Nigeria’s security agencies appear to have settled into a perverse pattern of arresting and re-arresting popular cross-dresser, Idris Okuneye, also known as Bobrisky. It is increasingly becoming clear that there is more than meets the eyes in his seemingly endless run-ons with Nigerian authorities.
A couple of days ago, while he was waiting for departure on a flight bound for Amsterdam from Lagos, EFCC operatives stormed the plane and arrested him. The commission has since confirmed that he has bundled to Abuja where he will face new charges.
Until Bobrisky has his day in court, what new charges he faces will remain unknown, given that the EFCC is notoriously secretive.
However, the Gestapo style in which the EFCC removed him from the flights suggests that there is something the commission is not telling Nigerians.
What is Bobrisky’s offense? His cross-dressing may not be to everyone’s taste, but who says that in a country of more than two hundred people, everyone’s lifestyle must be to everyone’s taste?
Besides, there is no law forbidding cross-dressing. If there was, Bobrisky, who is a source of constant annoyance to many, would have been long arrested, prosecuted and incarcerated.
When the EFCC singled him out from the sea of Nigeria’s Naira abusers and charged him before the Federal High Court in Abuja, he was sentenced to six months. As far as the law is concerned, he did his time already. Today, many other Naira abusers continue to walk free with the EFCC looking away.
If the EFCC has anything against Bobrisky, let the commission state it clearly in the interest of its image, long battered by allegations of selective prosecution and even persecution.
Otherwise, let the commission spend its energy on responding to the allegation that some of its staff collected bribe worth fifteen million Naira to drop money laundering charges against Bobrisky the other shortly before he was charged to court for Naira abuse.
Hounding him day and night is no sufficient response. If they did, the officers who collected the bribe must be punished. That can be the only sufficient response.
Having tried Bobrisky, fetched him a six month jail term which he served, the EFCC should consider leaving him alone and going after other criminals in Nigeria-and there are many.
Bobrisky’s cross-dressing may be a source of irritation to many Nigerians, but there is no law criminalizing that. Those who are sufficiently irritated can ask their representatives in the National Assembly to criminalize cross-dressing.
Until that is done, the EFCC which has acquired a rather unseemly reputation for chasing small fish while sharks saw away at Nigeria, has no business prosecuting cross-dressers, whether openly, or hiding behind some nebulous offenses.
The true measure of any society’s diversity lies in the fact that everyone is not everyone’s cup of tea. Variety is the spice of life. In a world full of people, should there be any accounting for taste? In a country where there is no accountability of any sort, let no one unduly appropriate the measurement of responsibility or decency.
Despite whatever else he may have become, Bobrisky remains a Nigerian citizen with full rights and privileges under the law. Those rights and privileges cannot be taken away from him except under the law.
The law will not also allow him who has only ever been convicted of a misdemeanor to be treated like a common criminal at every turn in a country where terrorists and corrupt public officers walk free with little or no impediments.
Nigeria has so many offenders walking free and wild t for the EFCC to concentrate on one person who has done time, and whose major “offence” appears to be a lifestyle that is different than others.
Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com
