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Tag: Dino

  • LABAF: Dino’s book missing

    Two questions and two answers got me thinking deeply about books and people who write books in a week that the 19th Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF) 2017 celebrated books with a big buzz.

    On the eve of the book festival, Leke Baiyewu’s interview with Senator Dino Melaye appeared in Sunday Punch, November 5. The embattled federal lawmaker who represents Kogi West Senatorial District answered two questions on his book, which was launched in Abuja on May 15.

    A picture of the book presentation: “The event which took place at the Yar’adua Centre, Abuja had in attendance, the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremmadu, Speaker House of Representative, Yakubu Dogara, former First Lady, Patience Jonathan, Minister of Federal Capital Territory, Bello Mohammed, his Labour and Productivity counterpart, Dr. Chris Ngige and former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Dr. Anyim Pius Anyim.” A report said: “over N27 million was realised…the representative of Aliko Dangote launched the book with the sum of N10 million.”

    Melaye’s book, titled Antidotes for Corruption: The Nigerian Story, has an interesting story.  Some days after, a report said the book was ”yet to grace the shelves of any bookstore, 11 days after its introduction to the public on May 15. At the launch, the author had announced that the book, whose cover price is N50, 000, would be available in Abuja bookstores that same week.”

    Other events overtook the book launch, particularly Melaye’s struggle to save his seat in the Senate in the face of a determined move by his constituents to recall him. Then the book came up in an interview.

    Bayeiwu asked: “You recently authored and published a book on corruption. Why did you venture into writing?” Melaye answered: ”You cannot cure a disease if you don’t diagnose it. You cannot fight corruption without educating people on corruption. Because of my passion to fight corruption, I decided to go into research and put together my experience as an anti-corruption crusader in form of a book that I called ‘Antidotes for Corruption’ so that Nigerians can understand the level of corruption. I mentioned names and characters in that book. You cannot ‘restitute’, ameliorate, palliate or correct without exposition.”

     Next question: “How acceptable is the book in terms of sale?”  Answer: “As I speak to you, I have sold over 100,000 copies. I travelled recently to Germany and I took 500 copies along with me. I have been called that the copies have been exhausted. I went to Russia with 100 copies. As I speak to you, they’ve all been sold. I sent 1,000 copies to the United Kingdom; they’ve been completely sold. I sent 2,500 copies to five states in (the United States of) America and they are still demanding more. I want to believe that it has been properly received. Within the country here, I have also made huge sales. I am laughing all the way to the bank.”

    There may well be something to laugh about, and it may well be Melaye’s fantastic account of his book’s success. Also, the writing process that produced this book is something to wonder about.  This is how a report presented the writing process: “The Secretary Planning Committee of the book launch, Mr. Babatunde Faniyan in his welcome speech said when Dino first made it clear to him that he wanted to write a book of up to 800 pages he shrugged off the idea thinking it was a mere wishful thought. He said: “In fact I was right there with him when he started from scratch. Basically he put his thoughts into words and spoke into a tape recorder which was subsequently transcribed, typed out and edited.” According to him, sometimes Dino would go quiet for months. He said: “At a time, we would not communicate for a while and other matters of life would take precedence. Then suddenly we would be back to the business of this book.”

    It is said that the book “is divided into 14 chapters with 600 pages.” The publisher of Sahara Reporters, Omoyele Sowore, was quoted as saying:  “We have been looking for that book in bookstores in Abuja; it has not been made available because we can’t afford it. It is N50, 000 — just to buy cut and paste of newspaper articles.”

    During stimulating LABAF sessions at Freedom Park, Lagos, I wondered why the organisers did not feature Melaye and his book.  There is no doubt that he would have attracted greater public attention to the book festival.

    LABAF 2017, November 6 – 12, was dedicated to Niyi Osundare, the internationally recognised multiple award-winning poet and social critic.  According to the organisers, “It is conceived and designed as a campaign for Literacy and Human Capital Development through such interactive events as reading sessions, conversations (around books and ideas in the context of national and global polity), exhibitions of books (and other publications), art and craft, Children/Students/ Youths creative workshops and mentoring; live music, drama, dance and poetry performances.”  The focus this year was “Eruptions: Global Fractures and our common Humanity.”

    Was Melaye aware of LABAF?  Why was his book not there? A book about a cure for corruption, which has been described as a killer disease that could kill Nigeria, should be made available and affordable.

