Much ado about Dino Melaye

It was obvious that those gunning for Senator Ali Ndume had him on toast when the senate president appeared before the ethics and privileges committee of the senate. Hopefully the irony is not lost on Nigerians that there is a committee in the senate overseeing ethics. So when the inevitable happened and our ‘distinguished senators’ as they love to be addressed, followed with the inevitable and suspended Mr. Ndume, some vocal Nigerians with access to computers or smartphones asked that we scrapped the senate. 

True, there is nothing wrong with such call, noted that I said wrong and not illegal, and not to be accused of doublespeak, this column too had actually made the same call in August 2015 with a noticeable difference: it was for the national assembly and not just one arm. But the instances are different. The call then was predicated on the drain the senators and representatives constitute to our commonwealth and not because a senator was suspended. We seemed to be preoccupied with fighting for Ndume who embarked on self-immolation when he decided to fight Saraki and Dino Melaye. Funnily, some are still pleading his cause and we should not begrudge them, except that they are dissipating energy on a wrong cause.

If Mr. Ndume feels his rights have been trampled upon he sure knows what to do as a lawyer: the courts are there for him to seek refuge. Even though some people from his home state, Borno, have visited Saraki to plead their senator’s case, it seems improbable that he would not spend some time from the outside looking at what his sybaritic colleagues are up to. Most likely Ndume is still nursing the wounds of his removal from office as senate leader forgetting that democracy is a game of numbers and when you happen to be in a group that does not have the requisite number, you can only bide your time. Probably too he had forgotten how he found refuge in the Saraki camp when he teamed up with others to defy their party on senate leadership after inauguration.  One wonders also where the emergency crusaders for him were when Abdulmumin Jubrin, a House of Representatives member, who blew the whistle on the scam called 2016 budget was suspended by his colleagues. Nobody lifted a finger to help him. His case is still in court.

What else can we say about Dino Melaye? Hopefully Nigerians remember when he mutated into an anti-corruption crusader and became a master of ceremony at APC campaign events toward the 2015 elections. When the party found him useful, he was their poster boy; now he’s useless but the man will not go down without fighting. It was incredible that some actually thought the Ahmadu Bello University vice chancellor was going to say anything different from what he said at the ethics committee. Are people aware of the current situation of things in our universities? Do we know what goes on before vice chancellors are appointed? Do we know how external interests override other interests in such exercise? Is it really surprising that records are not properly kept in our universities? A senior colleague recently shared a story with me about his former university. His classmate whom they graduated together is now the head of department and while talking about academic transcripts, the new head told him that the school does not have a record of the courses they took as undergraduates. The saving grace for my senior is that he had collected the transcript shortly after graduation when records were still intact and he was asked to bring a copy to get another one.

So when a university head said “according to available records” we thought he was supporting Melaye, no, he was only working with what is available to him. Routinely, students’ academic records are increasingly difficult to compile as graduation approaches in our universities even when nearly all of them now have computer science departments. Lest this be construed as a hagiography of Mr. Melaye, the point is many things ail us in Nigeria that we focus on him alone at our peril. A person of his age putting on an academic gown to senate obviously should not be taken serious just as we must overlook his narcissistic tendencies evident in the obscene number of cars and the singing videos he routinely post on social media.

We still do not have a budget for this year just as we have lost nearly 400 to meningitis as at the last count, yet some of our compatriots still think a senator suspension and the antics of a man-child are issues deserving our attention. Pretty sad.