Celebrities and social media show of shame

BY ARIWOOLA SAMUEL AKINWALE

One malady of our celebrities is that they have stinking laundry, and we only get to know about it when they bring it to social media for washing. The new media have changed our world, including street fights and family dynamics. For our elites, it has been a curse. Today, among siblings and families, brickbats and slingshots are hurled at the media.

Last week, Isaac Fayose, as usual, took his elder brother, Ayo Fayose, former governor of Ekiti, to task; his sister, Bose, joined the fray in haste—all on social media. In one instance, their ageing mother has also been dragged into the process.

Initially, it was Ned Nwoko and his wife, Regina, who had slugged it out, bringing private issues that were hitherto hidden from the public to the fore. According to Ned, Regina was said to be undergoing rehabilitation for drug addiction. Regina, however, accused Ned of being an abuser and abetting her drug addiction. Their marriage has suffered consequently.

There’s something so ridiculous about these situations that only a satire could capture, which I have tried to do in this piece.

Whom the gods want to destroy, they give the mania for clickbait. The words of the elders are lost to these people, words that say, “you can’t offer your household cheaply at the market and bid it back at a luxury price at the same time.” Never!

In all, let the public know three or four maladies are frequent with celebrities—assault, abuse, drugs, and betrayal. The poor also suffer this, but rarely are they on the media tearing down their family status—at least poverty can be a blessing. Your sanity is guarded under rage, and your ego is managed. Even when a poor man catches the click flu, media attention eludes him.

Frankly, one blessing in all of life’s travails is that memories decay, we simply forget, and it’s so easy to forgive private offences. But not so with social media fights; they are cinematic, graphic, pictorial, and textually bold to be ignored. They haunt the actors for many years and refuse to heal. From time to time, they surface even after the actors are gone.

For instance, years ago, a former aviation minister and one of his wives were at it again—for weeks, they thrilled us with their palaver. Guess what the issues were? Some of those maladies I alluded to earlier. At the time, it was an evolving subculture for our elites and celebrities, but now it’s full-blown.

Social media has now become the court of public opinion where they vent their grudges as estranged family members. But the clip finds its way to the fore from time to time. Pity!

Today, new-age “gossipers” like Binta Nkeji ( not real name) make fortunes from curating titillating stories for their audience from such fights. Yet, when the arrow struck between her and her estranged husband, our tongues dripped with overstimulated appetites, with accusations and counter-accusations between her and the legal wife of her husband.

Before now, I had always thought any man who lasts five minutes in “Jerusalem” or “local government area” has tried. The other room is not a tea party (if you understand what I’m saying). But Bonto Sikeh (not real name ) made it a curse when she accused her estranged husband of being a “five-minute man” in the other room, adding to our already exhausting list of salacious lexicons. See what I said about our celebrities: we also peep into their bedrooms from social media.

These matters throw up private secrets to public glare that can’t be ignored. The convergence of private and public life in our time is made possible by the new media. Hence, the public is dragged into family affairs and sometimes becomes a jury among siblings. Interestingly, the parties get confused because the juries are divided along sentiment lines.

So, even validation is lost in the process, coupled with losing an estranged spouse, siblings, parents, or children in the process.

For people who are so used to the win-win that the traditional channels of dispute resolution promise, social media hands them an irretrievably fractured relationship. How many of our celebrities, after the “show of shame” on social media, have their relationships restored? Funke Akindele, Tonto Dikeh, Paul and Peter (P-Square), Emeka Ike?

Caution is often thrown to the wind when family members bicker on social media. There’s an element of social media validation that spurs such spats and reputational consolidation from throwing media brickbats.

There’s also an element of catharsis or a relief from tension that this brings to the parties. However, the wound unleashed in the process rarely heals. Often, the damage is done.

Not long ago, it was 2Baba and Annie Idibia who had used the media space to tear apart their marriage before heading for divorce in public—again, drug abuse was also insinuated in this instance by Isaac Fayose.

Those who are skilful in street fights excel in social media brickbats. The assault isn’t limited to physical alone; verbal, character, and reputational assault are combined.

This is where the likes of Portable (Omo olalomi), that controversial hip-hop artist, stand out. When he brought his former lover, Queen Dami, before us, everything unprintable in the dictionary oozed from his mouth, dragging even the sacred throne of the Yoruba kingdom into the matter in the process. You dey whine!

Sometimes salacious stories or even cans of worms of betrayal are opened up in the process. For example, when the son of a popular Nollywood artiste and his wife made a villain of him on social media, a man known for heroic roles in movies became a subject of scorn. I have since wondered what the relationship would look like between father and son ever since, and if any justice was even served in the process.

But latter-day feminists on our social media encouraged the wife to embrace verbal diarrhoea in order to heal up, encouraging other women not to die in silence. Noise on social media is now therapeutic; one is encouraged to quickly shout loudly on social media once there is any abuse in marriage.

While it will be foolish to keep quiet in an abusive relationship, the poor and low-key have learned not to heed such advice. You can’t lose your reputation in addition to your status—there are better channels to explore. It is not all clothes that are sun-dried, so say the elders.

Ariwoola Samuel Akinwale wrote this piece from Lagos. He can be contacted via [email protected]