It may’ve been a rumour but we know it could as well happen. That by the time a threat is sounded of Russia letting off a bomb towards the city of London, UK, the country’s queen would long have been whisked away and placed in a secret bunker.

So, rumour mills seem to have jumped on the kerfuffle going on between Russia and the NATO countries over the former’s invasion of Ukraine to milk the fact of that bunker nest. We saw many clips, but one purported to be a BBC News segment about a Russian nuclear attack. Fake, yes, but maybe someone wanted to enjoy the spectacle of the queen being tucked away in a hideout on a false alarm.

Which, if for nothing else, served to show us that like in the USA, top government officials in the UK, not only Queen Elizabeth II, have hideaways prepared for them in case of any possible mass-annihilation danger. These are shelters from bombs, devastating natural calamities or any other such terrible happening but they are exclusively for government top hunks.

Now, think about it. I don’t know about natural calamities or any other unforeseen menaces, although we can never ignore the fact of the hand of our northern democracies in setting even the natural disasters off. Surely, there are ways of adopting methods that will avoid never-ending fears of any destructive occurrence, a fact that’d save them the disgrace of panicky scurries into hiding on false alarms.

But the topic at hand: hideaways from Russian killer bombs. Apart from the other less mass-destructive weapons, it’s said to hold around 6,255 nuclear weapons. And the race is on, with the deadliest of them all being rumoured to have just been unveiled and with a name to match its destructive power – Satan II.

Well, then, it looks like the government kingpins of our democracies of the global North are going to need none-too-few hidey-holes. Because apart from the annihilation weapons from Russia and any of its other unpredictable neighbours, there will be those other natural cataclysms, for example, to shelter from.

The countries we are talking about are exemplary democracies, remember. And we should know, because, at the slightest chance, they’ll make sure the fact is inculcated into our poor ‘dictatorship-minds’ of the global South.

Model democracies that they are, with kind hearts to match, they are eager to make us become like them, even if it means whipping us into it.

For adopting Western values is for our own good.  And it would forever gnaw at their conscience if they failed to bend us towards adopting their democratic ways.

Problem is, to some of our ‘dictatorships’, democracy starts with the littlest citizen. Our ‘dictatorial democracies’ will not be worth their ‘dictator-tag’ unless they ensure the security of that citizen and his/her property. And that security cannot be ensured without his/her participation because he/she alone knows how it can be ensured. That inescapably calls for participation in her/his ‘dictator-governance’.  

In the first place, some of these ‘dictator-leaders’ that those of the global North harangue every day about abusing the rights of their people will have come into ‘dictator-leadership’ through laying their lives on the line for those very same people. Because these people are their grannies, grandpas, kids, on and on. Speaking for Africa, it’s very well known how all Africans are kin and kith.

That’s why to Africans it sounds more than laughable to hear that their country’s president scurried into hiding at the sound of an alarm about an attack from another country. Worse still, if it happened to be at the sound of a false alarm, that president would be laughed straight out of their statehouse!

African kings and queens as heads of their countries are a too negligibly small number to consider. Even then, the few who exist may be accused of having many spouses but not of leaving their subjects high and dry and sinking into snake-holes at the sound of a false alarm. Theirs would be turned into thrones of thorns.

Admittedly, there may have been Kaddafi’s and Gbagbo’s who may have sought hiding in sewer pipes or colonialist-built cave-escapes. That, however, will have been because their citizens were misguided by NATO countries or a French former colonial power, for these powers’ ulterior motives, to hunt them down.

Otherwise, an African leader worth their country’s instruments of power will consider the wellbeing and safety of their most vulnerable citizens first. That way, he/she together with the able-bodied can work out the best defence.

Meanwhile, as a leader, his/her duty will be at the frontline, to work with a select group on devising strategies so as to provide leadership in this effort. 

‘Kleptocratic’ and tyrannical governments apart, in these developing democracies that the global North terms ‘dictatorial governments’, governance is, first and foremost, sacrifice for the populace.

‘Operation Candids’, or secret nuclear or other-reason escapes, for African leaders, leaving their people to the nuke-dogs? May such shame never visit Africa!