By Emmanuel Ugwu
No one who is conversant with the biography and career of ‘Senator’ Dino Melaye would be shocked by corroborated reports that he threatened to beat up and ‘’impregnate’’ a female colleague during a closed door session of the Nigerian senate on Tuesday. The act, outrageous as it sounds, is in character. Dino has always been the quintessence of a street thug. His personal and public lives show a symmetrical penchant for hysterics, bullying and violence.
Dino truncated his two attempts at marriage with his own hands. He battered his wives beyond the ‘normal threshold’ of a black eye. He inflicted life-threatening injuries on them with such meanness and frequency that the victims cottoned up to the fact that this husband meant to perpetrate murder in installments.
Only a couple of months, Dino threatened to assault Senator James Manager (PDP, Delta South) in an executive session of the senate. Manager’s heinous crime was that he advised that the Senate risks tarnishing its image as an institution if it does not extricate itself from ‘Senate President’ Bukola Saraki’s trial at the Code of Conduct Tribunal. Dino charged at the older Manager and moved to attack him.
In his earlier incarnation as a member of the National Assembly, Dino fought on the floor of the House of Representatives. The majority of the legislators were angling for the resignation of the scandal-tainted Speaker Patricia Etteh. Dino tried to save her by starting a fight. He was beaten and stripped half-naked. He walked out in rags.
When Dino hectored Senator Oluremi Tinubu and hurtled towards her so that his alarmed colleagues rushed to save him from himself –by arresting, pacifying and taming him –it was the force of habit at work. He had been beating up women by rote. But since his two wives walked out, he had been suffering the deprivation of existing without a woman to abuse.
Dino’s fifteen minutes of madness boils down to forced withdrawal symptoms. He had not had the fix of woman-beating for a long time. He desperately wanted to be a ‘wife beater’ again. Even if he had to do it to another man’s wife. Even if he had to do it in the chambers of the senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria!
His threat to beat up and ‘’impregnate’’ Mrs Tinubu in one breath is not a thoughtless indulgence in non sequitur or mixed metaphors. It was an externalization of a perverse sexual orientation that seeks pleasure in the harm and pains of a woman.It was the coming out of a closet revelation of a sadomasochist!
A normal man cannot conceive of the intimate act of ‘’impregnating’’ a woman as an improvement on the horror of beating her. It takes a sick, demented man to scream at the top of his voice that he would beat up a woman and escalate her woes by mounting her. It takes a Dino Melaye to lech after a married woman and to expressly ventilate it in a language that pretends to be anything but a promise to rape!
Dino is a misogynist. He doesn’t believe in the personhood of the female human. He was the senator who derailed a reasonable debate on the necessity of promoting the patronage of made in Nigeria goods by educating the senate that there is such a thing as ‘’made in Nigeria women.’’
Dino was the senator who stood up during a debate on a bill prohibiting sexual harassment of students by lecturers in tertiary institutions and suggested that sexual predation happens when ladies wearing ‘’seductive and provocative dresses’’ ‘’enter the offices of lecturers who have ‘’no anointing to resist sexual temptation.’’
Dino threatened to beat up and ‘’impregnate’’ Mrs. Tinubu in order to shame her for her gender. To remind her that whoever she was, he was the superior sex. She was a mere woman, easy to be conquered, prostrated and violated right into her most private space.
The threat to ‘’impregnate’’ by force escaped from a phalocentric mindset that regards sex as a weapon of war. In Dino’s world, sex is the ultimate victory lap. Sex is what you do to a woman to trivialize her femininity. It’s what you do to impose on her an acute sense of her inferiority.
The story says that when the echo of his voice returned to him, he walked back the impracticable threat in a manner only Dino could. He said he wouldn’t bother to fulfill the threat on Mrs. Tinubu. The former first lady of Lagos State was a dry fish. He would rather do it to ‘’a more robust and beautiful woman like Stella Oduah.’’
