We are officially tired of Dino Melaye's drama

We really deserve a break from Senator Dino Melaye’s unending drama. Someone needs to tell the senator that we are done with watching him play act and sing for the cameras.

Like, really done.

He needs to press ‘pause’ right away so we can focus on more germane matters of state.

On Wednesday, May 30, 2018, Melaye was at it again.

The senator who represents Kogi West in the upper legislative chamber, had been away from the senate for more than a month, after he was arrested on the tarmac of the Abuja airport on April 23.

On May 16, Melaye was granted bail on charges bordering on gun-running, criminal conspiracy, attempted suicide and damaging of government property.

Technically, Melaye is still on trial. When you still have to show up in court to defend yourself, you should at least keep a low profile in the interim. Not Melaye.

Upon his return to the national assembly, you would have expected the senator to make a quiet entry or a less colourful one. But Melaye had other ideas.

Dressed for the part, Melaye sauntered into the senate, unaided. He was walking normally; a neck brace accentuating his flowing white apparel. Hours later, as he made to switch seats from the APC section of the chamber to the PDP side of the aisle, Melaye could no longer walk.

A cast of PDP senators led by Ben Murray-Bruce surrounded Melaye and propped him to his new seat. From a senator who had only minutes ago bounced through the national assembly doors, this was quite some transformation of Idrisic (apologies, IGP Ibrahim Idris) proportions.

We have condemned the way and manner the police bundled Melaye into a truck like some common criminal. We sympathized with Melaye when he landed with a thud on the tarmac after he had jumped from a moving police truck. No one deserves to fly off a moving vehicle and have themselves injured. We didn’t quite like how Melaye was arraigned on a stretcher after his arrest in April.

What we don’t like is how Melaye is making all of his political battles into a national movie—from his endless dancing, to his guttural songs, to placing a tray of groundnuts on his head in Abuja, to boarding a flight to Lagos just to take a walk in Bola Tinubu’s neighborhood......

To make matters even worse, PDP senators who you normally associate with some commonsense, have taken up active roles in this badly staged Melaye blockbuster. Coming from persons who pocket N13.5million monthly in allowances alone, that’s really saying something about priorities of elected representatives.

Yet lawmaking and governance of a country with multifarious problems, should be serious business for every elected politician

Melaye’s case is still in court. He and his lawyers should be more concerned about having him acquitted of the charges that have been slammed against him and not playing Nollywood with taxpayers’ time and funds.