Read his piece below...
When our public officials fall asleep
while attending a meeting, or an
official function, the standard
Nigerian reaction is to have a hearty
laugh at their expense. Harmless
laughter. You’d remember many
photographs of our lawmakers turning
the National Assembly into an
extension of their bedrooms,
sometimes snoring loudly in the
middle of a heated and loud debate:
not that many of them would be of
much use anyway even if they were
awake.
Governors, commissioners, high ranking
government officials have also all been
caught at one time or the other, sleeping on
duty. Well, those whose circadian switches
go off like that should count themselves
really lucky they are Nigerians. If they were
to try that in North Korea, they will face the
firing squad!
Yes, in North Korea, such careless
sleeping attracts the death penalty. In that
country of 25 million people, there is a
despot in power. He is Kim Jong-un. At 32,
he is the world’s youngest leader but
probably the most dangerous man in the
world. He rules his country like a
concentration camp and continues to commit
some of the world’s most frightening crimes
against humanity. Human lives mean nothing
to him. He is so desperately paranoid, the
slightest act of irritation in his presence
could make him commit murder. His word is
law. He is supreme commander, judge and
executioner.
I was literally shivering when I read the
latest horror story from Kim Jong-un’s North
Korea. Two high-ranking officials were
ordered executed by the dictator. Ri Yong
Jin, a senior official at the Ministry of
Education, was accused of putting up an
“inappropriate posture” while “The Marshal”
was delivering a speech. Ri Yong Jin’s crime
was that he dozed off. Former Agriculture
Minister, Hwang Min’s crime was that he
dared to disagree with Kim’s guidelines for
designing a working policy on agriculture.
He developed his own ideas. He used his
own initiative. He was accused of trying to
undermine the leader. Both Jin and Min
were marched to the stakes within 24 hours
and executed with anti-aircraft guns. Kim
Jong-un is not satisfied with an ordinary
gun; his victims have to face anti-aircraft
guns, and you can imagine the impact of
such a special purpose gun, targeted at a
human being.
Since assuming office in 2011, Kim Jong-
un has murdered more than 70 persons,
including elite government officials who all
lived in fear. His own uncle, Jang Song-taek,
was one of the earliest victims at the
beginning of his dictatorship. Others include
a military officer who was executed for
drinking during the official mourning period
for Kim Jong II, Kim Jong-un’s father, and
the proximate genetic source of his
megalomania. In 2015, the architect who
designed a new airport terminal in
Pyongyang was executed because Marshal
Kim did not like his design! And Ri Yong Jin
won’t be the first man to die for succumbing
to the call of nature. In April, former Defence
Minister Hyong Yong-Choi also faced the
firing squad for falling asleep during an
event. The North Korean Human Rights
situation is a threat to the whole of mankind.
The use of execution, extra-judicial killing,
torture and forced labour as tools of political
control is one of the worst abuses of power
ever known.
The United States has imposed sanctions
on Kim Jong-un. The United Nations has
also officially condemned his atrocities, but
Kim Jong-un is dangerous, again because of
the nuclear power and missiles at his
disposal. Starkly egoistic as he is, he could
throw the world into utter chaos, were he to
press a nuclear button. The United Nations
Security Council has an obligation to take
the situation in North Korea more seriously.
Kim Jong-un’s matter should be an urgent
matter of concern for the International
Criminal Court (ICC).
I mean, to kill a man for falling asleep?
Polysomnographers insist that there is
nothing any one can do about sleep. Even
when you don’t suffer from somnipathy, when
it is time for the body clock to switch off, it
does so on its own. The best option is to
give in to nature so the body can rejuvenate.
Many public officials and business executives
run crazy schedules. They over-stretch
themselves, either travelling over long
distances and rushing from one meeting to
another, without any opportunity to take a
few moments of rest - jet-lagged, tired or
exhausted, they could doze off. This is why
at many meetings, there is always a coffee
pot on standby or sweets or as I have seen,
kolanuts and just about anything that you
can put in your mouth to enable you focus
on the event at hand. But even these offer
limited help. Balancing work with rest is
often a challenge for busy people. The whole
world knows this, except Kim Jong-un who is
so insecure he cannot stand other people’s
humanity.
I think of all the government officials in
Nigeria who sleep during meetings. If they
were to be in North Korea, they would all be
dead by now. I recall incidents involving
soldiers on parade, even soldiers of the
Guards’ Brigade, suddenly slumping, drawing
sympathy, and one particular incident
involving a former Minister of State for
Defence, who suddenly slumped while
standing at attention at a military event. Try
that in North Korea: immediate execution by
a firing squad would be the result. And if I
were North Korean myself, and I had served
as official spokesperson to Kim Jong-un, I
would have been executed by a firing squad
long before 2015.
I used to doze off too at meetings. My
boss ran a tough schedule and he had more
stamina than his staff. We could return from
a foreign trip by 2 am, and we would all be
expected to be at work by 8 am. If you know
how these things work, it could take another
two hours to properly disengage and go
home, leaving you with only two hours of
sleep. In our case, the principal would have
been up and about by 6 am (only God knows
how he always did it) to attend morning
devotion and spend some time in the gym, all
before 8 am. We the principal aides would
struggle to arrive, still sleepy but struggling
to appear capable. Sometimes, the source of
the grogginess may not be jet-lag but just
work (and God, we worked!).
From one meeting to the other or a
function after another, in the course of the
day, I used to doze off occasionally. Note
taking often kept me awake, but there were
moments when I simply lost control. You
know that kind of thing: you’d suddenly
realize it and jerkily regain consciousness.
On such occasions, I often caught the
President glancing at me. But one day, I
guess I overdid it. In the middle of a
meeting, I must have snored – that kind of
snoring that produces noisy decibels and
note-changing, level-revising, rhythmic
modulations. It was the President’s voice
that shook me out of the slumber.
“Abati, what is that?”
I opened my eyes.
“Next time you are feeling sleepy, just go
out, walk around for a few minutes and come
back. But don’t snore when we are having a
meeting.”
In North Korea, that would have earned
me an appearance not before an anti-aircraft
gun, may be an armoured tank! Kim Jong-un
is crazy. The problem is not form; it is the
psychology of power. The civilized world
must stand up for the right of every human
being to be human and not have to die
because of a leader’s ego. There is a
nightmare going on in North Korea and that
is probably better explained by the number of
North Koreans who are fleeing to the
neighbouring countries of Japan, China and
South Korea.
North Korea - the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea (DPRK!) - is a hermit state
where even the right to information or free
speech is impossible. People are not allowed
to communicate with the outside world, there
are restrictions on movement and rights of
association, there are no labour rights, the
state is so repressive, there is even a strict
national policy on men’s haircut: not more
than 2cm hair growth is allowed. Why? You
can’t grow your hair higher than that of the
self-styled “great person born of heaven!”
What exists in that country is not leadership,
but a cult of personality, and the only
personality is the leader whose legitimation
derives not from the people but dynastic
inheritance. North Korea is a living
demonstration of the dangers of power
acquired not on the grounds of intellectual
brilliance or competence or the people’s
choice, but heredity.
Regime-change is a popular phrase in
closed-door international circles, what is
needed in North Korea is not just regime
change, but a people’s revolution that takes
power away from class dynasty and hands it
over to the people. The world has enough
dangerous men already, tolerating a
schizophrenic in the Korean Peninsula who
has access to nuclear power makes the world
a bit more dangerous than it is already.
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