With democracy returned to Chile, it is to be hoped that its people will put the past behind them and close one of the darkest chapters of tyrannicalrule in South America.
The consensus among Nigerians at the time was that the country, under tyrannical military rule, was so corrupt that no Nigerian could, on the surface, be trusted to be earning a clean living - we must all, therefore, be rigorously screened for narcotics and fraudulent intentions when we went abroad.
George Orwell warned of the dangers of a tyrannical government that justified its rule in the name of the greater good in his classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.