Thuggery is the reason our politics is not for everyone. Thuggery furnishes the apprehension that suffocates and debilitates politics in Nigeria. It impoverishes choice. Some families think only the suicidal opts for politics. And it cripples the very act of selecting from a wretched menu. Voters stay home to stay away from trouble . Politics is lent a precariousness that deters the best minds and rewards buccaneers. Innocent electoral officials have paid with their lives. At every stage, violence lurks.
That walk on Bourdillon was a painstaking , diligent search for trouble. A mere buffoon would have seen its futility. The sort of walk that should ordinarily implicate senility. But thugs revel in confrontations. And vigorous chest-thumping. The advertisement of that prowl of empty braggadocio speaks of something more pernicious than pathetic clownery. It isn’t just the evidence of a nature given to frivolity and obscenity. It is a purulent eruption of an underlying socio cultural disease. That which renders noise and fury indistinguishable from substance and reason .
And lets touts prevail. Violence and dirty money have drowned decorum and comportment . Made them irrelevant . Patriotism has been substituted with shameless uncritical loyalty that announces itself by its readiness to desecrate and trample , to defile and decimate. So, many have stayed away. Waiting for sanity to make a miraculous entry into our politics. Women have generally left it for men, the way they ceded the motor parks. That is why the few who dare, often have to account for their loss of domestication. Because even the company of ‘distinguished’ men is the company of the wild. The police have a cultural soft spot for those who commit assault.
They extract a strained apology for the victim and pocket the offender’s ‘peace offering’. And battery? Not much more. Any recalcitrance by a victim is met with an impatience, that can degenerate into insolence , that suggests the police have more serious issues than ‘two fighting’ to contend with. So politics, where the stakes are highest and confrontations most vigorous, is inevitably the play ground for thugs. Lack of restraint, and tested capacity for occasional horrendous violence are coveted gifts. Groups that survive in jungles know the gifts some members must possess.
Civility is apparent weakness. So crudity and savagery are kept handy. In the senate, like in a secondary school dinning hall, bullies may censor freedom of speech. The streets are filled with megalomaniacs seeking roles in melodramas. When they are done humiliating the masses with their lavish opulence and oppressive sybaritism, they lapse into hollow, self- serving pseudo socialism. So a Dino can flaunt pictures of revelries with models on a yacht and wake up as an anti- corruption crusader. You would think that anyone who spent months hounding Stella Oduah for wastefulness has some capacity for sober reflection. Or should have the tact that make-believe requires. The joke is actually on a desperate public that accepts every attention seeker as a social vigilante. Rascality is bravery.
A party that has canonized itself watched a male senator threaten to beat a female senator, and remained mute. Feigned ignorance. If the police think parliamentary privileges confer immunity against criminal offences like assault, they are clueless. The police must be hungry for opportunities for exemplary deterrence.
In the face of the proliferation of violence against women and the poor participation of women in politics , Dino Melaye was a gift from God. In a criminology class in England, Nigeria came up. She was prosecuting armed robbery cases and never really prosecuting assault and battery. The conclusion was that fighting was cultural, commonplace.
That oblique reference to Nigeria as a jungle was mortifying. Chidi Lloyd’s near decapitation of Michael Chinda with the mace in River’s house of assembly was grave. But its implications were narrower. Flare-ups aren’t uncommon in legislatures. Inter-party brawls are shameful but they do not approximate threats to rape. That assault on a female senator in the senate has wider ramifications and graver implications. It doesn’t have the diffused weightlessness of a melee. It has a particularly malicious character. It was a pointed onslaught. It will fuel gender based violence and strengthen the arms of the multitude of wife beaters in Nigeria.
A man with a pedigree of physical abuse against women cannot be allowed to get away with more without imperiling the society. Terror lies in mass apprehension of fear. That episode in the senate sent flutters to the hearts of Nigerian women. A threat to beat up and impregnate must be frightening and humiliating. The senate can’t be where human dignity is fed to dogs. Women are sex objects, punching bags, superfluous ornaments. But these are constructions governments and modern political parties exist to dismantle. The APC and the Federal Government cannot but tackle these degrading , inhuman misconceptions. The threat to brutalize a female senator in the senate chambers by a male senator cannot be treated with conspiratorial levity.
The denials are in place and noted. They are incoherent. The initial insistence that the allegations were imaginary has given way to poorly strung vague afterthoughts. And they are made more implausible by the belligerence that can propel an adult from Abuja to Bourdillon without an interlude of restraining clarity . Such persistence in willful loss of contact with reality must be met with chords of restrain and sedative shots. But an insouciant APC has stayed home again and again and its sheep slipped into labour, tethered.
If Nigeria is such a jungle that the threat to beat up a female senator by a recidivist is trivia, what happened to our collective African repugnance for sexual vulgarity? Especially against mothers and wives? A male Senator picked a microphone and spewed obscenity. In between guffaws, he suggested that he couldn’t have threatened to impregnate her because he knows she is past menopause. And no one shouted “God forbid!” Some of those who must have chuckled sadistically while the incontinent senator indulged his whims behind closed doors in the senate, have risen to exculpate themselves by demanding an apology.
How will an apology after that press conference send the right message to all thugs? Apology can whitewash humiliation. But how will such a wretched apology curb the damaging stab- first -and -beg –later cynical tendency that threatens the utility of decency in our politics ? How can a party achieve any sort of cohesion if buds of rascality are not speedily contained? How will that apology send the message that threats of violence to endangered species- women in politics-is grossly abominable. In the face of remorselessness, an opportunity for exemplary deterrence exists.
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