So the original slay queen of Nigeria, Chidinma, has been crowned a beauty Queen right inside the prison custody?
This country is something else. A comic tragedy at best.
Somebody that is in prison custody that is generally believed should be in perpetual sorrow, remorse and agony because her hands are allegedly stained with a man’s blood, she is participating in a beauty pageant, beaming with broad smiles like somebody who just won a visa lottery. Sounds nauseatingly absurd.
Anyway, we must not forget this, the law still presumes the girl innocent until she is declared guilty. And until then, she still has a life to live at least within the confines of her limited freedom.
She owes herself a duty to keep hope alive and make herself happy. Afterall it said that when there is life, there is hope.
The prison authorities also have a duty to project to the outside world that things have truly changed in Nigeria. They have told the world that we no longer have prisons; what we now have are correctional centers. They also need to tell the world that our prisoners are no longer starved and dressed in rags like before; that our prisoners are now living a next-to-normal life. So that programme was simply a PR stunt by the prison authorities.
Chidinma
Iam aware that the prison authorities sometimes organise sporting activities and academic exercises for the inmates. They do this to give them hope and make them realise that outside of imprisonment, there is still life.
The beauty pageant Chidinma participated in was just like any of such. Iam not deceived, the broad smiles we saw on the girl’s face are merely make belief. It is like the smiles you see on the faces of armed robbers when the are tied to the stakes ready to be fired. They are never for real.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they had had to whack Chidinma up to make her produce that smile. What is the joy in being crowned MISS CELL, of all things? I see it as more of ridicule than celebration. Which of her family members will be happy to be introduced as the brother/sister of Nigeria’s Miss Cell?
Your mates are being crowned Miss Campus, Miss Lagos, Miss Nigeria, etc, but here you are being crowned Miss Cell. Shiorrr!
I repeat, the girl is not being celebrated, she is only being ridiculed.
Even, if by some miracle, she gets off the hook, the whole water in Bar Beach can never wash this tag off her identity forever. Whatever she can become in life after now has been eclipsed by this title – Miss CELL.
May your daughter or sister never go the way of Chidinma, Nigeria’s newly crowned Miss CELL.
Culled from the FB page of Peter Adebolu