    The information provided by the author that he had sold over 100,000 copies, including a high number abroad, should encourage local writers who need evidence that writing can bring big money. As a publicity stunt, Melaye could travel across the country with his book, and hold mentoring sessions on how to write a book that sells well.

    Melaye is a lucky writer who is blessed with friends in high positions and high-profile connections. He got people who probably won’t read his book to buy it at a high price, which is what happened at the book launch. As for the copies he claims to have sold in other countries, the figures are thought-provoking.   Given the claimed success of this book, it should not be surprising if Melaye is thinking of writing another one, possibly about his experiences in the ongoing drama to recall him.  Something Melaye should think about: He needs to take advantage of book events, and should consider participating in the next LABAF, hopefully with a new book.

  • Fort Dino

    Any elected representative in political office who truly knows legitimacy derives from voters should welcome the occasion, no matter how dubiously orchestrated, to spot-check his/her mandate with the people. If strongly validated at such opportunity, he secures a moral high ground to rebuff the hurdlecrowd and hecklers within the power elite, and stay the course with his agenda that had thereby been shown acceptable to electoral constituents. And where he survives, but just by the teeth, he gets the best cue to recalibrate his program in alignment with the electors’ preferences. Either way, he gains something; unless he is wholly rejected by the constituents, in which case he had no business being in the office.

    That was the logic of the gamble by British Prime Minister Theresa May who called a snap election for June 8, this year, that turned awry. Scheduled poll was not due until 2020, but May had hoped a renewed mandate and bigger parliamentary majority for Tories would strengthen her hand against party rebels and opposition cynics hassling her over Brexit negotiations with the EU. Only that the gamble backfired, resulting in leaner Tory presence in the British parliament and compelling the coalition deal that currently sustains her in office.

    It is evident that Nigeria’s Senator Dino Melaye wouldn’t dare a voluntary gamble at revalidating his mandate from Kogi West senatorial district voters – at least, not outside the electoral cycle. And when the occasion was foisted on him by purported constituents lately seeking his recall from the Senate, he bunkered up in the legislative chamber to demand protection from persons who ostensibly sent him there to represent them. Only last week, Dino Melaye sought mandate protection from the Senate against supposed voters who had given him that very mandate. And curiously, the Senate dug into the trenches to provide the shelter he sought. It is the Americans who call their military formations forts, we call ours garrisons. But for brevity, you could say the Senate’s other name at the moment is Fort Dino.

    The ‘distinguished senator’ has for some time been at loggerheads with political ally turned foe, Kogi State Governor Yahaya Bello, who he fingers for alleged dubious plot to oust him from the Senate. And that may well be true: politicians spare no quarter in their attritious turf wars. But he would not even allow the possibility to be interrogated in line with the Nigerian law. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had on June 21 received roughsacks containing signatures purported to be from 52.3 percent of the registered voter population in Kogi West, demanding Melaye’s recall from the Senate. And Section 69 of our Constitution (as amended) provides for those signatures to be “duly verified” by INEC, which the electoral body scheduled August 19 to do in all polling units within the constituency. The outcome of such verification, according to existing law, should determine whether the electoral body would conduct a referendum to allow Kogi West constituents openly have their say on Melaye’s continued stay in the red chamber. But the senator preemptively headed to court to leash INEC from proceeding with the statutorily prescribed process, and reports at the weekend were that he secured an order stopping the commission.

    Melaye had earlier last week stepped up his ambuscade by rallying the Senate to delegitimize INEC’s process. Coming through Order 14 at the chamber’s plenary on Tuesday, he not just again accused the Kogi governor of masterminding the recall bid, he also indicted the electoral body as complicit in the alleged subterfuge. “The score of both valid and invalid votes in the election that brought me into the Senate in 2015 was 118,000, but my governor and his appointees in four days claimed they got signatures of over 188,000,” Melaye said. “They got INEC’s database of registered voters and copied into a recall register, and forged all the signatures. As I speak to you, I have over 120 dead certificates issued by the National Population Commission, and these people’s relations have sworn to affidavits and these certificates have been deposited. The names of all these dead people appeared on the recall register submitted to INEC,” he added.

    The catch here is: since INEC has not complained of its database being hacked, the alleged copying, if true, must be with insider collusion by the commission. Of course, nothing is beyond the pale in these matters, and I doubt that the INEC leadership would vouch for every single staff member. But the whole point of the scheduled  verification of signatures is to demonstrably expose such shenanigans, so why wouldn’t Melaye brook going through with that process?

    Then, it was well within the senator’s right of free speech to make those allegations; what was troubling was the Senate’s seeming fore-conclusion on them. Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu, who presided at the plenary, waved off Melaye’s anxiety by dubbing the recall bid futile. “I am wondering why we are dissipating energy on this matter and wasting precious legislative time on a matter we should not. What is happening in Kogi in respect of Senator Dino Melaye, as far as the Constitution is concerned, is an exercise in futility,” he said.

    His confidence was not hinged on Melaye’s acquittal based on recall procedures outlined in Section 69, though, but on some curious interpretation of Section 68(1)(h), which provides that a member of the Senate (or House of Reps, as the case may be) shall vacate his seat if “the President of the Senate…receives a certificate under the hand of the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission stating that the provisions of Section 69 of this Constitution have been complied with in respect of the recall of that member.”

    Ekweremadu hinted that this provision is for a magisterial, and not administrative function, saying: “When they are done, they will go back to Section 68, which states that the President of the Senate receives from the chairman of INEC the recall of the member. They would also present evidence satisfactory to the House or the Senate; so they need to come back here and convince each and every one of us that they have done the correct thing. Unless they do that, they cannot even give effect to it.”

    Senate President Bukola Saraki, who was in the chamber at the time, cheerled his presiding deputy who has endured in that office across dispensations. “As they say, 10 years is no joke in leadership. The Deputy Senate President has explained the processes. So let the process speak for itself. I really don’t know why efforts are being wasted that should have gone into more important things. Eventually, it must come back here for us to decide whether it is satisfactory or not,” he said.

    I am not a lawyer and would not even hazard legal arguments here, but I dare say the Constitution’s intent can’t accord with the Senate’s interpretation. It is against the grain of justice for an accused (or his prejudiced class) to adjudicate in his own matter. If the constitutional requirement is meant as suggested, the National Assembly is a veritable fort and no member will ever get recalled by aggrieved constituents.

  • Councillor Dino

    When English poet William Wordsworth first coined his 1802 paradox, “the child is the father of the man”, he sure didn’t intend it for delinquent politics, where a sitting senator would lust after a lowly councillorship, from his lofty senatorial portals.

    Yet, that is what it appears morphing into, in the surreal, no-dull-moment world of Senator Dino Melaye, the Ajekuniya exponent, of the political push-and-shove school.

    “As an astute politician,” the Kogi West sitting senator averred in a suit to compel Kogi Governor, Yahaya Bello, to hold local government elections, “I am interested in contesting for a councillorship position in my local government area, Ijumu.”

    Ah, the mighty Dino, he of the senatorial din and parliamentary trash (o, what profound oxymoron, for everything parliamentary ought to be the reference) craves to be a councillor!

    Can you imagine the din of excitement Councillor Dino would infuse into local Ijumu politics?  The politics of sheer colour and breathless pace, only the return of the senatorial native from Abuja, the city of gold, could muster!

    The legislative day would start with the monster-hit Ajekuniya single.  A new sheriff is in town; and all had better be at their best behaviours.  Any essay at any rascality would attract instant — you guessed right — Ajekuniya!

    Then, who is that Lilliputian chairman who would ogle public funds, when Dino is around?

    Who indeed, in the presence of an integrity veteran, who not only was the soul of the Integrity Group in his heady days at the House of Representatives, but also topped up his no-nonsense anti-corruption CV, in his senatorial days, with the launch of an award-winning tome, Antidote for Corruption?

    Never mind those howling over the alleged lexical howler in the award-winning title, bleating it ought to have been Antidote to Corruption!  Did the (wo)men of timber and caliber, anti-corruption caterpillar and bulldozer, immaculate saints that graced the book’s launch ever complain?  They perfectly understood the message now!

    After Councillor Dino had thoroughly pacified every Kogi local government chair with his radical brand of transparency and accountability, which of them would dare strike sweetheart deals with any governor, insistent on just sharing public money, with these errant third “tier-ers”?  Which one indeed?

    And before you know it, in this season of frenetic restructuring, a new era would have dawned on the third-tier.  With the Dino treatment and cleansing, a new fervour would dawn out there: the third-tier, not the corrupt and maggot-ridden states, would be the new federating units with the Federal Government, in a newly restructured Nigeria!

    And just as governors moved from State House into the Senate (even if that would mean their former state-wide constituencies reduced by two-thirds), former senators, taking the Dino lead in Spartan transparency, would begin a mad rush for local government councils, for even more reduced constituencies.    Transparency calls.  Patriots must obey!

    That, indeed, would be the new Nigeria.  Dealers in the corrupt-ridden centre, dashing to became straight-as-pin, clean-as-whistle leaders, in the innermost crevices of their own parts of the country!  Thank God, by his a dint of solid example, Dino is about showing the way.

     

    Hardball has some dissonance, though.  Is this a real, golden dream?  Or a feverish recall-driven reverie, fast turning into a nightmare, by the first parliamentary recall product in Nigerian history, should Melaye’s recall process succeed?

    You never know — in any case, not in the cacophony of dins that has evolved as the political world of Dino Melaye, as an endangered species of the Senate of the Federal Republic!

    Indeed, the child is the father of the man; and Dino’s local council dream is prime example!

  • Dino burlesque

    Dino burlesque

    Nigeria’s corruption champions revel at a bathetic book launch. It’s left to a long-suffering country to confront them headlong

    To start with, Dino Melaye’s book is a corruption of lexis. Its title, Antidote for Corruption, is unknown to English grammar. It ought to be Antidote to Corruption. That about set the tone for the heavy fog of corruption that hung over the event, for every form of corruption starts with the corruption of thought, epitomised in lexis by sloppy grammar.

    Besides, it is the ultimate corruption of parliamentary practice, with its stress on parliamentary language, powered by immaculate lexis, that the lexically challenged would not only prance about the hallowed chamber of the country’s legislative summit, they would deign to freeze, in cold print, their lexical challenge.

    As if everyone has gone over the bend, this hotchpotch of varied opinion, a compilation that could at best be dubbed as “chartered plagiarism,” attracted a N50, 000 price tag for its hard back, in a country where the minimum wage is N18, 000! Perhaps, that is no crime, if the enclave market, gathered at the pseudo-launch, is dumb enough to buy mere tinsel for the premium price of an 18-karat gold.

    The real crime however, in terms of wanton abuse of office and privilege, is that both Senate President BukolaSaraki and House of Representatives Speaker, YakubuDogara, forked out N23.4 million in public money to buy 109 copies for all the senators and 360 copies for all the members of the House of Representatives. Again, this is a most combative corruption of trust and privilege. Besides, if the National Assembly members love to quash their money on trash, why should such a hobby be charged to the public purse?

    If just these alone had happened at the Dino Melaye burlesque, it would still have earned the most severe of strictures from right-thinking and long-suffering Nigerians. Their mandate was clear to President Muhammadu Buhari: go forth and flush out corruption. But this insensate National Assembly leadership, in words and in deeds, has wilfully set itself against that mandate.

    That is why the shameful cant, of both Saraki and Dogara at the launch, is not only scandalous, it is utterly condemnable and unforgivable, at least to the teeming majority, whose future depends on the triumph of the present anti-corruption war.

    Saraki went on a lecture binge, on why anti-corruption methodologies ought to be preventive and not punitive. From any other person, that could perhaps sound reasonable. But from Saraki, it sounds annoying, premeditated and shamelessly self-serving — and this has absolutely nothing to do with the ad-hominem fallacy.

    Indeed, Saraki is Number 3 in a corrective regime, the head of the legislature, in a government voted in to fix the pathologies of the best-forgotten Goodluck Jonathan Presidency, which made sleaze its foundation of state policy. Yet, with a straight face bereft of any irony, he takes pot shots at the central plank of the regime’s policy, which he ought to rigorously drive.

    Of course, it could hardly have been otherwise, given the dodgy way Saraki emerged the Senate President, selling his party, and its right to the senate deputy presidency, to the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). With an opportunistic PDP opposition, and deluded All Progressives Congress (APC) elements, led by the brash and uncouth Melaye, he has pretty much formed a not-so-informal parliamentary coalition for corruption, even if he tries every sinew in his body to hide behind a finger, posturing otherwise.

