An island paradise, replete with sparkling beaches, pristine holiday resorts and people so attractive you wonder if the sunshine there is peppered with an Instagram filter. Not quite the location you’d expect an iron-fisted autocrat to come from, no less to rule for three decades. But as we know, dictating, much like getting infected with the novel coronavirus, can happen anywhere.
And so we turn our attention to the South Asian island of the Maldives for our villain of the month, one Maumoon Abdul Gayoom.
Now the Maldives, like a good portion of the world, had been under British control. In the early 1930’s a Constitution was drawn up, which as these types of documents are concerned, was as dry as a Spar rotisserie chicken. But it did contain a notable clause: that the country would be governed by a sultan (a fancy title for “prefect”) who would be appointed by the all-knowing Brits.
As nice as this arrangement was, it wasn’t quite independence and not really what the good people of the Maldives were hoping for. It wasn’t until 1965 that the Maldives was recognised as a fully independent sultanate - which basically meant they could choose their OWN prefect.
Turns out this also wasn’t really what the people of the Maldives wanted either, and after a nationwide referendum, which was about as logistically complicated as organising a school assembly, the Sultan was chucked out. The Maldives was declared a Republic and Ibrahim Nasir was elected the first Headboy...I mean President.
As far as Heads of State go, Nasir was pretty decent. More than decent, in fact. Dude was a total rockstar. He modernised the fisheries with mechanized vessels and pretty much started the tourism industry. You see, before Nasir came along, the Maldives was a mosquito infested backwater and not the bucket-list travel destination it is today. My boy did that!
On top of all that, he introduced a modern curriculum to government-run schools, brought nationwide television and radio to the island and even abolished some of the heavier taxes on individuals and on imported goods. And if you’re from a certain southern African country, you’ll realise that all of this is the exact opposite of what a certain scarf-toting leader and his mafia of miscreants have done there.
But I digress...
Despite all this good stuff, Nasir was criticised for being heavy handed and a tad bit too authoritarian (read “violent”) in how he dealt with the people. And sure, when a group of petulant villages tried to form a breakaway government, Nasir responded with the pharynx-crushing efficiency and lethality of a 21st century respiratory disease, but these villagers were asking for it. And, besides, it was for the greater good.
But in my view, and I’m sure you’ll agree in a few sentences, this wasn’t Nasir’s biggest failing as President. His most bone-headed decision was to reject a third term in office and facilitate an orderly and peaceful transfer of power to our mans Gayoom (or G-Styles as he shall henceforth be known). Who does that?!
At this juncture, we probably need a little bit of back story on the man who was about to fasten his hands to power like white on rice.
G-Styles was born on December 29th 1937. Clearly refusing to let go or pull out was an inherited trait; his father had 8 wives and 25 kids, of whom G was the 11th.
His childhood was pretty normal, aside from the whole having enough siblings to populate a medium sized village thing. G-Styles was bright enough to win a scholarship to Al-Azhar University in Egypt, where he graduated at the top of his class. His grades were so good, in fact, that the President of Egypt, Abdel Nasser - a character in his own right - publicly congratulated him.
Amazingly, even though he achieved great academic success, G-Styles hadn’t spent his student years cooped up in a library memorising Plato or Aristotle or some crap that's about as useful in real life as a chocolate fireman. No, G-Styles at his young age was pretty politically active. Woke, if you will.
He led a group of 14 Maldivian students who sent a letter to Ibrahim Nasir asking him to reconsider his desire to establish diplomatic relations with Israel (I guess because of the apartheid and stuff but this was the 60’s so who really knows if they weren’t just high off an acid trip or something).
After receiving the letter, Ibrahim “Pettyson” Nasir cancelled their scholarships.
So that didn’t work out very well.
The 27 year old G-Styles was forced to end his studies but managed to get a lecturing gig in Nigeria. But not before meeting and falling in love with 15 year old Nasreena Ibrahim, who he would later marry and bring home in lieu of a diploma. And again, this was the 60s. Statutory rape wasn’t quite a thing then. Right?
Anyhow, after 2 years in Nigeria, G-Styles and family returned to the Maldives where our boy eventually got a managerial post in the government shipping department.
For some mysterious reason, G-Styles decided that now that he was back home, this would be the opportune time to again call out President Nasir on his policies; which G-Styles ironically argued didn’t sufficiently prioritise human rights.
G-Styles was promptly put under house arrest. Which kind of proved his point, no? After being tried in court, he was banished from the island for 4 years - considering how dope the Maldives is, this is actually more of a punishment than it sounds. I mean being evicted from paradise could be tantamount to...well...hell.
