Playbook of a Tyrant

On July 20, disgruntled soldiers led by a young man later to be known as Saikou Manneh, who staged a protest against the government were disarmed, detained but later set free. The country''s president, Jakali Sanneh, was away. Behind the country''s State House docked a military ship by Babylonia. Their mission was a joint military exercise with soldiers of Kanan, so they claimed. Except that the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, President Sanneh, was not aware of this exercise. The journey of how one of post-independent Africa''s earliest democracies was thrown into a dictatorship has begun. Rarely has one written a book to portray tyranny, a system established, sustained and ruined by the same fear that created it, as the Playbook of a Tyrant