The founding National Secretary of the Alliance for Democracy, Prof Udenta Udenta, on Thursday, accused the Bola Tinubu Presidency of dismantling democratic values and weaponing the judiciary, and the 1999 Constitution (as amended) against Nigerians.
Prof Udenta, a distinguished fellow of the Abuja School of Social and Political Thought, said the suspension of Governor Siminalayi Fubara of Rivers State was a distortion of democratic institutions by the Tinubu government.
“The system that should protect democratic governance, you are weaponising them; the judiciary, the apparatus of the state, you are distorting, diluting and transmogrifying them in a way and manner that is shutting down democratic conversations.
“That is what you find as the legacy of the Bola Tinubu president and his political agents,” Prof Udenta said on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily programme.
The scholar said dismantling democratic principles isn’t by shooting guns but by misusing democratic instruments like the constitution and the judiciary.
“When you abandon the foundational norms of democracy and then you begin to use instruments you acquired in power to dismantle the guardrails that govern the democratic system, then democracy dies.
“It is not by firing a shot that democracy dies or crumbles, it is leveraging the guardrails like the constitution, like what was done in Rivers State, to abort democratic rules,” he said.
The scholar also accused Rivers State Administrator, Vice Admiral Ibok-Ete Ibas (retd) of dismantling the levers of democracy with his suspension of all political appointees in the oil-rich state.
“You find the sole administrator strutting around Port Harcourt, dismantling democratic infrastructure,” he said.
Prof Udenta described what is practised in Rivers State as a “hybrid regime which is a part of competitive authoritarianism” being deployed to “manacle the spirit of a nation and abort democratic institutions at all levels” including labour unions, media houses, political parties, and civil societies.
Prof Udenta regretted that the quality of the lives of Nigerians in the last two years has so depreciated. He lamented that there is widespread hunger and poverty in the land with escalating food inflation usurping the income of average Nigerians.
“There is poverty in the land, there is hunger everywhere, inflation is soaring, criminality and terrorism and all manners of insecurity pervade the nation, and the government is bemused like this current one,” he said.
