The One-Man Republic

Apr 05, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Peeping Tom…

Kaieteur News- There exists, tucked away on the margin of maps and minds, a country that has perfected the most old-fashioned of modern illusions — that a nation may function on the genius of one man alone. This is a land where parliament exists for performance, where ministers are but courtiers, their portfolios ornamental. The real decisions, the serious ones — about roads and rivers, oil and air, bread and ballots, about everything — all emanate from a single desk, a singular brain, a man so convinced of his own omniscience that he sees the State as an extension of his own nervous system.

In this republic — let us call it the Republic of One — democracy is retained only as a skin, taut over the slow muscle decay of governance. The people, periodically summoned to perform the ritual of voting, know better than to expect real choices. Their vote is a courtesy extended to maintain appearances. The real work happens in corridors of absolute discretion, where the Oracle speaks and the rest nod, sometimes scribbling in notebooks, not to remember but to appear occupied.

It begins as all such things begin: a man with some luck, some cleverness, and a great knack for surrounding himself with weaklings. He arrives, as fate would have it, at an opportune time: when institutions are tired and society is disoriented — after a crisis. He does not rise because he is exceptional; he rises because the guardrails have rusted and the people are too tired and apathetic to demand better. And once he rises, he never quite descends.

In the Republic of One, policy is a matter of personal whim. Today, an airport. Tomorrow, a stadium. The week after, a highway to nowhere. Ministers, whose job in functioning countries is to guide and execute, in this land exist only to echo.

Even the experts, the technocrats, those who studied and specialized, are reduced to clerks, occasionally summoned to justify decisions already made. A professor of economics might explain a fuel subsidy, but only after the One has announced it on national television. A doctor may be asked to nod beside a new hospital’s blueprint, which the One sketched on a napkin. Science is tolerated only when it aligns with superstition.

This is no democracy. It is not even a benevolent autocracy. It is a theatre of obedience — a place where civil service is reduced to servility, and governance becomes guesswork. Institutions do not function. They defer. They stall. They wait for signals, for whispers, for the nod of the One. And so, a country slows, not abruptly, but imperceptibly at first. Files pile up, ideas die unborn, and innovation is stifled by fear of contradiction. Everything that needs more than one mind to flourish — science, education, justice — begins to shrink. The nation, like a body denied circulation, becomes anemic.

One-man rule is not only inefficient; it is an insult to the very idea of civilization. No man — however brilliant, however messianic — can contain within himself the diversity of knowledge needed to govern a country. The arrogance of such belief is matched only by its danger. For the One begins to believe that to question him is to oppose the State. And from there, the journey to tyranny is a short, well-paved road.

Opposition is treated as sabotage or even subterfuge. Journalists become enemies.  The constitution, once invoked to protect the people, is now reinterpreted to protect the One. Dissent is not crushed — that would require effort — it is suffocated under the weight of constant surveillance, bureaucratic sabotage, and moral fatigue. People learn to lower their voices. They forget how to argue. They cease to dream of alternatives.

Each failure is repackaged as sabotage, each setback blamed on ghosts of the past or villains abroad. And the people, conditioned by repetition and devoid of other options, continue to clap.

But decay cannot be managed indefinitely. Eventually, the stench becomes undeniable. Citizens leave. Investors flee. The currency wheezes. Crime rises. Foreign dignitaries stop visiting. The nation, once brimming with potential, becomes a cautionary tale whispered in regional summits. And still the One clings on, now surrounded only by flatterers and guards.

This is not hypothetical. History is bloated with such men and the ruins they left behind. What makes the tragedy of the Republic of One unique is not the ambition of the One but the passivity of the many — those who knew better and said nothing, those who whispered in private but applauded in public, those who convinced themselves that stability was worth the slow erosion of everything else.

The truth is brutal: no society built around one man can survive with dignity. It may linger, it may even impress the gullible with its fanfare and flags, but it cannot thrive. Governance requires friction, argument, and the slow grind of collaboration. Without these, a country becomes hollow — then brittle — then waste.

One-man rule is not strength. It is weakness masquerading as control. It is the dream of every tyrant and the abdication of every citizen. “The world is what it is” — ruthless, complex, indifferent. And a country that entrusts its fate to a single man, no matter how eloquent or well-meaning, has already begun to rot.

(The One-Man Republic) (The One-Man Republic)

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)   

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• bureaucratic sabotage, civil service, Peeping Tom, real decisions, serious ones, surveillance

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