illegitimate authority. Where it proves impossible to create parallel institutions, the dictator assumes the power to hire and fire cronies and stooges beholden only to his personal whims and caprices.
In a dictatorship, society is reduced to a giant masquerade of lies and pretenses. All who wish to survive are compelled to keep their minds dormant and their mouths shut. People are compelled to deny their true opinions and express only fake opinions in praise of the dictator. An atmosphere of general insecurity mistrust prevails in work places and public spaces because unprincipled liars make it dangerous to express any opinions that are not complimentary to the dictator. Unscrupulous and callous individuals take advantage of the high premium placed on sycophancy and lying to cook up stories of unpatriotism against innocent folks and deliver them up to the power-hungry tyrant. Jealous individuals eying top positions have their colleagues removed by telling lies about them to the dictator. Friend is turned against friend, brother against brother, sister against sister, family against family in the service of the dictator’s insatiable lust for power. Crippled by paranoia, the dictator struts around disguised in the drab robes of fearless bravado.
The dictator classifies the society he lords it over into two distinct factions. Those who negate their humanity, ignore truth and justice, willfully lie, torture and kill innocent individuals are considered the good and the loyal. Those who cling on to their humanity, who insist on telling the truth, who speak up for justice, who refuse to lie and refuse to crawl on their stomachs like miserable reptiles – those are considered the criminal elements. Society is stood directly on its head: Truth becomes lies, lies truth. Injustice struts around as justice, and justice is spat upon as injustice. Law-abiding citizens are routinely criminalized and punished, while criminal elements are glorified and elevated to the status of patriots and paragons of virtue. The law is rendered an instrument of illegality and criminality. For a classical example of the perfect dictator, see Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh.