I have been away from these pages for a while. I was busy wrapping up shoot on my film, “Other Side of History”.
Anyway, there is something happening in Nigeria right now. It is not political. It is not cultural. It is gormless, dopey and injudicious.
Fans of Nigerian celebrities, are busy, tattooing faces and names of their ‘celebrities’ on their legs, posterior, forehead and on their hands. They will then take pictures and send to the celebrities. Like hostage taking, they expect the celebrities to pay them attention and pay them money. Bobrisky has been forthcoming with recognizing them and dishing out lots of money to them. Other celebrities , are lukewarm.
This is not about being woke: what is the essence of doing that? To show love? That is not true love. Even those who are carrying these tattoos don’t even like themselves. So, they are incapable of loving someone else.
To be clear elebrity worship is not a real religion.
Often when Nigerians do loony stuff, they attribute it to not eating. Everyone says: “There is hunger in the land.” There is no hunger in the land. Nigerians everywhere, are a greedy people. They have money to buy land and build houses and give tithes in the church for people like Pastor Johnson Superman or Suleiman to buy private jets. There is no hunger in the land. Where did they get the money to even tattoo anything? The idea is to emotionally blackmail the celebrity. Such things exist, because social media has now made it easy for fans to have easy access to celebrities, and it has bridged the gap between the upper class and the lower class, which is a terrible thing, because the truth is that these two classes have no business being on the same platform. More so, because I believe in hierarchical domination, every class should stay apart from each other. Would anyone tattoo someone’s name on his body, if there was no internet, making it easy for the fan to torment the celebrities?
Let me digress a bit: someone has to tell comic skit makers in Nigeria that cross-dressing is not comic. My favourite comedian in Nigeria is Mr. Macaroni. I have never seen him dress like a woman, but I watch every single comic skit and advert that he produces. He is intelligent, composed, smart, professional and reminds me of my Yoruba in-law from Ondo State a lot – the mannerism. It will be bovine to compare him with the clueless ‘comedians’ who have to dress up like women, to force us to laugh. Somehow, I have never caught myself laughing. I get irritated instead. Many of these comedians who cross-dress are men filled with insecurity, who are unsure of their sexuality, who want to use comedy to say what they are and who they are, which is fine, but then, many of them, pretend to be homophobic publicly. The idea of wanting to be a woman alone, exposes the truth of your male gender, that you can bend. It is either they are stopped or they should be seen and treated equally like Bobrisky.
Whatever, my rambling must be taken seriously. There is no need to cross-dress, to make anyone laugh. I have never laughed, watching these guys. It is off-putting rather, to be mild. And you can deduce from them, that these people are a bunch of ignorant kids, who, on having access to cameras and sound, think they can do anything and get away with it. It is scatterbrained. Life is not about the projections you make alone. It comes with its squabbles.
Stop the cross-dressers who think they are doing comedy and stop all the mompara, rattling us with tattoos of celebrities on their bodies. Stop all of them!
