Dino Melaye: And The Stubborn Spirits Settled His Case

PETER CLAVER OPARAH

Finally, Dino Melaye, the loud, rambunctious former Senator from Kogi West has fallen. He has been made to kiss the dust and has finally been rusticated from the Senate which, at the peak of his career, when the Senate was under the armpit of the equally-rusticated Bukola Saraki, turned senatoring to one huge showmanship. Dino was so loud that he made his vanity and its celebration look like his greatest achievement. When he was not advertising his exotic cars, he was mounting a comedy show to rub it on his opponents that he was relevant. But the stubborn spirits got angry with him and went to work on his case.

In tune with the many strange odds in our national politics, Dino Melaye just happened on the stage. He came from nowhere to find his way to the House of Representatives. There, he posed as an anti-corruption fighter who captured the minds of many Nigerians that were sold to the pursuit of social justice in the cobbled Nigerian political space. With the gift of showmanship, Dino was able to capture the klieg lights as he made a show of his concern with the rampaging acts of corruption that were going on when he was at the house. But then, his life was a huge contradiction to what he professed. His strange passion to fight corruption was tempered by the brazen display of wealth and his inability to explain the source of his strange wealth cast a huge slur on his pretension to fight corruption.

But Dino relished the liege lights and was entrapped in its glow. He struggled so hard to keep himself on the national space, often through controversial acts that extended to even messy relational issues. Knowing how to rant to capture his audience on very many issues, Dino was a recurrent decimal on our national discourse; either for good or ill. He poked and taunted his political enemies and was often to call them to a fight, which many saw as an effort to hug the limelight. But then, this provoked the stubborn spirits more and they grew determined to lift the rug off his political feet.

As time went on, Dino fell out with his PDP hierarchs and belching so much loud profession of populism, he found his way into the converging anti-PDP sentiment that birthed the APC in 2014 and clinched the party’s senatorial ticket in the 2015 election. As was the fad with that time, Dino was easily elected into the Senate; cruising on the wings of the victorious APC and the Muhammadu Buhari whirlwind that swept PDP to the dungeons in 2015. With his friend and soulmate, Saraki, Dino was soon to revolt against his party in the choice of National Assembly leadership and with the connivance of his erstwhile party, stole in a leadership of the National Assembly that worked on cross purpose with his party, the APC. Dino featured prominently in the many desperate acts of the Saraki leadership of the senate to keep its stranglehold on the National Assembly leadership. This often put him on warring paths with the APC.

While at the senate and with his annoying petulance, Dino was to encounter a scrutiny of his academic credentials in a move led by Saharareporters. Though he survived this inquest, he was vicariously bruised as the revelation of deep holes and gashes on his academic claims subdued and tamed him to a great extent.

Dino Melaye was to clash with his local Kogi APC leadership and the state government who abhorred his sabotage role and were bent on withdrawing him from the Senate. An extensive recall process was initiated against him and he scratched through a last minute survival that really shook the foundation of his boisterous political life.

As the 2019 general elections approached. Dino, Saraki and a cache of 14 other senators executed a plot against the APC where they planned and defected to the PDP with the hope of enacting the kind of revolutionary effect the APC wrought in 2015 when a faction of PDP leaders and officials defected to the APC and contributed greatly to the ouster of the PDP. As Dino and his cohorts jumped ship into the PDP, they and the generality of PDP rank and file celebrated that act as an bankable sign that they will rout President Buhari and APC from power in the on-coming 2019 election.

In the election proper, Dino was the only senator among the 16 senators that survived a phenomenal routing that saw the remaining 15 senators, including Saraki lose their seat and gain a humiliating retirement from the senate and from politics. It was obvious that by being the only one that survived this routing, Dino must have fathomed that he bore a charmed life that is unconquerable by any living mortal. Though his party lost badly in both the presidential and National Assembly elections which somehow, subdued and humbled Dino in his public carriage, he felt invincible and believed that his political life was above human destruction.

But the hunting spirits were not tired of Dino’s case. So when the APC candidate whom he defeated in the 2019 senatorial election, Senator Smart Adeyemi proceeded to the election tribunal to challenge his victory, he must have laughed it off as another wild goose chase. But that was where the spirits laid in wait for Dino. His election was nullified at the tribunal on reasons of grand manipulation. He waved off the tribunal loss and boasted that he would emerge triumphant in the decisive appeal tribunal where he went to seek relief against the adverse tribunal judgment. The appeal tribunal ruled and affirmed the ruling of the lower tribunal, while ordering for fresh election thus marking the end of Dino in the Nigerian Senate. With sparse courage left in him after this devastating ruling, Dino boasted that Adeyemi is like his wife and that he had mastered the art of defeating Adeyemi in elections.

Before then, Dino had joined the contest for the PDP governorship ticket in Kogi and just garnered a paltry 70 votes in the primary to come a distant fourth. He railed and ranted that he was rigged out of the contest and refused entreaties by his party men to work for the victory of their candidate in the ensuing gubernatorial election.

Come Saturday, November 16, the day the re-run election was fixed and Dino was seeing ghosts all over. Relishing his discontent and apprehension of imminent defeat, the spirits closed in and tightened the nots. Falling on the same date a governorship election that was to determine the fate of his bitter political rival, Governor Yahaya Bello, Dino knew there was real trouble for him at the polls. The thought of defeat was enough to scare the living daylight out of Dino as his courage deserted him and he was turned to a scare-monger that saw ghosts in every direction. He went to town with specious tales of plots to rig the election against him and his PDP. On election day, he became a full comedian, hawking stories of grand rigging plots against him. In one instance, he tweeted that APC deployed helicopters to bomb him and his supporters on election day but knowing him for who he is, no one paid him heed. When results started coming in and he was being trounced, he did everything to discredit the results. The final tally of the results saw him trailing Adeyemi by over 20,000 votes but because the cancelled votes exceeded that margin of victory, the Returning Officer ordered a supplementary election.

Knowing that there was no way he could offset the deficit he was having against Adeyemi, Dino went full circle in fangling diverse scenarios to stop the make-up election. He produced many videos alleging electoral manipulation and cajoled INEC to stop the supplementary elections but all ended up in smokes. Even as he threatened to boycott the election, Dino turned up and voted on election day and when results were announced, he heavily lost to Adeyemi thereby widening the deficit that trailed him going to the supplementary election. With the announcement of the final results and Dino trashed, the ghosts that saw him survive many plots to shoo him off the senate finally got him thereby ending his loud, controversial span in the senate. Some have opined that given his penchant to revel on the national scale, that Dino should join the local film industry, Nollywood but time will tell where he will continue his parody. Certainly not in the senate where many have seen his ouster by recalcitrant stubborn spirits, as good riddance to bad rubbish.

Peter Claver Oparah writes from Ikeja, Lagos.
E-mil: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com