Melaye’s Book: the Nonfiction Work of Fiction

I laughed and laughed hard like many Nigerians at the news of Dino Melaye authoring and launching a book. The 600-page book is called Antidote for Corruption, offering ways of tackling corruption in Nigeria.

Representatives of anti-corruption agencies, however, were markedly absent at the launch. Other politicians who though ethically deficient but yet retaining some senses did not also attend the event.

The composition and character of those at the event would tell the nature of the gathering. In attendance were Senate President,  Bukola Saraki, former First Lady, Madame Patience Jonathan among other usual suspects in the corruption saga. 

Antidote to corruption should never have come from someone in this class of men to whom corruption is a second nature. How can a man who breathes corruption be prescribing anti-corruption pills? Lucifer himself preaching paradise. Subconsciously, Melaye is probably offering suggestions that will endear you to corruption.

What happened was ethically-challenged people gathered and worried and complained about pompous publicity that the anti-corruption fight enjoys. If everything would be quietly done, less hyped and sensational, that will be okay. Not entirely bad idea, but such suggestion should have to come from somebody with clean slate.

The crucial question, however, is where Dino has got the intellectual resourcefulness to author a book, any book, when a simple Google search about him will not reveal any record of him writing a work anywhere? Related searches about him reveal sentimental superficialities, conspicuous shallowness, blissful philistinism, corrupt and vulgar life-style and crude ostentation: Dino Melaye’s house, Dino Melaye’s cars, Dino Melaye’s video, etc.

Dino wants present himself as intellectually formidable, not knowing that he and his friends cannot rise above themselves. The only people he can intimidate are the non-reading minds, the ilk of Bukola Saraki who was overwhelmed by what he calls Melaye’s “resilience” for writing a voluminous book. Saraki judges intellectuality by voluminousness, not depth and substance.

The farce is so crude, pedestrian, and painfully mediocre that Nigerians dismissed it with scornful laughter. But Dino is not one with sense to realize the emptiness and the fundamental irony of his work. A bold liar who traffics in alternative facts and optional truth, despite the scorn and contempt that greeted his charade, even though  he is lying and knows everyone knows he is lying, the Kogi-West Senator can still go ahead to think himself as that smart guy who scammed the nation.

Everything surrounding the book stinks corruption and raises more and more integrity questions. Unavoidably prolix, the book must have been ghostwritten by a mediocre PA who Dino refused to mention.

The price of the book has yet called for another indictment. The essence of work is to be read. The book is tagged $131.57, fifty-thousand naira local currency. How could a writer who wants to be read put such ridiculously high price for a book meant for public good?

The whole business of launching the book was carried out in near secrecy. Points of sales digitally or otherwise were not disclosed. So far, one can tell with degree of certainty that not a single higher institution across the country has gotten a copy of the book.

Saraki-Melaye crop are group of people who approach truth and ethic if not with subversion, then with absolute indifference. The urge to lie without conscience in this sort of politicians is compulsive. They are greatly obsessed with publicity and fame that in as much as they get mentioned, they don’t mind whether they appear in negative light or not. This explains why they gathered and threw jibes at anti-corruption fight, and tried so hard without success to project themselves as honorable men and women. Otherwise they would have avoided this outlandish self-inflicted damage.

Melaye is not alone in this joke. He is the foreman of corrupt politicians who receded to the background to scam the nation. The result of that drama is an evident desire to escape their own lives, an expression of inner turmoil. They are mocked, they are ridiculed and held in contempt. They look at themselves and look at others and feel bad. They are unhappy with themselves and seem to be saying “we are not corrupt.” And the public seem to be replying “yes, yes, we agree fools.”

I see phony people pretending the dream of being men of letters they never would, thus inevitably gravitating towards where they belong to: corruption. Melaye’s book can best be described as what Timothy O’Brien called “nonfiction work of fiction.”

 

You can’t lose a bet not even Dino has bothered to read the book, for these people lack interest in anything beyond money, power and sex. He might have just okayed the final manuscript. I can imagine the scene in his room, Dino sipping beer, fingering a baby and waving off a pathetic PA.

Emir Sanusi II, Northern Governors and Other Stories

You may not know what droved Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II to depict the ugliness of our society in the open. Before his ascension to the throne, the Emir might have been speaking as a private citizen, from a detached position, with no contact with the real tragedy.

