Nigeria is not new to international sex scandals. At the 1980 Moscow Olympics, when sports men and women from all over the world were battling with the Moscow cold, prospecting for medals of all categories at various venues, the Nigerian officials turned on the nation’s prospective female medalists in their hotel rooms.
The scandal rocked the nation to its foundation. At the end of the Games, the Nigerian contingent returned home the way they went… empty handed.
At the last Olympic Games held in London in 2012, our sportsmen and women, save the paralympians, did not capture even a bronze. Our medalless participation was not tied to any sex scandal, though. But a Nigerian lawmaker who was in London for the Games was caught in the vortex of pornography. Rather than being at the venues to support his compatriots, he placed himself under house arrest.
He spent most of the time in the hotel room, pleasuring himself with adult movies. What was not known to us was whether he was feasting his eyes all by himself or with prostitutes or Nigerian female athletes. But you will be too naïve to think that he was feeding his eyes alone. The embarrassment came to light when he asked for his bill to be prepared at the end of his stay. His eyes nearly leapt out of their sockets when he was handed a fat bill. He demanded for a breakdown of the bill for payment from the hotel management. His knees began to jerk when they showed him the number of hours he accumulated watching the blue movies which he thought was a free show… an incentive from the management of the hotel!
So, when on June 9, 2016, the United States ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. James Entwistle, petitioned the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara, accusing three lawmakers – Mohammed Garba Gololo, Mark Gbillahs, and Samuel Ikon – of improper conduct, attempted rape and soliciting for prostitutes during the trip to the US, I was not surprised one bit.
According to Mr. Entwistle, Mr. Gololo in particular grabbed a hotel chambermaid and solicited sex, while the other two solicited the services of prostitutes through car park attendants during their visit to Cleveland, United States, for the International Visitor Leadership Programme (IVLP) on good governance. But Gololo, a first-termer in the House, denied the allegation in a letter addressed to the American Embassy in Nigeria dated June 13, 2016.
The other two musketeers have also denied the allegations. They are asking for hard proofs of the accusations… like video evidence, failing which an apology should follow. They have also threatened to sue the ambassador and the US government for character assassination if an unreserved apology does not follow. Pray, which hotel would plant video cameras in its rooms to capture a scene of a guest pouncing on a chambermaid like a cat on a rat? One international figure did that a few years ago when he grabbed a housekeeper, armed with $3,000 and it backfired. We shall talk about that later.
Meanwhile, the House has also set up a panel to unravel the alleged sex scandal involving the trio. It is interesting to note that the much-taunted Federal Character was exhibited in the scenario: Gololo (Gombe, Bauchi) North-east; Elder Samuel Ikon (Nsit Ibom, Akwa Ibom) South-south and Mark Terseer Gbillah (Gwer East, Benue) North-central. However, the South-easterners, South-westerners and the North-easterners in the delegation were not represented in the scandal. The folks in the Federal Character Commission (FCC) should take note!
Be that as it may, it takes a high sense of discipline and self-control to resist the temptation of pouncing on a pretty housekeeper that walks into your hotel room tidying up things alone with you. That was the temptation that the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, could not resist when a New York hotel maid, Nafissatou Diallo, a black, emerged in his room on the fateful day in May, 2011. The struggle for sex which lasted for six minutes ended in a scandal that led to his fall from the Olympian height of the world’s most powerful financial cartel. The groundswell of that indiscretion ultimately ruined his marriage and shattered his dreams of becoming a French president.
However, Strauss-Kahn’s accuser, the irresistible Guinean Nafissatou, is now a proud owner of a restaurant, Chez Amina, established in the Bronx, New York, serving up African, American and Spanish cuisines. She was able to achieve the feat with the windfall ($1.5m) that fell on her laps as an inducement to drop the rape case.
The three musketeers who have been in the eye of the storm merely exhibited the mentality of the average Nigerian big man once he steps out of the shores of the country, regardless of the nature of his trip. It was this mentality that played out at the Moscow Olympics as well as in London where the lawmaker soaked himself in blue films for the duration of the London Games. Most Nigerian men are hedonists who cannot sleep alone once they touch down on a foreign land.
Even men of God are not immune to the temptation of wanting to lie with white ladies. There was this Nigerian pastor who was posted to the headquarters of his church in the United States. Upon arriving at the hotel which was booked for him, he freshened up and sauntered into the lobby where his roving eyes fell on a pretty African-American. Momentarily, he forgot a line in the Lord’s Prayer that says “lead us not into temptation” and to ask to be delivered from the evil that the devil had packaged for him.
He fell for it and slept with the strange lady. As it turned out, the lady was a member of the choir of his church. When the pastor was introduced to the congregation the following day, the lady shot to her feet and spilled the beans, in disgust. To shorten a long story, the pastor was bundled into the next available flight back to Nigeria. He missed a lifetime opportunity of a good life for himself and his family that would have joined him later.
As for the three musketeers, we can only keep our fingers crossed and hope that the matter would not be swept under the rug of the Green Chamber.