That’s the rarity of senator of a country declaring his sexual fantasy and grading his female colleagues based on how close their physique came to matching his specifications of an ideal bedmate!
After news of his shameful action went viral and he began trending as a butt of jokes on Nigerian Twitter, Dino tweeted a denunciation of SaharaReporters, the medium that broke the news. He would later follow that up with a press conference; a self-massage session before the media.
Dino told his auditors he was “a responsible Nigerian.” ”A role model.’’ ”A champion of anti-corruption.” The report that he threatened to assault and ‘’impregnate’’ the lady senator was a lie. He had never and would never conduct himself in a manner unworthy of the people of his constituency and their culture.
In no time who the liar was became clear. Senator Oluremi Tinubu’s husband, Bola Tinubu confirmed the reports. Dino had truly made the threat to beat up and to ‘’impregnate.’’ He had even boasted that he had immunity. He would commit the abuse and ‘’nothing will happen.’’
Mr. Tinubu called Dino a ‘’disgrace’’ to the Nigerian senate. Okun Parapo, the socio-cultural group of the Yoruba-speaking people of Kogi state, his own extended family, disowned him, calling him a son of reproach.
It goes without saying that Dino cannot be properly characterized. He cannot be characterized because he has no character. Whatever you say of his vulgarism, his barbarism and his love for products of civilization and loath for the power of civilization proves an understatement of the baseness of the man. When you venture to frame his uncouthness, your resultant point-by-point takedown of the figure doesn’t do due justice. It, instead, reads like a stunted compliment.
Why is it so?
Dino vanquishes you in the outer court of understanding. A man’s idiosyncrasies have to make relatable sense to you before you can be in a position to assay him and choose words that meaningfully approximate to his quality. He doesn’t lend himself to comprehensibility.
He is a compulsive buffoon that keeps evolving in complexity. A fool that keeps waxing stupid in sophistication.
The problem with Dino, though, is not that he is a fool. The problem with Dino is that he is a fool that loves to perform in the spotlight. He is an erratic fool that goes out of his way to impress you. He is the fool that keeps pushing the boundaries of idiocy. He is the fool that demolishes impossibilities. He is the fool’s fool!
After a disastrous time in the lower house and his punitive banishment to political wilderness by his constituents, you would have thought that when next he appears on the national stage, he would be a different person from the avatar of nuisance you used to know. He would have rehabilitated himself in private. Or the passage of years would have mellowed him.
But Dino hasn’t changed for the better. He is still the star actor of shame. He has even become a more audacious miscreant. A narcissistic insurgent that makes an exhibition of his own nakedness.
Dino is not the only devious person in the Nigerian senate. The Nigerian senate is a menagerie of pedophiles, drug barons and thieves. These crooks generally blend in the woodwork. They keep a low profile and take care not do further damage to their name.
Dino’s distinction is that he has as much appetite for scandals as he relishes villainy. He loves to be the issue of the day. He loves the mockery, the ridicule, the constant mention of his name.
Dino claims to have earned six degrees. He doesn’t reflect any token of the briefest flirtation with education. In his elements, he comes across as a deranged English-speaking ventriloquist.
Dino recalls that he checked into the university from some motor park where he was a bus conductor. He is still the bus conductor. Nothing in his pattern of behavior suggests that he transitioned.
The way to explain the irony of his abundance of degrees and his abject poverty of decorum is that he probably collected them the same way he collects things that he imagines would enhance his social standing. He bought them like his exotic cars and his 22 of chieftaincy titles!
Dino Melaye recently announced on live TV that he would soon be the president of Nigeria. He repeated ‘the dream’ in his rebuttal of the current story –in the same speech in which he editorialized on a woman’s menopause!
Dino is a vulgarian and a thug. His presidential dream represents a threat to ‘’impregnate’’ Nigeria!
Emmanuel Ugwu can be contacted via immaugwu@gmail.com, @EmmaUgwuTheMan
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