Parliamentarians stood on their feet and sang a servile song of allegiance to the president. As they sang, trumpets sounded, and the national flag fluttered outside. The president must have been dizzy with pride. The man had come to tell them how he intended to spend public money next year.

The parliament is supposed to scrutinize his requests, amend estimates, and approve. But rather than receive him with sobriety and objective skepticism because the country is broke and budgets have perennially been abused, they stood and gyrated like cheerleaders, much like the parliamentarians in North Korea, who twist and twirl to honour Kim Jung Un.

The last time we came close to this was under Abacha. Abacha wanted to transmute into a life president. He created five parties and infused them with his cronies. The multiplicity of parties was supposed to simulate democratic freedom. But in reality, they were the webbed and deformed fingers of a leprous hand.

While the Abacha parties were rehearsing their choreography, army generals started wearing Abacha badges on their chests. Under Abacha, many serious things started like jokes. Soon, military officers who didn’t wear the badges became fearful like dissidents. So erstwhile courageous military generals capitulated like school children. The early stages of making a despot are always marked by an insidious personality cult.

According to Montesquieu, when legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, there is no liberty. The willful subsumption of the authority of parliament under the mandate of the president is therefore a tragedy. Separation of powers, in words and deeds, ensures liberty only by imposing checks and balances.

Fawning federal legislators, ‘standing on the mandate’ of the president, cannot check him let alone bother to. President Tinubu ought to have stopped them. When senators sing and dance like court jesters before a president, they diminish the country and its president. Tinubu knows the difference between honour and sycophancy. Sycophancy is debilitating. The problem with an all-party virulent sycophancy is that it can catalyze the metamorphosis of a pro-democracy activist into a latter-day Mobutu. 

No other president has allowed a private campaign song to usurp the national anthem. If another song was needed to welcome the president to present his budget proposals for parliamentary consideration, it should be a dirge. A mournful song to tell the story of our bedridden economy. Our politicians, it seems, are sleepwalking. And it’s not difficult to imagine what our international creditors would make of that scene at NASS. We have been around the world begging for a panful of dollars to shore up our floundering currency. Then on a day our parliament receives the documentation of our situation, the parliamentarians lapse into a fire-breathing hero-worship session. Those serving the president with political sugar love neither him nor the country. 

A politician might have legitimate reasons for adopting another as a demi-god. Nigeria is a space where riffraff can be dusted up and placed in high positions. But when the parliamentarians of all parties in the country stand and sing allegiance to a president, then the parliament becomes a subsidiary of the executive. Akpabio has a good reason to convert the hallowed chambers of the senate into a Tinubu Worship Center. On the eve of the elections, the man was hiding from the EFCC.

After the elections, the agency suffered liver failure. In three months, Akpabio went from a beleaguered ex-minister to an elusive aspirant with a dodgy ticket to the headship of the national assembly. Who can blame him for raising an altar for Tinubu in the National Assembly? Tinubu has restored his hopes. So, how won’t such a man throw decorum to the winds and worship his political messiah in the Davidic style? But Tinubu must watch what he consumes.

The parliament had been called pejorative names in the past. Under David Mark, many saw it as sheepish. Perhaps the House of Representatives of 2011-2015 cut the leash early. In 2015, the NASS rebelled against the executive and chose its leadership. The relationship with the executive was frosty till the end. In 2019, Lawan came. He was the choice of the Executive. The NASS under Lawan and Gbajabiamila struggled never to offend Buhari.

So the NASS became the archetypal rubber stamp. The 2023 leadership was installed by the executive. The effort was a little strenuous. Not to look like ingrates, the new leadership has gone from rubber-stamp to ‘otimkpu’ mode. The devotion to the president comes with alacrity. The idea that this devotion to the president would bring lucrative political rewards is the reason the lawmakers in the opposition are members of the sycophantic choir. The National Assembly has become a congregation of hype men. 

Many African politicians move around with praise singers. As a child in the military school, I had wondered why Governor Solomon Lar’s convoy had loudspeakers and many hypemen. Later, I understood that humans particularly old people love hype. It might have been innocuous for many supporters of Tinubu to stand on the mandate of a man without a mandate or with a limited pseudo-mandate in one or two states. Initially, the song was a rallying call for the endangered species in the opposition in the Southwest, who had been routed by the then rapacious ruling PDP.

Standing on that kind of mandate was in a sense counter-cultural. In that sense, despite what opponents described as abasing lyrics, ‘On Your Mandate’ wasn’t a dangerous song. But the man has become president. If old men gather to sing such worship songs into his ears, he might forget that he is still human. The office of the president brims with power. Every president is obese with power. He can’t handle such an infusion of political sugar anymore. 

‘On Your Mandate’ has been sung at a cabinet meeting. It was sang at an ECOWAS meeting when the Niger fever was at its peak. It has now been sung at the National Assembly. Our ancestors admonished us to remove the monkey’s hand from the soup before it turned into a human hand. If President Tinubu consults an oracle, it will advise him to beware of men in long robes who love to greet him like children and promise to stand, sit, and lie on his mandate like mannequins. These hype men will leave him with political diabetes mellitus. They might not be bothered with what their fate might be when that happens. They are only interested in instant gratifications. But this country can’t become Paul Biya’s Cameroon.