Melaye’s Book: the Nonfiction Work of Fiction
I laughed and laughed hard like many Nigerians at the news of Dino Melaye authoring and launching a book. The 600-page book is called Antidote for Corruption, offering ways of tackling corruption in Nigeria.
Representatives of anti-corruption agencies, however, were markedly absent at the launch. Other politicians who though ethically deficient but yet retaining some senses did not also attend the event.
The composition and character of those at the event would tell the nature of the gathering. In attendance were Senate President, Bukola Saraki, former First Lady, Madame Patience Jonathan among other usual suspects in the corruption saga.
Antidote to corruption should never have come from someone in this class of men to whom corruption is a second nature. How can a man who breathes corruption be prescribing anti-corruption pills? Lucifer himself preaching paradise. Subconsciously, Melaye is probably offering suggestions that will endear you to corruption.
What happened was ethically-challenged people gathered and worried and complained about pompous publicity that the anti-corruption fight enjoys. If everything would be quietly done, less hyped and sensational, that will be okay. Not entirely bad idea, but such suggestion should have to come from somebody with clean slate.
The crucial question, however, is where Dino has got the intellectual resourcefulness to author a book, any book, when a simple Google search about him will not reveal any record of him writing a work anywhere? Related searches about him reveal sentimental superficialities, conspicuous shallowness, blissful philistinism, corrupt and vulgar life-style and crude ostentation: Dino Melaye’s house, Dino Melaye’s cars, Dino Melaye’s video, etc.
Dino wants present himself as intellectually formidable, not knowing that he and his friends cannot rise above themselves. The only people he can intimidate are the non-reading minds, the ilk of Bukola Saraki who was overwhelmed by what he calls Melaye’s “resilience” for writing a voluminous book. Saraki judges intellectuality by voluminousness, not depth and substance.
The farce is so crude, pedestrian, and painfully mediocre that Nigerians dismissed it with scornful laughter. But Dino is not one with sense to realize the emptiness and the fundamental irony of his work. A bold liar who traffics in alternative facts and optional truth, despite the scorn and contempt that greeted his charade, even though he is lying and knows everyone knows he is lying, the Kogi-West Senator can still go ahead to think himself as that smart guy who scammed the nation.
Everything surrounding the book stinks corruption and raises more and more integrity questions. Unavoidably prolix, the book must have been ghostwritten by a mediocre PA who Dino refused to mention.
The price of the book has yet called for another indictment. The essence of work is to be read. The book is tagged $131.57, fifty-thousand naira local currency. How could a writer who wants to be read put such ridiculously high price for a book meant for public good?
The whole business of launching the book was carried out in near secrecy. Points of sales digitally or otherwise were not disclosed. So far, one can tell with degree of certainty that not a single higher institution across the country has gotten a copy of the book.
Saraki-Melaye crop are group of people who approach truth and ethic if not with subversion, then with absolute indifference. The urge to lie without conscience in this sort of politicians is compulsive. They are greatly obsessed with publicity and fame that in as much as they get mentioned, they don’t mind whether they appear in negative light or not. This explains why they gathered and threw jibes at anti-corruption fight, and tried so hard without success to project themselves as honorable men and women. Otherwise they would have avoided this outlandish self-inflicted damage.
Melaye is not alone in this joke. He is the foreman of corrupt politicians who receded to the background to scam the nation. The result of that drama is an evident desire to escape their own lives, an expression of inner turmoil. They are mocked, they are ridiculed and held in contempt. They look at themselves and look at others and feel bad. They are unhappy with themselves and seem to be saying “we are not corrupt.” And the public seem to be replying “yes, yes, we agree fools.”
I see phony people pretending the dream of being men of letters they never would, thus inevitably gravitating towards where they belong to: corruption. Melaye’s book can best be described as what Timothy O’Brien called “nonfiction work of fiction.”
You can’t lose a bet not even Dino has bothered to read the book, for these people lack interest in anything beyond money, power and sex. He might have just okayed the final manuscript. I can imagine the scene in his room, Dino sipping beer, fingering a baby and waving a pathetic PA.