Luckily for our mans, 5 months later, Nasir was in a buoyant mood after winning a second term as President and let G-Styles come back. And things started going really well for G-Styles - he was promoted to Director of the government Telecommunications Department - until he opened his big mouth again to criticise Nasir.
Like GroundHog Day, G-Styles was arrested again in July 1974. This time he was thrown into solitary confinement in a local prison, which was a harsher or more lenient sentence than before, depending on how you look at things.
Once again, his punishment was short lived as it only took 50 days for him to be released again. Of course, this is a situation many readers can relate to. Not the “being allowed to freely roam the streets only 50 days after being locked up” part (because, who are we kidding?) but rather slowly losing the will to live as the walls close in on you.
By 1977, bygones were bygones (or so Nasir thought) and G-Styles had worked his way so far up the red-taped rungs of the bureaucratic ladder that he was appointed Minister of Transport, thus making him a member of Nasir's cabinet.
Which brings us, more or less, to the fateful moment Nasir made one of the dumbest decisions of his life by resigning from the Presidency. Styles wasn’t exactly popular - I mean 15 times more members of the “parliament” voted for Nasir to stay on than voted for him to be President - but he was the only one available/willing/power hungry enough to pick up the reins.
Upon taking office in November 1978, G-Styles promised liberal reforms. But before actually doing any of that, he replaced the leaders of the security forces with his homies. He also appointed his brother, Abdulla Hameed, as governor of the provinces, one of his brothers-in-law as the head of security and trade and another as head of the national broadcaster.
Having control of the TV and radio proved a useful avenue for G-Styles to fulfill his lifelong dream of critiquing his predecessor. Indeed it would be two decades before radio airwaves anywhere would broadcast verbal venom even as remotely lethal against a man named Nasir.
In addition to the constant diss tracks on radio, massive rallies were held across the island where disparaging cartoons were held aloft and crowds would dance giddily to chants slandering Nasir and everything he stood for. Which is a good use of productive time when you live on an island, I suppose.
G-Styles himself led a massive demonstration against Nasir on 16 May 1980 and in his address to a crowd of almost 20 000, accused Nasir of among other saucy misdemeanours, mishandling (read “stealing”) government money. The allegations against Nasir were never proved but who cares about the truth when the lie is so so entertaining?
Nasir was tried in absentia, sentenced and banished from the island. The next time he was to return would be as a corpse in 2008, after dying in Singapore.
But that’s enough about Nasir. Back to the real star of the show...
In between the politicised beach parties, G-Styles came to the sobering realisation that he actually had to govern the country. Which, as it turns out, is the hard part of being a ruler.
One of the early hallmarks of his regime was being tough on terrorism, drugs, and any forms of extremism. This, of course, served to justify the kind of repressive ball busting activities that barely shock your sensibilities if you’ve read enough of these pieces. Oh, you know, like jailing anyone who spoke ill of him, banning political parties, using torture and intimidation to rig elections. The usue.
G-Styles also shifted the nature of the tourism industry. Whereas before, any middle class Tom, Richard or Hulisani could pull through to the Maldives for a fun holiday experience, G-Styles focused specifically on luxury tourism, which could partly explain why the Maldives is STILL on most of our bucket lists mentioned earlier.
And look, in theory, attracting the world’s biggest ballers to blow obscene amounts of their hard swindled money in your hotels and resorts is a decent idea. The problem was that the effect of this was that income distribution within the country became deeply skewed. While hotels could cost $5,000 per night, most ordinary Maldivians (many of whom worked in the hospitality industry) were living on roughly $1 per day. Not great.
Another side-effect of all this was an increase in destitution, crime and drug abuse. The most widely used drug was a budget form of heroin called “Brown Sugar.” And let's be honest, if you’re giving a drug a name like that, you’re not exactly discouraging people from using it, are you?
The drug problem became such an issue that it was estimated at one point that 10% of Maldvians had a substance abuse problem; to say nothing of the puff-and-pass recreational users of the assortment of narcotics that were on offer. To add further paraffin to an already raging forest fire, the fact that people so casually stuck heroin needles into their blood streams meant that HIV, hepatitis and other COVID-19 cousins were on the rise too.
So too was were the reports of sexual abuse of female users. As was the toilet-bowl skidmark of an industry, the sex trafficking trade, as female addicts were forced into sex slavery to feed their habit.
Amidst this cocktail of chicanery, G-Styles did the square root of zero to alleviate the plight of the people. In fact, rumours abounded that G-Styles himself was personally connected to the drug trafficking operations. And I’m not saying that they were true, but dipping his toes into the narco-trafficking waters wouldn’t have been bad for his bottom line.
