Ayo Sogunro may publicly deride religion, but last weekend he learned why the Christian faith considers greed as one of the seven deadly sins. Greed, an insatiable and unrestrained desire for things and pleasure, causes men to do strange things. Including inviting a married woman into the intimately personal space of a hotel room, minutes after landing in a country. Such was Sogunro’s craving and impatience.
Perhaps the bespectacled lawyer, renowned for his sanctimonious long prose and public dance for donor grants, fashioned himself a sleek operator. The Marlon Brando of 2023 who could, undetected, usher in a woman bound legally to another man into a room where none but them could observe proceedings. But it is for the sake of men like Sogunro who have learned to shoot without moral restraint that the eagle of the law has learned to fly without perching.
Surely, Sogunro, who never stops yapping about his legal qualifications, understood that his action was legally impermissible under the penal code, which applies in Abuja, a city in northern Nigeria. But he went ahead anyway, likely safe in the knowledge that if caught and queried, either by the husband or the law, he would put on his well-worn garb of human rights activism and argue passionately for the rights of married women to tour hotels with the opposite sex.
As Strategic as the plan may look on paper, it failed to take into account an important point. Human rights activism is more likely to be successful when it involves fighting for rights that do exist, not rights that the activist thinks should exist. Where the laws do not exist, then advocacy and lobbying should be deployed to ensure that those laws are brought into existence.
Of course, sometimes, advocacy may involve some form of strategic baring of the fangs, but generally it is futile and even foolish to lock horns with the very institution of the state that wields the legal instruments of coercion. Sogunro acted disdainful of the laws and those charged to enforce them.
When the authorities arrived, possibly at the prompt of the husband Sogunro so disrespected, the grants-seeking lawyer began to huff and puff, confident that he had a defence ready. He even attempted to draw in the crowd with alarmist tweets announcing his arrest and subsequent detention.
But after a night in the cell to think soberly about what he had done, and when the hardened part of his body must have mellowed and returned to its natural state, he soon realized the folly of his actions and behaviour and took a new leaf.
He bared his full set of teeth and began to warmly greet everyone, from Police to cellmates, now bent on making friends out of them. But it was too late. They had no respect for a man who obviously lacks self-discipline and sought to manipulate the law to justify his moral weakness. The woman too was not spared the judgement gaze, even if she avoided detention, unlike the man she was such in a hurry to see, she nearly arrived at his hotel before him.
There is an old saying that Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion. Perhaps Sogunro’s friend has never heard it. Nevertheless, one wonders what conversation she must right now be having with her husband who, clearly, has his suspicions. She has been spared the indignity of having her identity exposed. Let’s hope it remains that way.
Finally for Sogunro, who just may have gotten away with a slap on the wrist, it is hoped that this experience inspires a rethink the next time he crosses oceans and seas for the warmth of a married woman. Men have died for less. And as he can see, everything about adultery could get you killed. Or permanently disgraced.