I read your recent article, “Ibrahim Traoré: The Soldier Selling Africa False Hope”, published in Premium Times, with a mixture of disappointment and disbelief. Your piece is not a courageous defense of democracy, but a glaring display of selective outrage, intellectual dishonesty, and a deep disconnect from the harsh realities that millions of Africans, including Nigerians, endure daily.
You criticize Captain Ibrahim Traoré for his so-called “anti-democratic” posture. Yet you have remained deafeningly silent about the daily assault on democracy happening right here at home, under Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration. In Nigeria today, poverty ravages the land, insecurity holds communities hostage, and corruption flourishes unchecked — all under a so-called “democratic” system you so desperately champion. How has democracy saved your own people when the majority live on empty stomachs and broken promises?
You accuse Traoré of suppressing dissent and centralizing power. But where was your voice when the Nigerian government cracked down on peaceful protesters, jailed journalists, rigged elections, and weaponized institutions against political opponents? Is democracy only worthy of your defence when it is being critiqued outside Nigeria?
Your defence of democracy sounds hollow when it is blind to its glaring failures in your own backyard. You quote India, Botswana, and Mauritius as examples of democratic success, but deliberately ignore how many Nigerians, despite 25 years of uninterrupted “democracy,” are poorer, more vulnerable, and more disillusioned than ever.
Democracy — as imported, distorted, and practiced in much of Africa — has become a smokescreen for elite exploitation. That is the bitter truth you refuse to confront. Your eagerness to dismiss Traoré’s rejection of this hollow model exposes not a principled stand for African progress but a desperate need to remain in good standing with Western interests and narratives.
You brand Traoré’s revolution “political theatre.” Yet the real theatre is the tragic comedy playing out across Nigeria: politicians looting with impunity while the masses die of hunger, neglect, and violence, all under the banner of democracy you so blindly revere. If you truly cared for Africa’s future, your pen would be directed first and foremost at the local and international systems that have made a mockery of governance on our continent. Instead, you choose the easy path: attacking a young African leader daring to imagine an alternative.
You, Mr. Bala, have become an ostrich—head buried in the sand, pretending all is well while your country burns. Worse still, you have become a Western puppet, peddling outdated scripts about democracy and dictatorship to an audience that knows better than to keep believing them. Until you summon the courage to confront the undemocratic rot within Nigeria itself — and hold your own leaders accountable, your lectures about democracy will remain empty, self-serving, and irrelevant.
Africa’s youth deserve better than recycled slogans. They deserve thinkers and writers who are unafraid to speak the whole truth, not merely the convenient half-truths sanctioned by foreign powers.