Not like he needed an additional income stream, to be honest. The man had a pretty tidy bank balance from looting state funds his career earnings. Among his assets was a $9.5 million luxury yacht, a multi-million dollar presidential palace which was renovated at a small, small cost of $17 million, 11 speed boats and 55 cars. If you’re wondering how a civil servant could afford all this, be reminded that it's none of your business.
Naturally, the dire economic and social conditions as well as the in-your-face opulence of the dude in charge was enough to grate the cheese of the hapless populace. Despite the ban, opposition to G-Styles and his method of government, if you can even call it that, began to emerge in the 1990s. As expected, any momentum such opposition gained was snuffed out quicker than hope just before the election results from Uzumba Maramba Pfungwe come in.
For his part, G-Styles doubled down on the ban, saying that the existence of opposition parties would go against the homogeneous nature of Maldivian society. This argument was about as logically coherent as Donald Trump contending that injecting bleach intravenously into one’s bloodstream is a remedy for the coronavirus, but hey, G-Styles was President and his word was law. For all intents and purposes.
In response, a group of young western-educated Maldivians in the UK formed a political party to challenge G-Styles’ hegemony. They called it the Maldivian Democratic Party, or MDP for short. Yes, the MDP.
The straw that broke the camel’s back (which is quite an unfortunate idiom given the events) was when, on September 19 2003, a 19-year-old prison inmate was beaten to death by prison guards while serving time for drug offences. This set into motion a long series of events that would eventually lead to G-Style’s removal from power.
Firstly, the kid’s mother refused to stay silent about the murder; she sounded a rallying call for people to gather in the streets on the day of his funeral and had open-casket funeral so that people could see his injuries.
This only sparked further outrage, beginning with a prison riot that didn’t quite have the cinematic ending of a Michael Jackson music video, as 4 inmates were killed and several more injured. Demonstrations on the streets ensued.
G-Styles and friends, fairly predictably, responded to this volatile situation with the calmness and poise of an elephant trying to pick a lock; the security forces bruised and bashed the living daylights out of the demonstrators, arresting those they were too lazy to beat into submission.
Shortly afterward, G-Styles won the 2003 presidential election, receiving a whooping and very believable 100% of the vote. Oh, he ran unopposed. The President, ever humble, took this victory as “clear evidence that the people firmly supported his policies.”
Spoiler alert: they didn’t.
Even though he had won the elections convincingly, G-Styles faced the crisis of credibility that his earlier heavy-handed crackdown on demonstrators had created. There was still widespread civil unrest internally. Externally, there was now a big spotlight on the abuses of power that threatened to taint the Maldives as a tourist destination.
Under pressure, G-Styles announced a raft of reform measures (wink wink) to improve the human rights situation in the country in November 2003. 10 short months later, this was proved to be a steaming pile of horse droppings when 10, 000 MDP supporters staged a nonviolent demonstration in the middle of the capital, Male.
If there’s anything we know about our boy G-Styles by now, its that he didn’t really learn his lessons the first time. Or the second, really. What came next was a violent crackdown (more like beatdown) worse than the first one. Several people were injured and more than 250 activists were imprisoned. The day later became known as “Black Friday”, which when you really think about it, isn’t that far removed from what most of us know “Black Friday” to be.
For good measure, G-Styles declared a state of emergency and mobile phone and internet services were turned off to block communications and prevent news of the atrocities from getting out to the world.
Countries like the UK, USA doubled down on their condemnation of the regime’s actions; probably not out of genuine concern for the Maldivians but you can imagine that for British and American tourists, the sights of locals being manhandled and blood flowing in the streets does ruin the holiday experience somewhat. India, Sri Lanka and the EU soon joined in calling for an end to all non-humanitarian aid to the Maldives, as well as a travel ban.
Begrudgingly, the state of emergency was lifted and several detained activists were moved from the squalid conditions of prison to the squalid conditions of house arrest.
More trouble loomed for G-Styles though when the Maldives was hit by an earthquake and tsunami in 2004, which left the island nation in need of considerable humanitarian help. Perfect for the international powers, who now spotted an opportunity to facilitate their “regime change agenda”.
G-Styles was driven to the negotiation table; meeting with the MDP for the first time in 2005, in a series of meetings called the Westminster House talks - which sounds eerily familiar.
