Nigeria, May 17 -- In the architecture of constitutional democracies, the office of the president is designed to be a symbol of national unity and the executor of the collective will of the people. Even in the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria, the preamble read thus: "We, the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria". However, in Nigeria, that symbolic head has evolved, or perhaps I should say devolved, into a quasi-divine figure. The president is no longer merely a public servant. He is, for all intents and purposes, a deity: revered, feared, adored, and, most worryingly, obeyed with a level of unquestioning devotion that sits at odds with the tenets of democratic governance.

To understand how this political deification came to be, we must...