By Ugoji Egbujo

A media company held its annual awards ceremony a few days ago. The guest speaker was Senator Dino Melaye.

He walked up to the lectern in his usual flamboyance. This occasion, and his guest speaker role, couldn’t extract some sobriety from him. The air was immediately infused with frivolity.

The man who likes to be mistaken for a champion for rule of law and accountability announced his intention to speak about the concept of separation of powers, with relish. But what he spent the 45 minutes that followed rambling about had practically little to do with that political doctrine. It must be that the heart and the brain had different targets.

It didn’t take long before his devotion to sensationalism showed. “You speak the truth you die, you keep quiet you die. I choose to speak the truth and die,” he bellowed. And discerning eyes couldn’t hide their glints of mischief. Boastfulness has become part of our political culture. But a man who revels in hedonism and exhibitionism should not expect this ruse to attract anything but derision.

Before anyone could begin to fantasize with the possibility of the senator pulling a surprise, Dino Melaye started petering out. He declared the president’s bewildering reluctance to sack the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), an abuse of separation of power. I strongly support a thorough criminal investigation of the SGF matter. But Dino knows that the tepid water of that truth can scald no one now. That unfortunate scandal has gathered dust in the market square.

Dino knows the public is anxious to learn how many hundreds of millions of naira senators allocate to themselves as allowances from national coffers. His colleagues won’t forgive him if he exposed what the senate hides from the public. ‘Speaking the truth and dying’ can earnestly start from such revelations.

The truth that can hurt Dino isn’t the one that all women in Jankara market already know. They would like to know how many senate committees ‘shake down’ departments and agencies in the name of oversight supervision.

The speech by its title promised so much. But the speaker chose self indulgence, and wandered into the wilderness of glib talk. What has separation of powers got to do with any dereliction of duty by the president in the SGF matter? But wait a minute.

Isn’t it ridiculous that Senator Melaye has the equanimity to canvass, publicly, the prosecution of any public officer? Dino Melaye who hasn’t relinquished his leadership of the horde that troops to court in cynical solidarity with a senate president facing trial for alleged falsification of assets declaration. That sustained attempt to infest the public with the impression that the anti-corruption programme of the government is contaminated with vindictiveness isn’t borne of courage.

Melaye took centre stage and played to the gallery, drawing occasional applause from an audience that was being titillated rather than enlightened. If the organisers wanted a sober reflective mind, they had other choices. A proper speech requires a little more than the braggadocio needed to walk around Bourdillon street, Ikoyi, seeking to provoke a brawl. They went for noisy superficiality. Evidently, speeches, like the awards themselves, have become tokens for political patronage, ‘paddy, paddy’ stuff.

A male senator once stood in the hallowed chambers of the Senate and rained unprintable words on a female senator. He hasn’t rendered a public apology. How is he a courageous man? In Nigeria, the pursuit of a selfish political end will always be sold as a quest for a superior moral cause. And because duplicity is rife, almost cultural, politicians can stand at rooftops and loudly preach sermons whose very tenets their lifestyles repudiate.

Dino postulated that the country is manacled by oppressive demonic forces. And he suggested that a separation from those forces must happen if the country would survive. Who would begrudge Dino for thinking outside the box? We have to force a separation of the powers of the state from the grip of the powers of demons. Those who chose Dino had sensationalism rather than substance in mind.

The demons Dino referred to, it would appear, operate through the medium of divisive ethnicity and sectionalism. So Dino proposed a new country where no one would be identified by state of origin but state of residence. If that was what the senator came with, and focused on, the speech would have been worthwhile. But after churning out a multitude of hypocritical propositions, he made the germane issue of state of residence look like an icing on a rotten cake.

It’s pardonable. Our politicians are not crafted for intellectual engagements. But it never pays to come to such a speech with the frame of mind with which topical social issues are manhandled in bars. Loud and alarmist, emotional and sensationalist, no depth.

Cowards also speak the trite truths, and grandstand. Taking pictures on expensive yachts and publishing them on social media is truth telling. A senator flaunting gleaming Bentleys in the faces of his famished constituents is truthfulness. The telling of the blessings of God. And honestly, no one in Nigeria suffers for telling such truths.

Awards are good. But in Nigeria every politician who lives long enough, no matter how corrupt, will get many of these awards. Mo Ibrahim hasn’t found a good material for his 5million dollar African Leadership award for years now. But in Nigeria responsible news media always, effortlessly, share awards every year.

They do so religiously even in midst of conspicuous poor governance. The laundering of corrupt, inept and badly behaved politicians through awards and speeches is a grave crime against the Nigerian people.