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By Abu Shekara
While the lives of hundreds of innocent citizens are being lost weekly and whole communities and school children are abducted with increasing frequency, the saga of Nigeria’s dire security situation is continuing in the showbiz capital of world. America is turning a tragedy into a thriller as President Trump gropes for a cause to ride into the country, “guns a blazing”, and play hero of world’s Christendom.
Enter, the famous US based, black singer, Nicki Minaj or at least the latest plastic version of her. She’s had so many adjustments done to her body that her folks in Trinidad can probably only know her by what she cares to retain of her name. The gal has indeed, undergone extensive overhaul, which includes a recent breast reduction and backside shots early in her career.
Perhaps it can be said that the singer’s body may have transformed but her mind is intact, in its original state. Well, even that can’t be guaranteed because anyone, who’s so dissatisfied with their nature and can go to extents to change it, shouldn’t be trusted on matters requiring mental balance.
She’s known to change her mind about her life the way the wind shifts in unstable weather. On her plastic surgeries, Minaj is quoted to once regrettably comment that she was, “fine just the way I was”.
This is the person that was called to the UN to speak on an ominous matter like the state of insecurity in Nigeria. If she was a victim or witness to the horrific events or even an expert on the issue, that’d have sufficed but as Minaj herself revealed in her short address, she was speaking from the claims of victims and associates in Nigeria, none of whom she bothered to identify in her submission.
Minaj went to the UN, spoke with some put on emotion and shed a few symbolic tears to punctuate a story that didn’t have enough credibility to be accepted for fairy tales. That’s how the UN has degenerated in standard in recent years.
The slide isn’t however confined to the global body. It cascades down. The Nigerian Bishop Wilfred Chikpa Anagbe, appeared before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa on February 14, 2024 and painted a mainly emotional picture of genocide in Nigeria, without the critical input of verifiable data or even the slightest details on the identities of some victims, the specific locations or dates of the incidents, he so forcefully described.
Perhaps as a man of God, Bishop Anagbe’s words could be taken on their face value but that can’t be said about Nicki Minaj. There’s so much about her life that could make even the most permissive judge or jury reject her testimony outright, especially on a matter as weighty as the security situation of a sovereign nation of over 200 million people that’s over 10,000 kilometres away.
The singer isn’t an obscure figure, being very (in)famous for the wrong reasons. In 1994, Minaj’s husband, Kenneth Petty, then 16, was accused of raping one Jennifer Hough at knifepoint in Queens, New York. He eventually pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree rape in 1995 and was in prison for over four years.
His conviction required that Petty must register as a sex offender wherever he lived. In 2019, having moved to California with Minaj, he failed to register and was arrested in March 2020 and was sentenced to a year in home confinement and three years of probation.
In August 2021, Petty Hough went back to court and instituted a civil suit against Minaj and her husband, accusing them of harassment and intimidation to force her to recant her original accusation.The couple allegedly tried to bribe Hough with an offer of $500,000 and another offer of $20,000 to make her sign a prepared statement recanting her rape claim.
When Hough resisted the offers, she and her family allegedly received an “onslaught of harassing calls and unsolicited visits”. She claimed she was forced to change address multiple times and could not work due to fear of retaliation, paranoia, and severe depression.
In another scandal, an employee of Nicki Minaj, Getty Garrett had cause to sue the singer for physical assault.
He claimed that Nicki sent him on an errand after her concert in Detroit in April 2024. He claimed he met Nicki in her room with other members of her team, where she grilled aides on their responsibilities.
The employee claimed that Minaj went ballistic, when she learned Garrett had once sent someone else to pick up one of her prescriptions. In the suit, Garrett narrated that the singer screamed obscenities at him, saying if her husband was present, he’d kick out one of Garrett’s teeth, adding he was a dead man walking, threatening to ensure he would never be anyone in his life.
Garrett said Minaj hit him on the right side of his face with an open hand, which caused his head to swing backward and his hat to fly off his head, after which her body guards closed in on to Garrett, while the singer struck him on his right wrist, knocking documents in his hand onto the floor.
This is the character that the American establishment has elevated to the status of champion of human rights and dignity, fit to address the UN on violence against tribes in a country she’d probably find beneath her to visit. The entire charade is not only an insult to the victims of terror in Nigeria but also gross dishonour to the country.
But then, Trump has already disignated Nigeria as a disgraced nation. Even coming from the man, who’s adjudged the worst President of America of all time and proving himself to be the most unstable leader on the globe, the treatment is not as shaming as the fact that some Nigerian citizens actually believe he’s right.
