Barbarians At The Gate – Abdul Mahmud

By Abdul Mahmud

Writing in this column last November, I reflected on Governor Okpebholo and the figure that has come to embody his style of power, the official hype man, the public jester elevated into the architecture of governance, “Nomindem”. I argued then that what appeared comic carried grave consequences, because the erosion of seriousness within public office rarely ends in laughter. It matures into something darker. Events in Benin City have now supplied a tragic confirmation. The abduction of the playwright, Don Pedro Obaseki, by thugs reportedly led by Osaze Kapuehpueh Adun
Osayande Obakhavbaye, Osamede Nomoless and others marks a descent from farce into violence, from carnival into mob rule, from spectacle into barbarism stationed brazenly at the gates of the Oba of Benin’s palace. The passage bears repeating, because its warning was not ornamental but diagnostic. “Mikhail Bakhtin was not alone in illuminating the idea of the carnivalesque. He found kindred insight in Robert Antoni, who, in his novel Carnival, populated his fictional world with foolish characters to reveal how societies lose their sense of seriousness when spectacle becomes their governing creed. Nigeria today mirrors that fiction. The state has become a continuous performance in which every act of governance is staged for applause. The governor’s hype man is not merely a man with a microphone; he is the symbol of a political culture that prizes noise over nuance, image over substance. The harm is cumulative. When leaders trivialise their offices, institutions lose authority and prestige. When governance becomes comedy, citizens stop expecting seriousness. The result is cynicism. People withdraw their belief in the state’s capacity to protect or deliver. They see power not as stewardship but as a circus”.

What unfolded in Benin City belongs to the same moral universe. The abduction of a playwright by political thugs represents the natural sequel to a politics that has abandoned restraint, proportion, and respect for institutions. Once the state presents itself as theatre, once authority trades dignity for cheap applause, violence soon follows, because carnival without limits invites the mob to take the stage. Before this episode, senior figures within Governor Okpebholo’s administration publicly received an individual who had physically attacked one of the governor’s critics in the United Kingdom, a gesture widely understood as gratitude rather than disapproval.

History supplies abundant parallels.

When ancient Rome allowed the circus to eclipse the forum, bread and spectacle became substitutes for civic virtue. The crowd learned to shout, not to deliberate. Authority shifted from law to mood. Emperors who mastered performance thrived briefly, while institutions hollowed out beneath the noise. The fall did not arrive through a single invasion, but through the slow corrosion of seriousness, until barbarians no longer needed to break the gates, because the gates had lost meaning. Late republican Rome offers another warning. Public office drifted from service toward self-display. Politicians performed outrage, generosity, cruelty, or mercy as scenes in an endless drama of ambition. Violence became theatrical, not incidental. Street gangs loyal to rival patrons turned politics into ritualised brutality. The Republic collapsed less from foreign assault than from the internal surrender of discipline and restraint. The same pattern appears across history. In medieval Europe, when royal courts surrendered judgment to flattery and pageantry, mercenaries and mobs filled the vacuum. In revolutionary France, public festivals of virtue curdled into spectacles of terror. The guillotine stood as a stage prop, not merely an instrument. Once politics adopted performance as its governing logic, blood followed applause.

Barbarians, in historical memory, rarely arrive without invitation. They gather at the edges when authority forgets its purpose. They advance when institutions weaken from within. They thrive when power becomes spectacle, because spectacle demands escalation. Noise must grow louder. Gestures must become more extreme. Crowds must be fed with enemies. The abduction of Don Pedro Obaseki fits this pattern with unsettling precision. A playwright represents the reflective conscience of society, a figure whose vocation lies in questioning power, in exposing pretence, in insisting on meaning beyond noise. For such a figure to face humiliation and coercion at the hands of political thugs speaks volumes about the state of civic life in Edo State. Violence rarely announces strength. It advertises fear. That this episode unfolded inside the grounds of the palace of the Oba of Benin deepens the tragedy. Hear Don Pedro Obaseki: “Inside the Oba palace premises, I was slapped, beaten, gagged and force to kneel while naked. While in this condition, I attempted to plead for my life and dignity as the Oba drove past me within the Palace compound”. The Benin monarchy, for centuries, embodied continuity, restraint, and symbolic authority beyond transient politics. Palaces in history function as thresholds between power and order, between force and legitimacy. When mobs gather at palace gates and grounds, history signals danger. The image recalls the fall of dynasties, the sacking of cities, the moment when reverence yields to rage. In ancient China, dynastic collapse often began with the erosion of ritual. Once court ceremonies lost meaning, rebellions multiplied. Confucian chroniclers understood that rituals disciplined power, while its abandonment invited chaos. The barbarians who overran capitals arrived after authority had already vacated its moral ground.

Edo State’s predicament belongs to this lineage. A politics that rewards hype over thought, insult over argument, performance over policy, steadily erodes the barriers between state power and raw force. The hype man stands as a prophet of this decay. His voice amplifies not governance but spectacle. He prepares the ground for mobs by teaching society that volume substitutes for legitimacy. The transition from hype to thuggery should surprise no one. Once seriousness disappears, intimidation emerges as persuasion. Once institutions lose authority, individuals assert power through proximity to violence. Once the state performs rather than governs, actors outside the law step forward to enforce loyalty. The figures involved matter less than the pattern. Osaze Kapuepue Adun, Osayande Obakhavbaye, Osamede Nomoless and their followers represent a type, not an aberration. They belong to a class of political enforcers bred by systems that celebrate impunity, reward noise, and mistake intimidation for strength. Such figures flourish where leaders refuse to draw moral lines. The cost extends beyond one abducted playwright. Each episode of mob justice corrodes public trust. Citizens learn that safety depends not on law but on connections. Artists learn that speech carries risk. Intellectuals retreat into silence or exile. The public sphere shrinks, leaving only the loudest and most brutal voices.

Barbarians at the gate symbolise more than physical threat. They signify the moment when the society’s guardians abandon their post. Gates exist to separate order from chaos, law from force, authority from violence. When those gates stand open, when mobs roam unchecked near symbols of tradition and law, history enters a familiar and ominous chapter. Edo State’s tragedy lies not in the absence of intelligence or culture, but in the systematic devaluation of both. A society that mocks seriousness invites contempt for law. A political class that treats governance as entertainment invites a public that responds with cruelty. Carnival politics breeds barbarism because spectacle demands victims.

The lesson from history remains stark.

Societies recover from economic hardship and political miscalculation, but recovery from moral collapse proves far more difficult. Once violence becomes theatrical, once mobs claim moral authority, once institutions retreat before noise, restoration requires painful reckoning. The abduction of Don Pedro Obaseki should provoke such reckoning. Silence would signal complicity. Excuses would confirm decay. What stands at stake transcends partisan quarrels. The question concerns whether Nigeria will continue down the path of carnival politics toward barbarism, or whether seriousness can still reclaim authority. Barbarians do not need battering rams when applause replaces judgment. They wait patiently at the gate, nourished by spectacle, summoned by noise, confident that a society laughing at its own institutions has already surrendered.