by Soma Oj.

Earlier today, a photograph of Big Brother Naija runner-up, TBoss and Senator Dino Melaye (APC, Kogi) at the launch of his book, Antidotes for Corruption, surfaced online and it has all but scattered the internet.

 

[In case you missed it: TBoss spotted with Senator Dino Melaye]

To be honest, I am not sure I know why exactly that is but I have recently been intimated that my sole purpose on earth is t help you figure out how you feel or think the way you do. I do not know what that job is called but I am running with it. I also know that I cannot successfully explain what you need to know – as in this case – without first helping myself understand. So I did…

And here’s what I found. 

That’s it’s not a big deal and that the majority of the reactions online to that photo are just cathartic responses to deeper issues which we will get to shortly I after I give the necessary background information needed to follow through with this.

So Senator Dino Melaye, everyone knows, is a man who has often made himself the subject of ridicule by either speaking unintelligibly (a.k.a the use of big grammar that has nothing to add to real conversations) on the floor of the House where he represents people who actually have real issues. Or more recently, by conveying veiled threats to a publisher who wrote about the possibility of him having lied about the degrees he lays claim to in an embarrassingly petty internet video. #AjekuIya.

He has also touted himself as one of the anti-corruption crusaders despite the fact that Ibrahim Magu (who by the way is still acting chairman of EFCC) has accused him of leaving the good side. What better way to reaffirm himself as a friend of the anti-corruption crusader than to write a book called “Antidotes for Corruption” right?

So he did.

But the problem is that no frustrated, struggling-through-a-difficult-recession, and frankly tired-of-all-the-BS Nigerian cares about what a member of the Nigerian Senate has to say about corruption. Because it is too early to forget that despite their own hardships, each member of the Senate enjoys a whopping cut of 125 billion Naira annually for doing the least, a.k.a not thinking creatively about ways to solve Nigeria’s many issues while passing all the laws that do not actually matter or have enough loopholes to only affect the average Nigerian and not them.

Also, no politically active Nigerian cares what Dino Melaye has to say about fighting corruption in our land considering the fact that he’s been a part of the institutions that have helped foster corruption for so long. Borrowing from the epic clap-back Donald Trump gave Hillary Clinton at the final Presidential debate last year when she would not stop bragging about her 30 years of experience in government:

“The problem is, you talk, but you don’t get anything done, Hillary Dino.”

It’s either the Senator does not know this or he does not just care because he wrote this book and launched it by inviting the most confusing set of patrons to help launch it. Two of them are Senate President Saraki who has barely cleared his name after being involved in a messy Code of Conduct trial on corruption charges and wife of former President Jonathan, Dame Patience who is currently fighting tooth and nails with the EFCC for ridiculously large sums found in several accounts opened in the names of other people, real and ghost companies but all linked back to her; all monies that she continues to say were not stolen funds.

To think that Senator Dino Melaye wrote a book on fighting corruption and then launched it by inviting these people is only then aggravated by the fact that he invited a lady who once bragged about her ability to blow 25 million Naira within a week. Yup! Way to go Senator Dino Melaye, that’s the exact antidote for corruption.

Still, I know a better way to deal with all these

There is one more thing. Senator Dino Melaye knows something that people like Donald Trump know about you, the avid consumer of everything churned up by the media: that the optics matter. The proof of that is simply the fact that rather than Nigerians forgetting Dino Melaye and his book as the complete irony that its very existence is, we are still talking about it today because TBoss, a celebrity of some sort has being thrown in the mix.

TBoss generates buzz and now she’s generated more buzz for Dino Melaye’s book than the very existence of the book can. And you helped him achieve that. By being mad/amused/confused or caring at all about that photo.

Hope you feel better now.