    Talking of the corruption army, nobody surely has forgotten the Melaye-Saraki anti-Ibrahim Magu stunt in the Senate, pulled to browbeat the Buhari presidency to drop Magu as the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) substantive chairman. It took another executive legal sleight-of-hand to halt that heinous ploy. Yet, it was clear who, in parliament, is mortally afraid of Magu and his handling of the anti-corruption war.

    Speaker Dogara also hee-hawed over the imperative of erecting robust institutions against corruption — hardly a bad counsel. But does the Speaker think robust institutions just cascade down from Mars? How can non-reform minds, as he and a good number of members of the 8th National Assembly would appear, birth the much desired robust anti-corruption institutions?

    Besides, how much of thinking, in anti-corruption institution building, went into muscling out Abdulmimin Jubril, for his temerity to accuse the almighty Speaker of various infractions, which were nothing but crass corruption? Of course, Dogara would wish everyone would forget that uncomfortable little event!

    Mid-year into a four-year term, it is clear the biggest obstacle against fighting corruption is the Saraki-led 8th National Assembly. That is bad enough. But to glory in such crass notoriety, and mock brave efforts to rein in this life-threatening monster for a nation, is the limit of parliamentary irresponsibility, by people who claim to represent the National Assembly’s leadership.

    That is why the electorate must take vigorous notice of these sundry acts of rascality. Come the 2019 elections, no parliamentary sinner, to borrow that Biblical phrase, must go unpunished. The list for that black book may well start with the pitiable ensemble at the Dino burlesque.

  • Dino: How to corrupt a country

    Now let all good men in the land rise and join hands in retrieving our country from Dino Melaye and his ilk. The handshake now seems to have reached the elbow and it is of course, no longer felicitation as the Igbo would say. And the Yoruba admonish that if you hesitate in apprehending the thief in your farm, he will promptly arrest you. A season of pernicious role reversal seems to be creeping fast into our polity and this is a wake-up call.

    The looters of our national treasury are now flaunting their booty in our face and indeed deploying it against us. The Minna parade of private jets last week is one example. In 2014, Nigeria was ranked 30th  of the world’s top 50 countries with private jets. Even though it’s a most impoverished country, it ranks ahead of such highly developed countries like Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Finland among others.

    Here is another example of corruption getting emboldened and acting up. This time it grows into a monster and threatens to eat us raw. It’s as concerns the power conundrum in Nigeria. Recall that Nigeria’s power sector was privatised a few years ago so that it would enjoy the fillip of the private-sector efficiency and growth. But three years down the line, the new owners who are mainly part of Nigeria’s corrupt political cabal now practically hold the nation hostage.

    Power supply remains at pre-divestment era when the government controlled it. Apart from getting the plants and installations at near non-competitive rates, new owners have not invested in commensurate measures, especially in the distributive stock. In spite of various credit facilities from the government and banks, consumers seem to reap only fresh excuses from power investors. It now appears to have resolved to hold the nation by the jugular. Metering which is the major plank of the new power roadmap has been stalled. Such is the extended dynamics of corruption plaguing the land today.

    With President Muhammadu Buhari voted into office on the strength of his anti-corruption stance now critically ill and the anti-graft agencies much flawed in their systemic and operational contradictions, the auguries are dark.

    What this means is that the country may have returned to her crass licentious state where public officials did not seem to know the difference between public funds and private bank account; we may be back to our inglorious years when public officials gloried in stealing and were honoured based only on how much of our treasury they could hijack.

    This explains the two troubling events that happened last week: the Minna display of private jets by former public officials and their contractor allies and the supposed book launch by a supposed senator. If the feast of locusts which took place in Minna is excused as one of those natural aftermaths of the depravity of the elite, the so-called book presentation is an affront and a present danger; it was cynical show redolent with un-nuanced insult on our collective psyche.

    The indisputable enfant terrible of the NASS, Senator Dino Melaye, representing Kogi West, is said to have written a book: “Antidote for Corruption: The Nigerian Story.” The book in itself is a fraud going by what is reported. It is said to be a 600-page compilation of media reports, bills and motions relating to the anti-graft campaign and major corruption cases under the current administration.

    One would have thought that Melaye was presenting Nigerians with a fresh distillation from the deep recesses of his mind, insights and knowledge about this canker that is eating up our polity. Why would a senator of the Federal Republic compile reports from the public space, tag his name to it as author and go ahead to make huge pecuniary gain of it at a public presentation? Is there a worse corruption? Yet he titles the so-called book “Antidote for Corruption…?

