As Tunisia's former despotic president for life, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, scurries into exile with his tail tucked in between his legs, to Saudi Arabi, the receptacle of African despots (Idi Amin died there in exile), Icheoku says bravo to the people whose resilience made it possible. They believed in a cause; they worked for a cause and they sacrificed severally to accomplish their mission which all the curfews and state brutality could not stop. Icheoku says what the people of Tunisia accomplished is not an easy feat for Africans whose despots are as tyrannical as they get; and spares no effort at visiting their terror on the people just to stay in power and maintain their stranglehold on the subjugated people.
Icheoku hopes that the fire which has been lit in Tunisia will turn into a raging inferno that will spread throughout the continent and scorch all those other despots doting the landscape, from Libya to Egypt to Lesotho to Gabon etc. What happened in Tunisia also sends warning shots across the bow of other Arab maximum rulers in the Arab world who are deeply entrenched over the many years without providing any meaningful economic and/or political opportunities and way-out for their people. It is about time the political revolution which swept across Europe in the nineties passed through Africa and the Arab world. It is indeed time all those other African despots, dictators, tyrants, maximum rulers and sit-tight leaders are held to account for their stewardship to the people and not the other way round, as usual. Leaders who hole themselves up in their high walled and gated palatial mansions, indulging themselves with the choicest of things money can buy, while their people languish in abject poverty and want, and in dire austere condition which they are oblivious of and appear clueless on the fix.
Icheoku says the Prime Minister Ghannouchi is part of the problem and should also go for a total and complete clean break from the past 23 years from. A prime minister since 1999, Ghannouchi is rather too close to the deposed president to bring anything new or flesh to the table of Tunisians yearning for a new dawn. Tunisians should therefore demand his exit and exile if possible and swear in the chief judge or speaker of parliament who shall organize an election within the next six months to enthrone a peoples orientated new leadership. Like United States President Barack Obama, Icheoku applauds the courage and dignity of the Tunisian people who today have liberated themselves from the twenty-three year long tyranny of their former President Ben Ali. Congratulations! The forces of light again triumphed over that of darkness and a brutal force dictatorship of a despot had its final limits.
It once again showed that arbitrary arrests, brutal control of the print media, Internet access, physical attacks on journalists, emasculation of human rights and opposition activists are sometimes not enough to stop the will of the people. They always lasts for a moment - up until such a time that such a tyrant is swept away in the flood of peoples power protest, generated by and to protest against such despotism. It is equally impressive that new age social media helped accelerate the change which happened in Tunisia as it provided the people timely knowledge of development as they joined to bring about the change they desired and needed. Icheoku aligns itself with this new media and together with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and the rest of other blogosphere hope to help spread the gospel of real democracy at work in Africa, especially in Nigeria. Our hope at Icheoku is that the people of Nigeria will listen and act as they learn who their rulers are likewise other Africans in Egypt, Libya, Gabon, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Lesotho etc. How can a person be in power for 23 years and expect to have new solutions to the problems of the country, solutions which he never invented these past two decades plus?