It is anger. It is pain. It is the deluge of human tragedies reaching him as a royal father. Daily, he sees supposedly normal humans do silly things. Daily, he sees incredible cases of irresponsibility. The radical, militant stances he took will make sense to you if you take a deep reflection, or imagine yourself in his shoes, or you experience one or two scenarios. One nearly feels like justifying the Emir’s action but for the channels, means and ways available to him.

The problem is deeper than we assume it on the media. It is sad and painful to admit, but our society is an eyesore and in terrible mess.

Of such irresponsibilities I have learnt recently is a man who divorced his wife for not dropping at his sister’s after visiting the area. Another man wanted to take a third wife through government-sponsored marriage, beat his wife with a fracture in her hand. He already has two wives living in different tenements. Feeding is no picnic, so also tenement paying. The first wife, who was beaten, did not object to his new marriage but argued that as pre-requisite for his marriage he should first of all assume his role as a father and start paying the school fees of his kids.

In a society full of people who can barely feed themselves, this man’s story is not the worst. Given a chance, each one of you can narrate thousand and one stories that will sure eclipse this.

I have hard time with the idea of being rough to women. Perhaps people who are willing to give up their male privileges and who can feel shocked upon hearing disgusting words said about women, or nasty action done to them, naively believe in the dignity of women. Someone asked me if I could wake my wife up and ask her to do things for me. Oh, you mean like a dictator? No, God forbid I become a despot or tyrant. Marriage is a partnership, not acquisition. We shall work and earn a deserved respect. But the painful thing is that women, even those who have been to colleges and universities, are made to internalize their oppression.

Emir Sanusi overlooked other great tragedies of human stories. What he overlooked is the plague of beggars and madmen in our streets. And the loss of young adults and adolescents to drugs – wasted humans, wasu sunci kai, wasu sunci rabin kai – largely due to parental failure.

When state failure is glaring, hopes must shift to community and individual. But we are confused. Maybe used to seeing the ugliness of our society made us internalize it and see it as normal. All that the Emir asked is a move along with time, that women need education to live a decent, dignified life even in marriage. For nothing, you need education to be a citizen of the 21^st century.

Lack of ambition and total confusion stand the society out. People lack techniques to survive the challenges of our time, they make almost no effort to acquire them, and when they suffer, they relate their suffering to God. That is the real tragedy, because if they know that their condition is unnatural, there can be hope of making effort to act on it.

The way people relate their suffering to God often makes me wonder: Has God hated us so much that He tests us so harshly than anybody? Blaming everything to God is simply a cunning way of avoiding responsibilities. Like believing that poverty is a good virtue. Or it is a sign of piety that will endear you to God. By being content with bare existence, one can see that there is something that kills ambition in our people.

We give birth to children and dump them to the mercy of luck and auto-pilot. As if we don’t really believe that we need good life for our sons and daughters. We fail to understand the simple fact that the more educated a boy or a girl becomes the more chances of better life, and the chances of swatting off irresponsible partners.

If your ancestors passed through a tragedy, and generations after them passed through similar challenge, like persistent female and child mortality, divorce and other social issues, and the same trend tends to befall you, then there definitely is something wrong. You have newer knowledge and techniques and newer, quicker access to them than your ancestors. For that, your ancestors should look at you admiringly and wish they were you.

Twenty-First century does not require only the ability to read and write. It needs more sophisticated techniques to enable one to solve complex human problems. The challenges facing humanity are blind to color, gender and belief and demand uniform skills from everyone. The reason why every child, male or female, should be educated. But the saddest thing is that in the next fifty years there would be some kids who would not be able to attend school as their parents do not attend today.

Who loses if the status quo remains?

Many may mistake Emir Sanusi’s new stand as cowardice. Their assumption cannot be dismissed outright. Careful observation, however, will reveal that the Emir’s stand is born out of a mixture of resignation and lost of hope in our people. But he does not lose if the status quo remains. Northern governors and their elite enablers do not lose; they are in fact beneficiaries of the hatch and breed system of the commoners’ kids that will swell the numerical strength of their votes.

The Emir was rightly indignant and tuned down. There won’t be rapid changes as he hoped for in a place where the visionless outweigh the visionary.  It will take a very long time before most people become aware of the horrible consequence the Emir is seeing now.

The sad reality in our society today makes it necessary that focus must shift to the self. Influence those who can still be influenced to get away from the grip of tyranny and exploitation.