Unpopular side with Thomas Oti
Email: thomasoti@qed.ng
We are what we watch. When we were growing up, our nights were terrifying. Sleep was sometimes impossible. Especially after we watched the very terrifying and blood clotting Hammer House of Horror series on TV. It had the most gruesomely horrific scenes and it terrified our young minds no end. Characters curled out of the very woodwork and hacked off limbs and heads. We watched wide eyed as for no apparent reason an oyinbo man would go berserk and start killing other oyinbo. The images were graphic and horrific. They scared the living daylights and nights out of us. Those images guaranteed that we could not stay in the dark alone ever. Hammer House of Horror kept us awake, entertained and fascinated. But that was in the movies.
Our hammer house of horrors today is just as terrifying. And unlike the make believe of movies, it is real. To get into the House, they steal, maim and sometimes kill. No atrocity is too horrid for them all in a bid to get in. Members of this house are supposed to be honourable and distinguished. But they are everything else but. They ideally should represent the absolute best of the people that we are; ones so erudite, scholarly and wise that they were elected to determine our fate. They are our lawmakers, masters of order. Carefully painfully selected as our leading light. They should help us define who we are and who we should be. They are us. But better. Or at least that would have been the original idea. But, not so today. Houses of assembly, legislature and senate are no longer hallowed chambers. They are now horror chambers. And that’s not peculiar to only one part of the world. This video here shows that politicians are either thugs and hooligans or normal people with abnormal manners. But normal people tend to consider politics too dirty, so they leave it to the riff and the raff; the dregs of our land. It then doesn’t take a genius to see why fights break out at the earliest provocations in the “hallowed” chambers.
Dino Melaye and Remi Tinubu took it to the next level though. Normally a slap here and a bite there may have been just enough to settle the tiff between the two distinguished senators behind closed doors. But no, they had to resort to name calling. Whatever the true scenario isn’t particularly of much importance to me. But the kind of abusive rhetoric used is what bothers me. When a “distinguished” senator uses or implies a word like rape in threatening another man’s wife, then there is a problem. No man should be proud of using a word like that on another person; male or female. It is not an abusive word at all. It is a traumatic word. It is a word that does more than incense; it deflates and invades. A threat like that should not be taken lightly at all. If Melaye used such a term in altercation with Remi Tinubu, he should have his manhood tied with a rope and suspended to a spinning ceiling fan. He is less than a man and whatever the lady had done to him should not merit the very thought of such devilish crap; talk less of the threat of it. Rape is evil. Anyone who uses it as a weapon or brandishes it as a sword is evil. I do not know Dino’s marital history but a quick Google search shows he’s been through two wives already. It is not hard to understand why; if his most dangerous weapon of choice in an argument with a female senator is to threaten rape. Sad state of affairs from our very own hammer house of horror.
Who will legislate against this heinous crime if the lawmakers think it is cool? What should our young men think if their role models threaten it so openly? Even if he did not exactly use the word, doesn’t he need to have his head examined if it is even inferable from anything he said? Shame on Dino Melaye o. Scum like him belongs in the worst place on earth! Wait, he’s already there o; the Senate!
Or maybe he had been eying the pretty senator for a while now and this is the one opportunity to express himself before he dies of so much lust inside?
Women are the world’s topmost manipulators after religious leaders, so indeed Tinubu could have fired him all up with a choice of strong abusive words. He had told the media that she called him a dog and maybe even worse. But that is still no justification for his choice of words or abuse. But maybe it’s pity he needs and not condemnation. A man who is hung like a horse and dungs like a hore will curse worse than a whore. And threaten like a mad man.