Our mans reluctantly agreed to lift the ban on political parties, which gave formal recognition to the MDP as well as a number of other parties. The biggest shocker was the emergence of “The New Maldives” party, which was made up mostly of members of Gayoom’s cabinet who evidently didn’t like him that much. That had to have hurt G-Styles’ feelings.
Even though they participated in the discussions, the MDP were skeptical that international diplomacy alone could lead to free and fair elections. Taking historical precedence into account, they weren’t wrong at all. And so the opposition talked but, as a side hustle, organised direct action to get rid of G-Styles and what was left of his cabal.
Part of this direct action included protests, speeches, and sit-ins. On November 10, 2006, the MDP attempted to put together “the largest rally the Maldives has ever seen.” with almost 20,000 protestors being brought to the capital from surrounding islands.
And because third time's the charm, G-Styles responded with his usual histrionics; arresting more than 100 MDP organizers the pretense of plotting to subvert a constitutionally elected government or something like that. The cops also handled protestors with their characteristic restraint and grace, which ultimately led to the MDP calling off the protest to prevent bloodshed and further arrests.
All of this happened, once again, just before presidential elections. Seemingly oblivious to the damage that his behaviour over the last few years had done to his credibility, G-Styles ran for re-election, promising to reform.
You’d be forgiven for not believing him.
In his favour, G-Styles still had complete control over the national broadcaster and used it to full effect as his very own personal propaganda apparatus. But the opposition were wily enough to come up with counter-programming in the form of catchy slogans, humorous signs and banners, and mobile music shows where popular musicians belted out anti-G-Styles tunes.
This helped shore up increased support for the opposition candidate: Mohamed Nasheed. Nasheed was a former journalist who, like many other activists, had suffered imprisonment at the hands of the Styles government. He gained popularity among the youth for his contemporary ideas and energetic campaign. But let's face it, at this point, anyone would have been a better option than G-Styles.
In addition to an able political rival, G-Styles also had to contend with vigilantes who weren’t content to merely register their discontent at the polls. In January 2008, 20 year old Mohamed Murshid attempted to stab G-Styles with a knife hidden in a Maldives flag. How he managed to get so close to the man is a mystery in itself but remarkably, a 16 year old Boy Scout jumped in the way, sustaining injuries to his bare hands but saving G-Styles from certain injury or worse.
G-Styles had no such protection in the elections of later that year though. He lost the popular vote; receiving 46% of the vote with the remaining 54% going to Nasheed and ushering in a new dispensation which turned out to not be so “new” after all. I mean, among other shenanigans, Nasheed would later go on to famously hold a cabinet meeting underwater to protest against rising sea levels. Like...what?!
And if the story of G-Styles seems a bit anticlimactic, hang on...there’s more.
Remember how G-Styles had like 100 siblings? And remember how he put his family into influential positions as soon as his hiney touched the fur cushion of the presidential throne?
One of G-Styles’s many half brothers, Abdulla Yameen, had served as the Minister of Higher Education and then later as Minister of Tourism. Well, turns out that their mothers hated each other. Go figure!
G’s family was from Malé, the capital, while Yameen’s mother came from a poorer outlying island. These class differences ensured that the wives were never really treated equally - and hence the hatred. Think the Montagues and the Capulets, except if they were all the same family and Mr Montague had like 50 wives and girlfriends who he couldn’t get to be even remotely civil to each other.
Anyhoo, after Mohamed Nasheed became the President in 2008 it didn’t take long for Maldivians to realise that he likely wasn’t the guy for the job. In the 2013 election, he lost to Yameen (G-Styles’ half-brother). Well, technically he won the election after a hotly contested and controversial re-run but in some countries, it's not so much the will of the people that matters but the will of the highest court in the land. In this case, the Supreme Court, which annulled Nasheed’s victory and declared Yameen the winner. Facts not figures, I guess.
Having his brother in power didn’t turn out to be the baby unicorn-petting , strawberry daiquiri-drinking, fairy-tale ending to G-Styles’s political career that you’d have expected. I guess Yameen saw his new found power as an opportunity to settle old personal scores. Or at least, his mum’s.
So sharp did the conflict between the brothers become that G-Styles ended up joining the opposition and actively campaigning against Yameen. Yameen responded with the decorum so typical of this family and threw G-Styles in jail, accusing him of plotting to topple the government.
It's amazing how these charges rarely stick. G-Styles was eventually released but went into self-imposed exile in the UK before starting yet another political party. Oh, he tweets too, so do give my boy a follow.
And that's the history lesson for today, folks! I guess the moral of the story is that you don’t need to make the same mistake three times to learn your lesson. Oh, and be nice to your siblings and/or side-chi...Wait.
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