On Dino Melaye's Protest By Pius Adesanmi

I don’t even know how I missed this one in all the recent back and forth but I have only just heard with one ear that the Senator Representing Bukola Saraki in the Senate, His Excellency Otunba Distinguished Senator Dino Melaye, is calling for protest and offering to lead it.



Senator Melaye's call for protest is welcome on one count: we have had such a tough, stressful week that a little dosage of comic relief is in order. When the history of this past week is written, you cannot say that Okun land did not help Nigeria out by offering badly-needed national comedy in the person of Senator Dino Melaye.

A people's misery, a people's weakest moment, is always a very fecund producer of opportunistic aspirant heroes and sheroes trying to embezzle such a people's legitimate struggles and triumphs. These are often prurient characters who sense an opportunity to smuggle themselves and their rottenness into nice positive corners in the people's memory. They want to be seen and known as liberators and freedom fighters.

Dino Melaye comes from the worst of this tradition: a pro-corruption activist always ready to freelance on the side of the people whenever he senses an opportunity to embezzle the people's misery and frustration.

You steal from the people all the time.
You impoverish the people all the time.
Even that poverty, you won't let them own it if embezzling it can burnish your ego and image.

Our friend, FFK, also belongs in this category of embezzlers. Whenever he is not eating at the centre, he becomes a champion of the people, especially on the ethnic front.

When he lost out at the centre, he became a champion of Yoruba causes and very nearly won some of my personal people over. He was that good at fooling people. I told folks that this champion of the Yoruba people was just making noise to be noticed again at the centre and he would abandon that cause as soon as he was invited to Abuja.

Goodluck Jonathan invited him...

When Jonathan lost the election, he could not return to Yoruba nationalism. There was no way he would fool people twice on that front. So, he became the Aare Ona Kakanfo Gburugburu of Igbo land, fighting ethnic wars on behalf of the Igbo, hoping that the Igbo would forget slurs such as "the Bitter Truth about the Igbo" and the fact that he was very recently the shine-Congo-and-publicly-tell-in-Chief of Igbo land.

But for the fact that FFK is currently undergoing degoatification, he would have taken a sabbatical leave from defending the Igbo to join up with Dino Melaye in being the liberators of the Nigerian people. And if the Igbo don't take him back after that, he would become the champion of Tiv nationalism.

Naija youth, beware of these characters. Beware of cheap embezzlers of your legitimate grief.

If you are an Okun youth especially, do not let me hear that you have signed up for Dino's protest o. He has no legitimacy. He is more your immediate problem than Buhari at the centre. He owes you explanations about his unaccountable wealth. He owes you explanations on the backwardness of Okun land. He is everything you should never aspire to be.

If you follow him like the fly which has no advice and followed the corpse to the grave, we shall identify your immediate family, your idile, and your agbo ile and report you to them. Okun land is not that big.