    Prominent at the public launch were Mrs. Patience Jonathan, wife of immediate past president, Goodluck Jonathan. She who is currently in court over tens of millions of cash in foreign currency traced to her numerous bank accounts among other indiscretions. Yet she would have sat there and probably proffered a few tips on the ills of corruption.

    Just in the same way the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, seized the moment to sermonise and teach us the basics and correct modalities for tackling corruption. He who is facing trial for money laundering, not mentioning the matters and allegations surrounding the collapse of Societe Generale Bank among others, took the podium and obliged us a disquisition on how not to…

    As my former lecturer would say, these fellows are really sucking it to us. Now we the victims of mindless corrupt practices are prostrate, taking lessons from our tormentors. We think Senator Melaye should write a book on how to suborn and loot a national treasury – that is the book he owes us. At a time like this, one would expect the legislature to stand in the gap; but the National Assembly, especially the 8th Senate, is even much more mired in its muck of sleaze and odious beginnings which have refused to blow away.

     

    It’s a grey republic!

    You may also call it the grey republic – that part of government in which impunity, fiscal irresponsibility and gross abuse reign. This is what happens when government agencies refuses to prepare budgets. This is especially troubling when such agencies control more funds than some state governments.

    Is it possible that parastatals like NNPC, CBN, FIRS and about 35 others are yet to submit their budget proposals for this year?  Is it true that such agencies have been living on huge extra-budgetary expenditures with the year nearly half gone?

    Deputy Senate Majority Leader Bala Ibn Na’Allah raised this point on Tuesday on the floor of the Senate, noting that it was wrong and indeed illegal for any government agency to spend funds not appropriated by the legislature.

    This matter of unbudgeted expenditure has been with us for a long time and these are some of the systemic abuses we expected this government to curb in its bit to combat endemic corruption in our polity.

    Apart from budgets, statutory agencies of government, especially the revenue-yielding one, are also supposed to render and publish financial accounts annually and promptly too. This is among the most critical ways of reducing the corruption in the system.

    But it is a grey republic we live in.

  • Dino’s helluva blockbuster

    He is no doubt Hardball’s guinea pig for interrogating official insouciance and that is putting it mildly. The truth is that he always corroborates that street fable about a heedless game that continues to chew unconcernedly even as marksmen aim at it.

    Call it Dutch courage, call it induced braggadocio, call it chutzpah of the running-nosed boy, whatever; the only point to note is the ways of Mr. Dino Melaye, the senator representing Kogi West, confound even his foes, not to mention his friends.

    Dino reminds again of another fabled character notorious for its exponential mischief. The dust of one opprobrious upheaval never settles before it rouses the very soul of hades. Such is the current momentum this senator has welled up around himself that it might seem even him has lost control of these happenings.

    Of course we all remember his recent certificate saga and how he converted what his detractors thought was  the making of  a major ‘gate’, (as in Dinogate), into a national orchestra. First, he did not only make the vice chancellor of a major university in Nigeria to personally appear before the Senate, his remaking of an old abuse song went instantly viral.

    He followed up with a full-dressed bandstand performance. Of course he led the band and again, the virtual world erupted for a senator who could morph into a juju music star.

    Now he has gone and done it again this Dino fella! Dino has written a book – and you guess it – it’s a helluva blockbuster; a 600-page tome of a book whose hardback edition sells for a whopping N50,000. Straight away, it must be said that there has never been a book like this in Nigeria. Not by our Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, or the legend Chinua Achebe.

    Such is the stuff Dino is made of, he is not unlike a hurricane, he leaves a cloud of impression in his wake. And what is Dino’s big book about you would ask as a logical follow up? Well here is it; he calls it: Antidotes for Corruption, The Story of Nigeria. Don’t gloat now, enemies of Dino, that’s supposed to be: Antidotes Against Corruption, but who cares, we already know that he was not the brightest in his class and even his VC confirmed that after seven years for a four-year course, he was only able to rustle up a third, so never mind any grammatical blips even on book cover.

    But what do you make of this: the book is reportedly a compilation of media reports, bills and motions relating to anti-graft campaign and major corruption cases ongoing under this administration. Well, you would be tempted to describe it as Dino’s Book of Corruption, won’t you? To affix your name to a compilation of works you did not author must be corruption, isn’t it Dino?