How Dino Melaye is slowly digging his own political grave

Editor’s note: Senator Dino Melaye’s altercation with Senator Oluremi Tinubu has spurred various reactions from political commentators with some blaming the Kogi senator for his outburst.
In this opinion, Emmanuel Ugwu predicts that Dino Melaye’s political career is already going down the drain.

The man, Dino Melaye

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!

The many sins of Dino Melaye

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 phallocentric 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.